[Update]: This article was first published on February 02, 2018. New sections have been added to the article to reflect current trends and changes in email signature good practices.
Every element of a signature block plays an important role. Contact details, user’s photo, marketing banner, hyperlinks, and social media icons need to go together to make the signature look professional. But there is one basic element, which, if overlooked, can significantly impact the signature’s readability and visual perception – it is a font. Having this in mind, in this article, I will show the best fonts for email signatures.
Best fonts for email signatures
To choose the best font for your email signature, you need to look for one of the web safe fonts. By ‘safe fonts,’ I mean fonts that are pre-installed on most devices. No matter if this is Windows, Mac, iPhone or Android – you can be pretty sure that the font you use in your signature is available on the recipients’ side. This will guarantee that the signature template will look just the way you see it on your screen.
Happy Holidays atmosphere is in the air! We are looking at fairy lights in the windows, sipping hot chocolate by candle light, listening to Christmas songs on the radio, and simply enjoying this special time of the year. We are also bringing some of this festive attitude to work and business communication in the form of Christmas email signatures.
Check out our collection of email signature ideas for 2022 holiday season. All the templates are free, so you can use them both in personal and business emails. Let the winter magic happen!
Elegant & warm Christmas signature
This email signature template will definitely help your recipients get the feeling of the holiday season. The golden accents make the signature look elegant, especially when displayed in email clients with the dark mode turned on. Green twigs in the Merry Holidays banner bring some freshness to the signature, making it really pleasant design to go for.
If your soul resonates with Christmas vintage vibe, don’t hesitate to use the below signature template in your business emails! Let others feel it, too. The banner with the classic red & white ribbons and handwritten wishes takes us back to the old times. The colors of the banner match the color palette used in social media icons, while the two-column design makes it easy to present contact details and a disclaimer.
It’s time for presents! Snow is falling, jingle bells are ringing and presents are waiting for us under Christmas trees. To celebrate this heartwarming tradition in your company, use the below boxing day signature template in all your emails during this winter season.
Using social media icons in an email signature is a must if you want to compete in today’s digitalized world. A company that doesn’t have at least one social media account, may look like it doesn’t even exist in eyes of potential customers. Companies gain trust by posting regularly, by being available and responsive on social media. Including your email communication in the social media strategy is a perfect way to take advantage of all branding and marketing opportunities. And there’s no easier way than simply adding social media icons to your company’s email signature.
The celebration time for all Americans is about to begin as the 4th of July is just round the corner. Why is this date so important? Well, something huge happened in American history on that day – back in 1776, the United States declared its independence from Great Britain.
Fourth of July 2022 email signature templates
There are many ways Americans honor this national holiday. Firework displays, picnics, barbecues, and parades are great ideas for outdoor celebrations. To show your festive mood in a professional setting, we encourage you to use one of these free signature templets in your email conversations.
Simplicity and elegance
It’s just classic. A great fit for any business that wants their emails look neat and simple, yet fully compliant. This professional signature template has four clearly distinguished blocks of information. The first one emphasizes user’s name, job title and company website. The second one presents users photo, contact details and social media icons. Then, the Independence Day banner designed specifically for this occasion adds a nice festive feeling to business correspondence. The last part of this template is a disclaimer, an essential element for ensuring legal compliance.
A very similar structure to the previous signature template, but this one brings social media links and like-in-motion marketing banner with the popular theme of the waving flag of the United States into focus. The banner will help you promote any special offers you prepared for your customers to celebrate the Fourth of July. Add a link to the banner to let everyone quickly land on your website or online store.
This signature template was designed to satisfy subtle tastes. It lets you celebrate the 4th of July in your email conversations, but keep it low-key. The company logo and details of the sender are the most visible part of the signature. The casual and inviting style of this template makes it a great fit for most professions.
Make it visible, make it enjoyable. Celebrate Independence Day with this fireworks display signature template. Bring fun to the office. Although the banner may look bold, the template itself looks professional and has all the necessary company details, with special attention paid to social media icons. Having this in mind, the template is a prefect choice for companies which extensively use social media and want everyone to quickly get to their official profiles for further interaction.
[Update]: This article was first published on March 15, 2016. It’s been updated to reflect the current steps required to set up an email signature on respective platforms.
Back in the day, when Exchange 2016 was released, OWA was replaced with a brand new and shiny Outlook on the web, known from Office 365 (or Microsoft 365, as the name also changed in the meantime). Since then, Outlook on the web went through some visual upgrades, but there wasn’t another name change (yet). What’s interesting is that despite the same name used for both on-premises (Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2019) and cloud environments, those Outlook versions are a bit different. Even though both clients are similar when it comes to setting up signatures, there are some noticeable differences. One of them is the path to the email signature editor.
That’s a good question. Email signature size is important, as it can influence the performance of email systems and the experience of users. When talking about size I refer to weight and dimensions (height and width) of the signature. Keep reading for a bunch of practical tips on how to find the ideal balance, so that your signature works flawlessly in every email client.
Email signature size – weight
The general rule applicable to email signature size should be: “the fewer kilobytes, the better”. If you can keep it under 100 KB, there should be no noticeable performance glitches along the way. While modern email servers should be able to handle larger messages, there are some valid reasons why it’s better not to use “heavy” email signatures:
Larger emails take longer to be processed – both by servers and email clients. Mobile email clients suffer the most.
Using a large email signature in longer conversations will cause each subsequent email to grow in size and even cause a heavy communication lag.
While contemporary mailboxes usually have a lot of space, they are not without limits. Cluttered mailboxes take longer to search through and need to be cleaned more often.
The heavier the email, the more likely it is to be caught by spam filters.
If you pay attention to file size, you can create an attractive email signature with a logo, a marketing banner and social media buttons without sacrificing quality.
To keep your email signature both attractive and lightweight, you might need to experiment with using different file formats for your marketing banners and company logo. In some cases, a lossless PNG image will be less sizeable, while a compressed JPG file might be better on other occasions. When saving an image in the JPG format, you will usually get to choose the image quality or compression rate, depending on the software you’re using. Exporting images at high quality (i.e. above 75%) or at low compression rate only causes an extreme increase in size, but the actual gains in quality are unnoticeable.
Pay extra attention to animated gifs. While they can make email signatures very attractive and still remain relatively lightweight, it is easy to go overboard with some settings and end up with an unacceptable email size in excess of 1 MB.
Email signature size – dimensions
The optimum dimensions of an email signature should be around 300–600 px wide and 150–200 px high. While the width is limited by the size of the screen the signature is viewed on, there are no technical limits to height. Still, I would recommend keeping the dimensions somewhere within the ranges suggested above. This should give you enough space to include all the necessary contact details, a smart marketing banner, your company logo, and a disclaimer. At the same time, a signature like that will still fit on the screen of older or smaller devices with lower screen resolution.
One of the worst ideas possible is to use large and complex email signature templates for every email. I’m sure you have seen conversations in which signatures take much more space than the actual email body. Add to that a disclaimer in three languages and you get a recipe for an email disaster. That’s why it is a good idea to use a different signature for new emails and a different one for replies and forwards. This makes conversations so much easier to follow. If you want to see some examples of how you can arrange various elements in an email signature, see our online signature template library. All templates are free, so if any of them attracts your attention, you can use it in your corporate emails.
Linked images help reduce email size
Images like a company logo, a marketing banner or social media icons are important parts of a modern professional email signature for business. So, how to balance the need for using images in signatures and the need for keeping email signature size low? You can use linked images instead of attaching them to an email message. Attachments increase the size of your email and if they are really big, they can negatively influence email performance. In the long run, those extra images will clog the mailbox with GBs of useless data. To avoid that, you can upload your signature images to your server and just link to them in your email signature. This way, they will be downloaded every time the message is opened, and you will get rid of unwanted image attachments.
Just a quick reminder: linked (hosted) images are usually blocked by the recipient’s email client. So, until your recipient chooses to unblock them, they will see a box with red x instead of actual images.
Prepare email signature images for Retina displays
Retina displays make text and images look sharper than traditional displays. This is achieved by having more pixels “packed” per each inch/cm. As a result, the width and the height of images need to be doubled. Knowing this, you can make your email signature images 2x wider and 2x higher than the original size. This way, when they are displayed on Retina displays, they will not lose their sharpness.
The “2x” part is quite important. Using images whose dimensions are not exactly two times larger than their intended display dimensions may cause them to scale incorrectly. As a result, images may become even more blurry.
Avoid bad practices
Another bad practice I had the chance to see way too often is to use extremely large source images. While images weighing a few MBs each are bound to look sharp in pretty much every email client, they will most likely get you blacklisted manually sooner rather than later. That is, if you somehow manage to make such large emails reach your recipients in the first place.
Remember that employees at your company most likely mean well when they pimp up their email signatures. Still, it is better to leave branding in the hands of experts. You can do so by using email signature management software.
It’s easier with email signature software
With dedicated email signature solutions like CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 or CodeTwo Exchange Rules, you can focus on what you want your signature to look like rather than worrying about the technical aspects of it. Additionally, a rich signature template library will let you choose the best signature template for you.
Tools like those offered by CodeTwo let you manage email signatures across the whole company easily. Regardless which email clients are used in your organization, you will be able to optimize your signatures and keep them attractive and lightweight. Using a signature manager, you will be able to:
Define different email signatures for the first and subsequent emails. This lets you create a complete email signature with banners, logo, social media icons for the first message in a conversation and a compact, yet branded and attractive, signature for the next emails.
Create different email signature designs for internal communication and outgoing emails.
Add one-click customer satisfaction surveys or other custom elements only when certain conditions are met.
If you have an Android mobile device that you use for sending business emails, you can create or update your Android email signature. This is especially important if it reads: “Sent from my Sony Xperia smartphone” or something equally generic. Obviously, this is not the signature you would want to use in business emails, but you may find it out of place in personal online conversations as well. So, depending on the email app you use on your Android device, follow the instructions below to create or change your email signature in the Gmail app, Android email app or Outlook for Android.
Email signatures in dark mode can look really funny (or scary if you like) if they don’t support the dark-mode environment. Well, this may be funny if you are the recipient of such a signature. You can look at it and roll your eyes or just smile when seeing a serious company sending you an email where the signature looks like chaos in your dark-mode-enabled Outlook or OWA. But what if you run this serious business and use email signatures that don’t support dark mode? Don’t worry. After reading this article, you will know how to look at your email signature to save your face in front of customers and business partners if they enabled dark mode in their email clients.
We have just entered a new decade and the changes in the business landscape it brought about affect the way we design and present our products and services. Of course, it doesn’t mean that you must reinvent your entire brand’s visual identity immediately. However, it is a perfect time to adapt it to the times we live in. One of the things you may wish to change are your email signatures. That is why we have prepared some examples of best email signatures for 2020 to get you inspired. Let’s see what signature templates will be trendy this year!
