Business email signatures – love them or hate them, but they’ve become a standard for email correspondence. Do them right and every employee gets a professional business card that creates marketing opportunities. Do them wrong and your communication becomes cringy and unwelcome. This article will show you how to get that perfect business email signature for your company.
Why bother with business email signatures?
You see, with company email signatures, you have 3 most usual scenarios:
- No email signature or lame email signature – automatically sends a signal to your prospects that the quality of your services might be sub-par. Just like your email signatures.
- Good email signature – better than nothing, but, realistically, everyone just expects this from every self-respecting company. A signature that includes up-to-date contact information is no good reason to pat yourself on the back just yet.
- Awesome email signature – now, if you stand out with the very first email you send, you gain instant trust. It works on the subconscious level.
Of course, you can have an excellent business email signature and still lose trust of your prospects if you’re not helpful or have a horrible product. But it’s another story – let’s assume that’s not the case here.
How to design an awesome business email signature?
Let’s assume you’re interested in crafting the best possible email signature. A perfect company email signature design doesn’t just happen – it’s a careful process that involves many steps. And if it’s your first attempt at it, you’ll probably end up with a lot of question marks over your head. But don’t worry. I’ll take you through the process of crafting your perfect business email signature, step-by-step.
Up to date contact details
“Up to date contact details” sounds obvious, I know. But, in fact, that’s all the more reason to overlook this subject. So, contact detail essentials go like this:
- First name, last name and job title – the trio every business email signature needs. After all, you’re not writing as a whole company, but as its ambassador. The job title makes a huge difference to your recipients. Communication with an Account Manager, a CEO or a Junior Accountant will be different.
- Alternative contact method – while email is still the king of asynchronous communication, sometimes a quick phone call can prevent a 20-mail thread. And there’s always a possibility that your email doesn’t go through. For example, when an overeager spam filter rates you as a criminal.
- Company address – it might not always make a lot of sense from the recipient’s perspective. However, there are legal regulations that require you to identify yourself in case of business correspondence. Learn more
Company social media channels
There are two critical reasons why using social media buttons in company email signatures is a great idea:
- Verification – your social media presence says a lot about your company. That’s why, since ancient times (like early 2000s), people have been using social media to check who are they talking to. Choose your pages wisely, because non-complete profiles, lack of activity, or bad reviews throw a lot of red flags. On the other hand, if, as a company, you send a message that your recipients like, you’re golden.
- Boosting engagement – every organic page follower increases your reach and a chance for engaging with your content. If your social media channels provide value to your prospects, an email signature is a good way to funnel your recipients right where you need them.
Which social media you should link to? Depends on your activity and the kind of business you do. Just make sure you don’t link to your Google+ profile or use the old Twitter logo. It’s a dead giveaway that you’re living in the past.
Whichever social channel you decide to use, here are some social media icons you can download and use for free. Also, our free email signature generator lets you add social media buttons to a signature design of your choice.
Company email signature images
Email signatures without images are like pasta without sauce. You can see right away that something’s missing.
So, here are the most popular elements you can use to grab attention:
- company logo,
- user photo,
- marketing banners,
- social media buttons,
- IM buttons,
- one-click survey buttons,
- background images,
- separators,
- purely decorative elements.
That’s quite a list, isn’t it? Should you include all those elements in an email signature? Good luck with that. You’ll need to pick and choose to assemble this perfect company email signature design and not overdo it. Remember that email signatures need to be helpful before anything else. If you have a choice between linked elements that help and purely decorative elements, you’ll pick the former in most cases.
Remember that if you do this right, you can add links to each and every signature element. It’s elegant, it’s useful, it’s the way to go.
Work your fonts!
Setting the right font is important. Experiment with font size and weight to highlight the most important signature elements. And when it comes to font family, stick to the web-safe fonts if you can. This way, you avoid a situation in which your well-designed email signature breaks in most email apps. It’s also crucial to follow your corporate identity guidelines and use a color palette that looks good with the company logo. It’s more art than science here.
Learn more about fonts in email signatures
Don’t put diss in your disclaimers
Disclaimer is an essential part of your company email signature. In this article, you can find some ideas on how to compose your disclaimer or what information to include to comply with the laws and regulations. These laws and regulations, however, may differ across different countries. If your company has business partners or customers located all over the world, you should make sure your emails do not violate law respected in their countries. Great reach comes with great responsibility.
See this guide on email disclaimers
How to get this all together
Now, if you look at the list and try to fit this into a single company signature design, you’ll fail spectacularly. And in case of mobiles, the difficulty ramps up even more.
So, at first, you need to think about what’s the most important. The final result needs to be useful and look professionally. And then, if you really want your recipients to see how great you are, prepare a shortened signature version for replies and forwards. An all-out marketing signature is great for the first message, but when a whole email conversation contains more signatures than email body, you will trigger people who want you to get straight to the point.
Then, instead of trying to create everything from scratch, take a look at good examples of company email signatures that work.
Great company email signature examples
Now, there are many places to look for signature inspirations. Let me recommend two that provide the most value:
Email signature library
The library presents over a hundred great designs. You can download each of them and use it as a starting point in your design journey.
Email signature creator
The creator lets you design a personalized email signature and helps you add this signature to any email client you want.
The company email signatures don’ts
Now, as an exercise for you, look below for an email signature that’s not right.
Can you list all the problems it has?
See the worst email signature mistakes for help.
Automate business email signatures in Microsoft 365
Now, creating a single email signature design isn’t that hard, especially with the help of our resources. But it’s not that simple in case of an organization. Here, you deal with tens, hundreds or thousands of email signatures that need to follow the same principles and guidelines.
If you leave this in the hands of end users:
- You risk complete email communication chaos.
- There’s no way for you to control how everyone represents your company.
- Everyone needs to waste time on signature setup.
- IT gets tons of requests concerning signatures.
- Nobody is happy.
See why businesses decide to take matters in their hands and automate their email branding management:
Automate your email signature management now
See also:
This article serves as a valuable resource on the subject.
The part of the font color really makes a lot of sense
Thanks