Setting up an automatic email signature in Outlook isn’t rocket science. But if you want to have a perfect email signature under every email you send, you might find this guide quite helpful. I’ll show you the easiest possible way to add signatures to Outlook.
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Managing brand image isn’t easy. With thousands of emails sent every day, a company needs to make sure that all of them look perfect. Whether you’re looking to promote your startup or strengthen a well-established brand, you should look for reliable ways to manage your email branding. Learn how to get consistent company email signatures on all devices in your Microsoft 365 organization.
If you decide to use the methods available natively in Microsoft 365, you have the following two options:
With this approach, you can get a company-wide email signature, but due to limitations listed by Microsoft (and extended in this article), your promotion-oriented efforts might eventually turn out futile. For example, your recipients won’t immediately see linked images (e.g. your logo) but only after clicking Download pictures; or your business email signature is likely to go unnoticed because it will be displayed at the very bottom of the email thread. Learn more
As you can see, there’s no easy nor perfect way to set up all aspects of your company email signature with built-in mechanisms.
Being aware of the native limitations, Microsoft recommends using a third-party signature management tool to handle email signatures in the context of a business organization. CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 is the solution you can trust, thanks to:
With CodeTwo Email Signatures 365, you can, for example, easily and quickly configure a unified email signature for your entire organization, on all email clients and devices, including mobiles.
Are you using a mix of email clients like Outlook for Windows/Mac, Outlook on the web (OWA), Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook for iOS, Gmail for Android, and so on? We’ve got you covered. Do your end-users send emails from PCs, Macs, iPads, Android-based phones, iPhones? No problem at all.
Simply set up CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 to work in server-side (cloud) mode, and next configure a uniform server-side signature for all users in your Microsoft 365 (Office 365). With such a configuration in place, the software will add your signature to every message that is sent from any end user’s email address in your company, no matter if they send it on iPhone or from Outlook for Windows, for example.
This approach is based on the same principles as Exchange Online mail flow rules (signature added in the cloud in transit), but, at the same time, it’s free from all the limitations of this native solution. In other words, it’s a win-win situation. See a step-by-step guide on how to set it up:
Cloud signatures are usually chosen because there’s no way for users to tamper with them, potentially ruining your efforts to ensure consistent branding. But as they are added in transit, your users won’t see them when they send emails. That’s true about native solutions but not about CodeTwo Email Signatures 365!
Once you’ve deployed the CodeTwo Signatures Web Add-in for Outlook, your end users will be able to preview a cloud signature. The add-in can be used in Outlook desktop, mobile and OWA.
You can also go one step further by setting up the combo mode and letting your Outlook users choose which type of signatures they want to use – cloud or Outlook. An example? Let’s assume that your marketing people might want to manually choose a signature that advertises a custom or seasonal offer. No problem – with the add-in, they can do it in Outlook in a few easy steps. After sending the targeted email, they can quickly switch back to the standard signature added in the cloud by using the toggle switch you can see in the picture below. And if you configure cloud and Outlook signatures for the same user, their emails won’t be sent with multiple signatures – CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 is too smart for that. Learn more
Consistent and branded company email signature is a great start, but there are some tips & tricks to make those signatures even better:
If you’re hungry for more email-signature ideas, feel free to visit this website where you’ll find the complete list of interesting use cases.
To learn more about CodeTwo Email Signatures 365, have a look at these video tutorials or consult user’s manual for even more details.
If you haven’t used CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 already, sign up for a free trial and test the tool without any limits for 14 days to see if it meets absolutely all your needs and expectations.
[Update]: This article was first published on September 15, 2015. It was completely rewritten to reflect current trends and changes in email signature branding best practices.
We’ve seen how professional, visual-identity-compatible email signatures have evolved from a new trend to marketing and branding basics. Now, only the most conservative companies stick to the old ways and insist on including only first and last name in their email signatures. Most companies have recognized the potential of email signatures for marketing and branding purposes. I’ll show you how best to realize this potential.
Email signatures have become more than just a regular, tiny detail of corporate identity. They’re included in every single email every employee sends. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a tech company or not – as long as you send emails, people will judge you based on what your company’s email signatures look like. It shows how much attention the company pays to communication with prospects and partners.
In other words, if your email signature includes, for example:
recipients will automatically assume that this aspect is out of your company’s control. And it’s quite natural to take assumptions a step further and think that it may not be the only thing beyond control. You lose trust and valuable marketing opportunities. But let’s not focus on what you can lose – let’s see what you can gain.
For ‘not convinced’ ones, let’s see what kind of information you may disclose when you send an email with your optimized signature.
The above-mentioned options stand for who you are, who you are working for and what you do. But that’s hardly all you can do with email signatures. You can also include:
While adding all of those elements into one signature at the same time is not the best plan, the above list should give you an idea on how much you can do with each email your employees send. The elements you add to signature should go with what you want to focus on and who is the final recipient of your message. Keep in mind that a potential customer will use the signature to gain insight about you (as a company). This might be a point where they decide to engage or withdraw from further interaction.
In general, visual identity is a base on which you build your brand trust. It’s the message you want to send to everyone who interacts with your company. If you want to boost your branding, the signature needs to communicate the same message and comply with your business identity.
Marketers have come to a point in which effective brand promotion is harder than ever. Your target audience often turns a blind eye to advertisements as a rule, use ad blockers, or the campaign simply doesn’t reach them. And there’s no point in great promotional offers if nobody knows about them. Fortunately, email signature marketing lets you bypass those limitations. Most of your recipients are not random people – you know which campaigns can be of their interest. And if you set up the email signature right, marketing banners will always be noticed.
As for the specific elements, your choice will depend on what you want to achieve. Social media links, article links or feeds could show your audience that you provide valuable content on a regular basis (hope you do!). This less direct way of promoting your services or products tends to be effective, since recipients aren’t feeling they are forced to click on your links.
Every journey starts with a single step. In case of email signature marketing, you need to design the signature before doing anything else. There are quite a few difficulties you might face at this point.
After reading the first part, you probably have some ideas on what to include in this branding-friendly and visually optimized email signature of yours. You have the visual identity sorted out and all the needed images are sitting there, ready to shine. Now comes the specific layout of the signature – how to arrange all this data, so that it looks good? And then, you need to convert this signature into HTML, making sure it won’t break in various email clients.
For most people that’s a bit too much. That’s why we’ve brought to you a completely free email signature generator. It lets you easily create professional HTML email signatures, even if you don’t know what HTML code is. And if you just need some inspiration, our signature template gallery lets you download pre-made templates and re-design them however you see fit.
After you’re done, you get a well-designed template for email signature branding purposes. The thing with visual identity and branding is that it doesn’t apply to a single employee only – for the good changes to take an actual effect, they need to be company-wide. So, the final thing is to get a personalized version of this email signature for everyone in the company.
When setting up signatures for an entire company, you might face some challenges, as the video below shows:
Now you can see, it’s not as simple as it sounds. So, if you need to manage email signatures for all employees, you might need to use a dedicated tool. This way, you could, for example:
It might be the right time to take your email signature branding to the next level with award-winning solutions.
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.
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.
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.
Download this free email signature to bring national festive mood to the office
Download this email signature template to celebrate 4th of July
Have you ever seen an email signature you hated? An entity so cringe-inducing that you wanted to end a discussion with it’s owner right away?
Yup, email signatures can do that. However, when set up correctly, they have quite an opposite effect. A neat, professional email signature can either have a WOW effect or simply make you feel like everything is just right. And, as an added value, a good signature lets you e.g. promote your offers or helps gather customer feedback.
So what makes a difference between a lovable and not-so-lovable signature? There is more than one factor and to make sure you get it right, you need to follow the email signature etiquette.
Email signature etiquette is a set of rules and best practices that help others not hate your signatures.
Below, I’ve prepared a list of the worst crimes against email signature etiquette and how to avoid or fix them.
Don’t get me wrong. Disclaimers can be required to comply with laws and regulations. However, some people mistake disclaimers for legal documents and overdo it. Not only are disclaimers too long way too often, but also they tend to be added to each reply and forward. That’s a very effective method of making your recipients angry.
Ask your legal team or whoever who came up with the two-page monster, if the disclaimer really must include all this information in three different languages. And if you have no idea how to start, here are some professional email disclaimer examples.
It might also be a good idea to append a disclaimer only once per email thread.
Images are quite all right in email signatures. They can make your correspondence stand out and if a signature is well-composed, they do promote your branding and encourage recipients to see offers linked to the banners. However, graphics can be your undoing as well. Using extremely large files presents more than one problem:
In most cases, the ideal image resolution is twice as much as its target placeholder. In other words, if your email signature design reserves 300x100px for a banner, you should use a 600x200px graphic file which will scale down nicely. Also, it’s worth exporting your images to PNG and JPG to see which format ‘weighs’ less.
Read more on best email signature size
The time and energy you put into making sure the signature looks and works well results in an increase of trust from your recipient. Attention to details is a must if you want to make sure your brand is always associated with quality. So if an element you send with each email is out of date, don’t expect others to think highly of you.
That’s why promoting an event which already took place or an offer which ended long time ago is hurtful. But promotion is not the only purpose of an email signature. A signature is also there to, for example, redirect your recipients to another contact channel. And if your contact details are no longer valid, you can be sure that those who can’t reach you will get angry.
If you set up your own email signature, make sure you check on it from time to time. And if your company manages email signatures centrally, it’s best to use a solution which syncs with your users’ database in real time and has a scheduler feature, like our tools.
Full-composition email signatures give you the most space to include your branding, promote your offers and, in general, present yourself in the best way possible.
However, including such a complete signature in each and every email reply or in internal messages can make even the most patient of email users furious. Bombarding your recipients with banners will not increase the number of intentional clicks and makes the whole conversation hard to follow.
The best practice is to reserve your complete email signature for the first email in a thread and use its simple variant in subsequent messages.
The next way to break the email signature etiquette is far from being obvious but it happens a lot. Consider this:
Email signatures are made of HTML. Websites are made of HTML. Since both use the same language, you should be able to create email signatures the same way you construct a website, right? While there is certain logic behind this, it is far from truth for more than one reason.
Nowadays, most Internet browsers display HTML code in fairly similar fashion. Things weren’t always like that. Before Internet Explorer (IE) was discontinued, it was the web developers’ nemesis. Things that worked everywhere else, failed to work on IE, and you needed a special kind of patience to find out why and how to fix it without breaking websites on all other browsers… Now think that almost every email client has a different way of understanding HTML. Almost every email client is like IE, one way or another.
On top of that, when sending emails, you need to remember about mechanisms that prevent spam from getting to inboxes.
OK, that’s a lot of theory. What exactly does it have to do with email signature etiquette?
If you try to design a perfect, responsive email signature which will look different for various screen dimensions, it probably won’t work. If you try to format a signature with JavaScript, it will probably end up in quarantine. Signatures need a very specific kind of HTML code if you want them to work well.
Use well-designed email signature templates from the template library, or create your email signature with the free generator. And if you want to design it from scratch, check out the following article:
See some designer’s tips to creating good HTML code for email signatures
Finally, test your email signatures, before you set them up for good.
In the light of previous point, you might be tempted to simply screenshot the signature once it looks OK and then paste the image into your email signature settings. An image should look identical regardless of an email client. True, but such an approach renders the signature almost completely useless at the same time. Here’s why:
Just don’t do it. It’s worth to put an extra effort, especially when you can use some good email signature designs to help you get started.
Following those best practices requires some effort but, overall, is possible and well worth it. At least for a single person. But think in terms of a whole company.
Ensuring each and every email signature complies with the etiquette and has the same brand identity is an extremely time-consuming task which usually ends up with the IT setting signatures for everyone.
That’s why we’ve come up with tools that let you manage email signatures across the whole company. Thanks to them:
[Update]: This blog post was updated on August 12, 2020.
If you are reading this, I guess you are already well aware of how important it is to have a corporate email signature inserted into your business emails. That’s great, but does the rest of your co-workers realize that too? You can use your online correspondence as a platform to promote your brand and spread your company’s values. However, it will not be effective if all employees create email signatures on their own. How to solve that? All you need is an official, standardized email signature template for your company. Then, you need to implement it for all users. In this article, I will guide you through an easy email signature standardization process.
Your brand image is your selling point, so it is crucial to include it in every outgoing business email. To solidify your brand identity, you need to create an original and consistent portrait of your organization to show in email communication. To do that, you can:
If you are a business owner, you probably know that in order to become successful, you often have to play more than just one role. This is especially true for small or new companies: a good business owner must be partly a marketer, partly a salesman and more. Because of that, a good, professional email signature for business owner must include many elements. This way, owners will be able to make the best use of every business opportunity. In this article, I will present how to design a professional email signature for business owner, along with some examples.
Remember, there is no single email signature design that will guarantee the success. However, there are several guidelines which will boost your chances of creating a unique, interesting email signature. Such a signature will become your personal business card, inviting its viewers to click every link included in it. Here are some tips you should follow:
Grabbing the attention is one of the most crucial, and at the same time, the most difficult properties of an email signature. If the recipient of your message is not interested by your design, they will be unlikely to click any links you may provide, or even remember the name of your company. It is also very easy to overdo it. In this case, instead of awakening curiosity, the signature will leave a feeling of distaste. Therefore, it is crucial to focus on this aspect first, as it determines the final formatting of the email signature.
No matter what professional you are – a marketer, a lawyer, a coach, a graphic designer or maybe a freelancer – you need an adequate email signature to use in every email you send to the outside world. Email signatures in business communication not only allow to pass relevant contact information to quickly communicate with you, but also carry a great potential to showcase your abilities, achievements, or certificates.
In this article, you will find some tips on how to design an email signature for professionals.
[Update]: This blog post was updated on June 29, 2020.
Email signatures and disclaimers play a very important role in email communications. Conversations without well-designed signatures can be hard to follow, and therefore cause misunderstanding and general visual chaos. A Human Resources email signature should be designed with particular care, as it is often responsible for the long lasting first impression of the organization.
