Tag Archives: email signature management

Written by Kamil

Published on Mar 23, 2023
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Email signature branding

Email signature branding – the thing that gets your company emails to send the message you want them to send. Couldn’t care less? Read on to learn why you should care a lot, especially if you have anything to do with marketing.

What is email signature branding?

Email signature branding is about using your email communication in such a way that each of your messages shows that you care. After all, building and boosting your brand is all about sending a certain message. It’s a part of your marketing strategy you should care about – despite multiple prophecies, email communication is still widely used. Each time one of those millions of emails reaches your recipients, you leave some kind of impression. Each time an email is stamped with a nice, well-formatted signature, a client thinks a bit higher of you. And when there is a problem with email formatting, you send outdated contact info, or a poorly-crafted hand-made signature, your brand takes a hit.

Penguin Hit Head GIFfrom Penguin GIFs

Death of a brand isn’t spectacular or sudden – it’s sad and quiet, and painfully slow.

This one tiny element on the very end of your email you might think everyone ignores, a signature, often decides whether your emails build customer trust or cause a heavy cringe.

REMEMBER: Thinking of email signature branding as a panacea for all possible brand problems is not the way to go. For a brand to truly succeed, you need to ensure professionalism in all business aspects. Email signature branding is incredibly interesting because, on the one hand, it can be extremely easy to manage. On the other hand, there’re a lot of ways where it can go wrong.

Good email signature branding example

Before we get into the list of possible signature troubles, here’s an example of a well-branded email signature.

Email signature branding - good examples

Clean layout, nice colors, all the information a client might need. You get the idea.

Get more ideas and email signature branding guidelines

Most popular email signature problems

No email signature

Theoretically, it’s no big deal – you don’t really gain anything, but at least it’s not a broken email signature.

The problem is, without a signature, your emails are generic, rarely leave any lasting impression and give the feeling of talking to a bot. Each email sent is an opportunity you lose. You need to decide whether you can afford losing marketing opportunities every single day.

Broken email signature

You might not realize this but breaking an email signature design is very easy.

Most noteworthy email signatures are built in HTML. The problem is email clients are not the same as browsers – some add their own formatting to all elements, others interpret code in their own unique way. Some still don’t support HTML, so they simply ignore all images and formatting.

Email signature branding - broken examples

The effects can take your breath away.

Unprofessional elements

Leaving email signature branding to end-users often results in some interesting elements reaching your customers. Examples:

“Hasta la vista baby” as a favorite quote under each email.
Señor Party Pooper or another “hilarious” job title.
Links to various websites. It’s bad even when it’s not NSFW content.
Disclaimers parodies. (Like “If you read this email, I own you and everything you have”. Yup, I’ve seen those.)

I’m all about a good sense of humor but not in professional communication. It might be funny to someone the first time they see it, but the second time you’ll get more cringes than smirks. And when it comes to disclaimers, they are still required in some cases, so it’s risky to replace them with some funny stuff.

Believe me, it’s better to leave email signature branding to your Marketing Team.

Everyone sends whatever they want

Branding is about trust. If you contact a company and every time you get a different experience, both when it comes to quality and visual experience, something feels wrong. No self-respecting brand wants that.

Email signature branding - different examples

Email signature branding - different signatures

Ways to handle email signature branding

No management

The saddest option. A must-have for companies that think of email signatures as those annoying thingies nobody ever looks at. Or for pure B2C companies who think that email is passe.

Pros

Less things to worry about.
Could work if you have employees who care. A lot.
Makes a lot of sense if you’re not using email. We’ve heard about such mythic creatures.

Cons

Honestly? It. doesn’t. work. It’s leaving an important company asset in the hands of a deity of your choice.

Email signature branding policy

The policy method means that you write down what you expect of users in terms of email signatures. This option is a great unknown. It all depends on how you execute the policy, whether it contains all required information, how it’s written, what email clients are used and so on. It also depends heavily on whether employees care and have the skill to do everything you tell them to.

Pros

A low-cost solution, especially if you don’t count time as cost.

Cons

Writing down a good policy requires a lot of work.
Executing the policy requires even more work.
Lots of variables.

Manual email signature management

This one is interesting. In short, manual email signature management means that you get someone to set email signatures up for everyone. The politically correct term is delegation. In the old days, when people believed that IT only sits in the basement and watches as those LED lights blink, companies thought it’s a great idea to send the IT squad to set up email signatures for everyone. Nowadays, some of it can be done remotely, after getting IT and users to decide on a meeting time, or by breaking into users’ accounts.

It’s a bit like you’ve heard the word “management” but didn’t quite get what it means.

Pros

It’s “free” and gives IT something to do.
You can count on IT to set it up right.
If the company doesn’t hire new employees, IT prays hard enough, and Marketing sleeps long enough, it will work and won’t require IT to repeat the process too often.

Cons

Those printers will probably need to fix themselves.
Nothing stops employees from removing or changing the signature the second IT leaves the room.
High IT turnover rate.

“I can do it meself” management

There are some DIY methods that let you manage email signatures for everyone without having to move as much as with the manual email signature management I mentioned above.

For example, there are scripts that set up email signatures for everyone in some email clients. Or there are ways to add an email signature automatically after an email is sent (e.g. Set up company-wide email signatures in Microsoft 365). Those methods ensure that each email is stamped with the signature template you set up, but are not limitation-free.

Pros

They usually work.
Require less time to configure.

Cons

Each environment requires a different method.
Needs an expert and IT-Marketing cooperation to set up and maintain.

True email signature management

Finally, there are tools that let you manage email signature branding the right way.

Signature managers usually let you control branding for all email communication from one place. The most popular approach works like that:

IT sets up the technical stuff (permissions, connectors, all the other technical whatnots).
Marketing sets up a signature design in a manner of minutes – could be one for the whole company.
Everyone magically gets email signatures with their own contact details. They don’t even have to do anything – it’s all automatic and works with all email clients and devices.

Pros

Central management of email signature branding – from one place, for the whole company.
Easy email signature marketing – promoting your offers with each email sent.
Additional features (depending on the exact solution).
Huge savings in time and resources.

Cons

Cost (remember not to count the time you save and leads you earn).

Best email signature branding tools

Free email signature generator

One of the easiest ways to create a professional email signature design for a single person. You follow a few easy steps to create your own branded email signature and apply it manually in any email client. Makes it much easier to get a well-formatted, professional HTML email signature design.

It’s not a tool that offers email signature management, but it makes email signature branding a lot easier.

CodeTwo Email Signatures 365

Perfect solution for organizations using Microsoft 365. Here’s what it can do:

After initial setup, IT is out of the picture – Marketing can go wild on creating email signature designs.
Automatically add signatures to all emails – regardless of which email client people send emails with.
Ensure professional email signature branding for every team.
Link to your social media profiles or landing pages from every external email.
Get email signature marketing campaigns running in a manner of minutes.

Look at the video below to see why it’s a good idea to manage email signatures with CodeTwo.

Still not convinced? 9 out of 10 marketers* guarantee that when faced with good branding, clients behave something like this:

*And one of those 10 marketers recently got fired.

Written by Adam

Published on Nov 28, 2022
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How to have an Office 365 email signature inserted only into new emails?

[Update]: This blog post was first published on July 13, 2017. It’s been updated to reflect the current steps required for a proper mail flow rule setup in Exchange Online.

Do your email signatures pile up at the bottom of your conversation threads? Well, I have bad news and good news for you. The bad news is that this is the default setup for Microsoft 365 / Office 365 email signatures. The mail flow rule responsible for appending email signatures can insert them at the very top or at the very bottom of the entire email thread. The good news is that there are ways to work around this. Let’s get right into the details.

Continue reading →

Written by Tomek

Published on Apr 21, 2022
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How to add email signatures in Outlook for Microsoft 365 and Outlook on the web (OWA)

Microsoft Outlook is the go-to email client for most businesses and enterprises. This is no surprise, as it has been around for decades and managed to become the ‘gold standard’ of this software category in the meantime. Outlook has evolved a lot since its first appearance, leading to its supposedly final form, “Outlook 365”. In this article, I’m going to quickly explain what Outlook 365 stands for and how to set up email signatures in this Microsoft-365-powered email client.

Outlook for Microsoft 365 vs Outlook on the web (OWA)
Central management of email signatures

Outlook 365: Outlook for Microsoft 365 vs Outlook on the web (OWA)

It might come as a bit of a surprise, but officially, there’s no such thing as “Outlook 365”. There are two Outlook versions which this name may relate to: Outlook for Microsoft 365 and Outlook on the web. Both come as a part of the Microsoft 365 subscription, which is probably the reason why so many users came to name them “Outlook 365”. This can be very confusing, especially since the name doesn’t explain whether the user means the app installed locally or the webmail version. The name stuck nonetheless and nowadays can be found all over the Internet, including tech community forums and specialist websites.

To be precise, Outlook for Microsoft 365 is the version of the app installed on desktop or laptop computers. It’s the most recent iteration, originating from a long line of apps included in Microsoft Office suites and standalone programs, so you might say it’s the longest known, as it brings to the table all the features and improvements implemented over the years.

Outlook on the web, on the other hand, is the webmail version of Outlook, allowing you to access your email account through your web browser. Besides being part of a Microsoft 365 subscription, it’s also available for organizations using on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 & 2019. By the way, the name “Outlook on the web” is being used interchangeably with “OWA”. The abbreviation actually stands for “Outlook Web App”, which was the official name of the app used with Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 & 2010, formerly called “Outlook Web Access” in case of Microsoft Exchange Server versions older than 2010. The biggest difference in comparison to Outlook for Microsoft 365 is that you don’t have to install anything on your computer or mobile device to use Outlook on the web.

Learn more about the differences between Outlook versions on this Microsoft’s site

How to set up email signatures

Now, let’s dive in and have a look at individual processes of setting up email signatures in Outlook for Microsoft 365 and Outlook on the web.

Outlook for Microsoft 365

Follow the steps below to set up an email signature in the desktop Outlook 365:

Open the Outlook for PC app from the Start menu or from the taskbar.

In Outlook, click File > Options.

In the Outlook Options window select the Mail tab and click Signatures in the Compose messages section.

Navigating to the Signatures and Stationery window

Note: Another way to start configuring your signatures is to open a New Email message, click Signature in the Include group and again Signatures.

Navigating from the New Email message window

In the Signatures and Stationery window, click New and provide a name for your signature.

Create your signature in the Edit signature section. Use available formatting tools to modify its appearance.

Note: The formatting tools offered in the Outlook signature editor are quite basic. If you wish to achieve a more sophisticated and polished design, you can use a free email signature generator to create an advanced signature template. Simply choose Outlook as the target email platform, select one of the many available templates, adjust it to your needs and there you go. Your signature is ready to be copied and pasted into the Outlook editor.

The Choose default signature section can be used to define which email account should get the signature (in case there is more than one email account set up in Outlook), and whether it should be added to new messages and/or replies/forwards. Once you are done, save changes by clicking OK.

In case you selected your signature to be treated as default for new messages, you will see it every time you compose a new email.

Note: If you didn’t select your signature as the default one, you will still be able to add it manually every time you write a new email. It will be available after clicking the Signature button in the Include group.

Adding the signature manually to a new message

That’s all there is to it. If you wish to create more Outlook signatures, simply follow the steps from point 3 onwards. You can create as many of them as you need – they will appear on a list visible after clicking the aforementioned Signature button.

Outlook on the web

The steps required to configure email signatures in the ”Outlook 365” webmail client are a bit different than in case of the desktop app:

Open your Outlook on the web either by selecting the Outlook App in your Office home page, or by using this direct link.

Click the Gear icon in the top-right corner and select View all Outlook settings.

Opening the Outlook on the web settings menu

In the navigation pane on the left, go to Mail > Compose and reply. You can also use this direct link to reach the signature editor panel. Use the provided editor box to enter your signature text, apply formatting as well as to add images or links.

Navigating to the signature editor panel

Note: If you wish to achieve a more refined appearance, you can use a free email signature generator with lots of advanced signature templates that you can fill in with all the necessary details and copy into the editor box in Outlook on the web.

The two drop-down menus under the signature editor let you decide whether the created signature should be added automatically to your new messages and replies/forwards respectively.

Note: It is possible to create and use multiple signatures for a single mailbox – similarly to the Outlook desktop client. Just click the New signature button after you have saved your first signature to create another one.

Once you are done, save changes and close the settings window.

If you select your signature(s) in one of or in both drop-down menus, it will appear in the compose message window as you type your email in the appropriate scenario. In case you left the menus’ default settings (No signature), you will still be able to add your signature manually while composing email.

Adding the signature manually while composing an email

Limitations of signatures set up by users

As you can see in the above guides, setting up a professional email signature is a fully manual process. From the company’s viewpoint, it comes with some limitations and risks:

If a company cares about their brand and wants to have unified look of their emails, the process needs to be repeated individually for or by everyone within the organization. It’s highly time-consuming, especially when you consider some less proficient users who will require support to properly apply their signatures. Not to mention the recurring efforts in case of any signature updates in the future.
The more users requiring signatures, the higher the risk of incomplete or outdated data, inconsistent design, missing legally required information (no disclaimers or company data).
Creating original, visually appealing (and working properly across different email clients and devices) signatures requires advanced HTML and CSS skills.
Nothing stops users from using wrong personal information or applying custom layout.
And more.

Being aware of those limitations, you may want to change the way email signatures are managed in your organization. Instead of leaving this task to users, many companies decide to manage email signatures centrally.

Central management of email signatures

Building and promoting a company’s brand is a continuous process and every employee interacting with customers or business partners needs to be seen as a brand ambassador. Email correspondence takes up a considerable part of that professional interaction, therefore email signatures should not be underestimated. They are a powerful way to convey the sender’s professionalism and tell the recipients whether the organization cares about its image.

Managing email signatures centrally ensures that they are kept under control and stay up-to-date, consistent in design and aesthetic and are personalized across the whole company. This way, email signatures can be carefully crafted (and implemented organization-wide) to send a strong message that helps the brand, promotes offers and supports the business.

It also allows for automation of a rather unexciting task, letting employees focus on their own work instead. Not to mention getting rid of issues connected to user carelessness or lack of technical skills.

Central management via Exchange Online

Exchange Online allows for central management of email signatures and disclaimers for the entire Microsoft 365 organization. It is possible to set up email signatures and legal disclaimers, which are added to email messages that enter or leave your organization. To achieve this, it is necessary to create a mail flow rule (with the Append the disclaimer action specified) that adds the required information to email messages. And since mail flow rules may include many different conditions and exceptions, it is also possible to create separate signature templates for different departments or even specific users.

However, the process might turn out to be troublesome for someone doing this for the first time. That is why we’ve prepared a short video guide explaining:

How to set up an email signature rule in the Exchange admin center.
Where to get the HTML code with Active Directory placeholders for the signature template.
How the global email signatures work from the user’s perspective.
What the limitations of signature rules are.
What tricks are possible to make the signature-adding-rule more useful.

Besides the Exchange admin center, it is also possible to achieve similar results using PowerShell and VBScript. The immediate drawback of these two methods is that the former only works for Outlook on the web (OWA) and the latter only for the desktop client.

Limitations

Although those management methods are better than setting up all email clients separately, they are still not perfect. They come with a lot of limitations:

Lack of a dedicated, user-friendly HTML editor.
No automatic users’ photos in email signatures.
Delegation of signature management is impossible.
Signatures don’t show up directly under replies/forwards.
It’s not possible to use embedded images.
Signatures not visible while typing or in Sent Items.
Blank spaces in signatures in case of missing Active Directory values.
No Active Directory attribute picker.
Forcing email format is not available.
No multitenancy support.

The above list is intended to highlight the constraints most commonly faced by businesses and as such is not exhaustive. Read this article to learn more about the limitations of native functionalities

Central management via CodeTwo Email Signatures 365

While the above list seems a long one, overcoming all those limitations is easier than you might think. Although they cannot be fixed natively, a dedicated tool, such as CodeTwo Email Signatures 365, can solve all related issues and do much more for your Microsoft 365 email signatures.

The service reinvents handling email signatures in Microsoft 365 organizations:

Manage all signatures centrally
You can use a single rule to apply personalized email signatures to everyone in a Microsoft 365 organization. Signatures are added to emails sent from every device and email client. You can adjust signature templates to look differently for chosen departments or users.
WYSIWYG HTML template editor
Easily create advanced email signatures that work on all email clients and mobile devices, automatically convert your signatures into HTML, Plain Text and RTF formats, insert Active Directory placeholders, edit signature layout, change colors and fonts, insert images, logos or Microsoft 365 users’ photos, etc.
Signatures visible while composing emails and in user’s Sent Items folders
CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 is the first email signature management software for Microsoft 365 that allows you to preview signatures that will be added in the cloud and to display signatures in users’ Sent Items folders across various devices and email clients.
Support for AAD fields and custom attributes
Besides the fields available in Azure Active Directory, you can add custom attributes that are not available in Azure AD, or you can let your end users update their signature information themselves (without impact on the original values stored in AAD).
Embedded logos and images
Add company logo and marketing banners as inline attachments. This way, images are not blocked by recipients’ email clients on receiving an email.
User photos in email signatures
Add Microsoft 365 users’ photos to email signatures.
And a whole lot more.

See the product’s page to learn more and test the tool for free or watch the following short video to learn why companies choose our software:

Written by Kamil

Published on Apr 02, 2021
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How to create a company-wide email signature in the new Exchange admin center

Microsoft 365 lets you set up email signatures and disclaimers for the entire company. The setup process includes the native mail-flow rule mechanism and the Append Disclaimer option. As a result, your company can centrally manage message footers, legal disclaimers, and email signatures in Microsoft 365. The problem is, the process includes a few steps which aren’t exactly intuitive if you are setting them up for the first time.

Set up organization-wide email signatures in Microsoft 365

That’s why we’ve created a step-by step video guide, which shows you how to easily set up email signatures in the new Exchange admin center.

And if you’d like to learn more about central management of email signatures in Microsoft 365, read on.

How does it work?

Mail flow rules used to set up an organization-wide email signatures are applied to messages when they are sent from your Microsoft 365 organization. Here’s how it works in practice:

A Microsoft 365 admin sets up the email signature rule in the Exchange admin center.
Users send emails, but they do not see any signatures in their email client.
Exchange Online adds the signatures to the bottom of each email sent, substituting AD placeholders with the user’s personal data.
The recipient gets the email with the signature applied.

The video shows how to add a unified email signature to all emails, but you can adapt the solution to your needs. Since mail flow rules include many different conditions and exceptions, you can use them to create different signature templates for various teams or even specific users.

Why manage email signatures centrally?

So, how is this better than letting users set up email signatures on their own?

Building and promoting your brand is a continuous process. Each interaction with your customers, leads or partners is an opportunity to promote your products and services or simply make a good impression. Unifying your email signatures helps you make sure that no such opportunity is lost due to user carelessness or lack of technical skills.

Learn more about the potential of your email signatures

Unless you leave the management of email signatures to your Marketing or Communications Team, you will not achieve consistent results. Some users will stray from the template you provide, while others will not set up the signature at all. There will also be those who encounter various technical problems during setup.

And even if all users manage to create their email signatures successfully, they will remain in charge of keeping everything up to date and updating them whenever needed. As a result, manual email signature setup becomes a major, extremely time-consuming distraction. Learn more

Managing email signatures in Microsoft 365 centrally allows you to turn every user into a brand ambassador. It also allows you to automate a rather uninteresting task, letting your employees focus on their own work instead.

The limitations of Microsoft 365 mail flow rules

Using mail flow rules to manage email signatures and disclaimers is better than letting users handle them on their own. The problem is, using mail flow rules to manage email signatures is not the perfect solution. There are numerous limitations of this native mechanism, for example:

Embedded images cannot be added to the signatures. This means that most recipients will not see any graphics when they first open your emails.
Signatures cannot be placed directly under the latest replies and forwards. They are applied at the very bottom of the conversation, which often renders them useless in longer email threads.
Users cannot see their signatures and disclaimers before they send their emails or in their Sent Items folders.
Outdated or empty AD fields cannot be replaced or omitted. As a result, if a user doesn’t have some attributes assigned, it is impossible to use a default value instead or remove the signaling phrase.

How to overcome native limitations

You can overcome the native Microsoft 365 limitations and do much more by managing your email signatures via a dedicated service such as CodeTwo Email Signatures 365. See the product’s page to learn more and test the service for free or watch this short video to learn why companies choose our software:

See also:

How to create company-wide email signatures and disclaimers in Office 365?

Written by Kamil

Published on Sep 09, 2019
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VCards in email signatures

While most people consider vCards as obsolete (or have no idea what they are) others use it on a daily basis in their email communication. So what exactly are those vCards? Why use QR-coded vCards in email signatures? And how to do that? Read on to find out.

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Written by Kamil

Published on Jan 15, 2019
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How to delegate email signature management in Microsoft 365?

Email signature management – sounds a bit technical. Simply speaking, it is a perfect way to make sure every email sent outside the company is professionally branded and gets just the right promotional content. The problem is that corporate identity, marketing campaigns, promotional banners – those aspects are typically handled by the marketing team. At the same time, Microsoft 365 management, by default, is an IT-handled task. Global email signatures fall into this category. How is this a problem? Normally, central email signature management means that either:

The IT department gains additional responsibilities. Not only can it overburden IT, but it also means that marketing needs to outsource their own projects, instead of doing them on their own.
Marketing needs to get additional permissions to the Microsoft 365 tenant. This option might be even worse because it creates a considerable compliance risk. A wrong configuration of a mail-flow rule can cause problems with sending and receiving emails and force the admin to intervene in order to fix the mail flow.

That is why I would like to present a simple method to manage Microsoft 365 signatures behind IT’s back. Don’t worry, although the title sounds a bit like a hacking tutorial, there is no nefarious activity included. In fact, it is a win-win situation for both the marketing and IT team. The solution is defining access rights to the Microsoft 365 email signature tool. But before showing you how it should be done, I’ll first show you how the Microsoft 365 signature management looks like when the problematic, native, approach is taken.

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Written by Adam

Published on Dec 23, 2016
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Limitations of Exchange 2010 signatures

Email signatures have always been there, along with problems connected with using them. Ensuring that all users have the same signature and disclaimer template requires some effort. Fortunately, Exchange 2010 enables central management of signatures and disclaimers. This option makes the task of unifying signatures much easier. However, you have to keep in mind that you cannot do everything using native tools only. Here is the list of drawbacks that Exchange 2010 centrally managed signatures have:

No WYSIWYG HTML editor. Graphic designers do not have to be skilled HTML code users. Therefore, it requires a highly skilled and versatile person to make genuine graphics and ensure that they display in a neat, appealing way. The email signature editor looks like that:

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Written by Adam

Published on Jul 12, 2013
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Edit an email signature in Microsoft 365’s Outlook on the web

[Update]: This article was updated on March 23, 2021

In this article I discuss how to work with email signatures in the Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) webmail client. To learn how to set up server-level email signatures for an entire Microsoft 365 organization see this article.

1. Open your Outlook on the web either by clicking the Outlook App in your Office 365 home page, or by using this direct link.