Wondering how to create your own professional mobile email signature? Need to replace the default “Sent from Outlook for Android” signature?
This step-by-step guide will walk you through the whole process:
Learn how to get a professional email signature for mobiles.
See how to add the email signature in Outlook for Android.
Avoid the most common mobile email signature problems.
How to design a mobile email signature
Each email client, including mobile ones, has a built-in email signature editor. But creating a signature with them is not as easy as you might think. Some don’t even let you add images or format your text. While Outlook for Android currently supports HTML email signatures, setting up a mobile email signature with it isn’t easy. In fact, if you want a professional email signature added to your emails, forget about the mobile Outlook’s native signature editor. Here’s why:
The formatting capabilities are very limited.
You have no influence on the underlying HTML code.
There’s a good chance that your email signature will break right after you send your first message.
You could also use the email signature generator directly on mobile. While it’s perfectly doable, the PC path is much easier. Trust me.
Add an email signature to Outlook for Android
To add the email signature to Outlook for Android, follow this guide:
Before you go to your signature settings, open the HTML email signature you’ve designed and sent to your email address:
Tap and hold any text part of your signature and then tap Select all > Copy. The HTML email signature will look like it’s broken, but it’s fine. It will turn out great when you need it.
Back in your Outlook for Android’s inbox, tap your profile picture.
Then, click on the settings cogwheel.
In the Outlook for Android settings, find Email > Signature and click it.
If you’ve never changed your mobile email signature, the default “Sent from Outlook for Android” or “Get Outlook for Android” will be there:
Tap and hold it, tap select all and then, paste the email signature you’ve copied in step 2. It still looks broken with broken images, but you will see it’s fine when it gets to the actual mobile email.
Finally, when you compose a new message, your mobile email signature will be added automatically to your Outlook for Android email – no broken images & formatted just the way you designed it.
Mobile email signature challenges
While setting up your mobile email signature isn’t that hard, there are some complications you need to keep in mind:
The mobile email signature is separate from your other signatures. So, whenever you need to update your email signature, you will need to do it separately on every device.
While Outlook for Android and Outlook for iOS do support HTML email signatures, other email clients might not. It means that you might fail at building your personal or company brand.
There’s no way to set up separate email signature designs for replies and forwards.
It simply doesn’t work for company email signatures. Preparing a custom template for users to update ends up with a very low success rate. Preparing a personalized email signature for everyone takes a lot of time and still doesn’t guarantee success.
If you want to manage email signatures company-wide, there’s a much better way.
Company-wide mobile email signatures in Microsoft 365
Manual signature setup isn’t the way to go for company email. It’s hardly doable even for small companies. For a large enterprise, it’s madness.
One person sets up the tool and designs an email signature template.
Then, thanks to integration with Entra ID, everyone gets an email signature with their contact details. It doesn’t matter which email client they use – your company branding is safe and sound in Outlook for Android, Outlook for iOS, as well as Outlook for Windows or Mac.
With the ability to add signatures in transit in the cloud, you can enjoy professional email signatures even with email software that doesn’t support HTML.
It’s 2024. We check our emails on mobiles more than we do on computers. But when you look at email signatures, it often feels like people are still in the last decade, with signatures that don’t have mobiles in mind. I’ll show you the easiest way to get a mobile-friendly email signature that looks good both on mobiles and larger screens.
What is a mobile email signature?
There are two definitions of a mobile email signature:
Primarily, a mobile email signature is the signature added to emails you send from mobile devices.
Alternatively, it’s a signature added to any email that is displayed on a mobile device.
In other words, if you want your email signatures to be mobile-friendly, it’s not enough to set up a signature on your mobile. You also need to remember about your recipients’ mobile devices. Let’s look at the numbers to see if you should care about that.
Mobile email usage in numbers
Let’s talk numbers. It’s not easy to come up with statistics, since there’s no standardized control over email. However, there are some sources that you can trust.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection introduced back in 2021 made it difficult to track how many people exactly use which Apple’s device, but there is some data to look at, nonetheless. Based on Litmus’ Historic Market Share Information – Apple iPhone was #1 email client when it comes to email opens. Back in 2021, approximately 42% of email opens occurred on mobiles in general. This might be an understatement, since back in 2018, research made by Adobe (Email Use 2017 – US Report) shown that up to 81% of email users prefer to read mails on mobiles.
Why are those numbers so different? For starters most research is based on tracked email campaigns. This instantly introduces selection bias, whether we like it or not. And there are ways to tamper with those statistics, Apple Mail Privacy Protection being only one of the examples.
Based on the number of the default “Sent from my iPhone” signatures still seen in 2024, for B2B emails, mobile email usage doesn’t slow down.
Think about it. For companies, it’s becoming easier and easier to set up and secure company email, even on BYOD devices. Detailed statistics depend on the industry and job role but, in general, most people do check emails on mobiles and when they do, they want to know who sent it.
For personal email, we like to be up to date, even when we’re away from home. Raise your hand if you don’t check your emails on a mobile… Well, I don’t see many raised hands.
Jokes aside, the numbers show that it’s becoming extremely important to focus on mobiles, when it comes to designing email signatures.
Mobile-first email signature design
The smart thing to do is to act on those numbers and change the habits. Instead of designing email signatures that look great on PC, but are useless for mobiles, you should think about mobile email clients first. Still, by switching your focus point, you shouldn’t assume that desktops don’t count.
Best practices for mobile email signature
There are a few design tips to keep your email signatures optimized for mobiles.
Mind the size
A perfect mobile email signature will have no more than 440px in width. Super-wide email signatures can have two consequences you might want to avoid:
They might cause the email body to zoom out. To keep the whole marketing banner within the display range, the email body might be auto-resized, making the email difficult to read.
The email might not fit within the viewing scope. So, if your recipients want to read the whole thing, they might need to scroll horizontally or zoom out. Both options cause a terrible reading experience.
KISS
Keep It Short and Simple.
The absolute minimum of any email signature is your name and an alternative contact method. But if you want to keep your signature professional, you need the following basics:
Name and title
Contact details
Company logo
There’s a lot of optional elements that might be incredibly useful, but you won’t use them all in one design. For example:
Your business email signatures might need a disclaimer or company address for compliance reasons. There’s not much you can do about it in your first email. But you can always create a second design that is a shorter variant of your main signature template.
Dark mode has been around for a long time. While on a PC not every email client supports it and, still, a lot of people prefer the traditional, white background, dark mode is often on by default on mobiles.
To make sure you’re fully prepared for it, always test your email signatures. Pay attention to how your colors look in dark mode – text colors might get transformed to something ugly or hard to see. Images might get white backgrounds or become completely illegible.
Although small, most mobile displays have quite a high resolution. So, to prevent your images from getting all blurry, it’s best to design images with twice the target resolution and scale them down with HTML. And remember, your widest image usually translates into the final width of your email signature design.
You might think that there are more problems than benefits when it comes to email signature images. While it might be a bit of a pain, all the professional email signatures include branding. If you’re thinking about company email signatures, a logo is a must. For personal email signatures, it’s nice to include a professional photo.
Without any graphics, signatures are likely to get overlooked – you won’t spark the WOW reaction you should be looking for. Images catch attention and make a perfect place to add links.
Email signature links are one of the most crucial elements. Social media links can increase your community engagement and make it easy to verify your business. Adding links to a well-designed marketing banner can really help with your marketing campaigns. When using links, you can always add tracking parameters to analyze your performance and run A/B tests.
Not every link will be mobile-friendly, though. Here’s a few good tips about links:
If you add microscopic social media buttons, recipients will need to zoom to actually tap them. So, instead of adding 6 different small social icons, it’s better to add 2-3 most important and make them bigger.
Don’t create image-only email signatures. You might be tempted to do that, to keep your design intact. Then, you might think it’s a great idea to add a link on the image, to send people, for example, to your profile card. That’s one of the worst email signature mistakes ever. Especially on mobiles. Basically, you make people click the linked image, whether they like it or not, while they are trying to scroll through the email thread.
Well, it’s not as easy as click this and that – it depends on which OS and email client you’re using. For some email clients, like the Gmail app, you can’t even set up a well-formatted email signature. Look below for links with step-by-step set up instructions:
Designing email signatures is trickier than it sounds. The underlying HTML code is different than the one used on most websites, because email clients have different ways of understanding it. So, you have four ways of creating a professional email signature that work and some that doesn’t, but people still use them:
Ways to design your email signature (that work)
Using an HTML editor designed to work for email signatures. Like this one
Designing your email signature from scratch in HTML. It’s time consuming and hard, but you can base your code on a working email signature template. Here’s a library of HTML email signature designs
Using an email signature editor built into your email client – each one is different and comes with a custom experience, but in general they usually can get the job done.
Wrong ways to design your email signature
Creating email signatures in Microsoft Word. You wouldn’t believe how much strange invisible formatting you get when designing an email signature in a word processor. This invisible formatting usually works for Outlook for Windows, but right after an email leaves your mailbox, it usually gets mangled.
Using graphic design tools. I mean it’s a good starting point but getting from here to a working HTML code is a long way. Automatically converting the design to HTML just doesn’t work and using an image-only email signature has a lot of downsides, especially for mobile email signatures.
Mobile-friendly email signatures for business
When you think about a company as a whole, the best possible scenario is to get mobile-friendly email signatures under each and every email an employee sends.
Doing this manually is out of the question. For more than 10 users, especially when they access emails on more than one email client, a simple email signature update takes too much time.
The thing is a company can’t afford to lose face with each email an employee sends.
Fortunately, there is a solution that makes mobile email signatures management quick and easy.
CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 lets you design mobile-friendly email signatures with ease. What’s more, with a single signature design in place, you can handle email signatures for the whole company. Each user gets a personalized mobile email signature directly in Outlook on their Android or iOS device:
The best part is that with CodeTwo Email Signatures 365, you can instantly add an email signature to every email you send. Some of its built-in features include:
Separate signature designs for replies and forwards.
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.
Native methods to configure a company-wide email signature
If you decide to use the methods available natively in Microsoft 365, you have the following two options:
A mail flow rule that adds a company-wide signature centrally to all emails sent by your users. See how to configure it in the video below or read this article if you need more details.
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
A native signature editor in an email client has some advantages over the centralized method, e.g. ability for your end users to preview or choose a signature. But, what’s the most important, it doesn’t let you easily apply the same company-wide signature or update it across all email clients and devices without a huge effort from you and your end users. Even though Microsoft rolled out the roaming signatures feature for Outlook, which lets you sync your signatures between your Outlooks, your signatures in Outlook for Mac/Android/iOS will still be separate. And there is still no way to manage those signatures reliably from one place.
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.
The better way to implement a branded email signature for all users
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:
What if my end users want to see their signature before sending an email?
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!
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
Tips & tricks for business email signatures and more
Consistent and branded company email signature is a great start, but there are some tips & tricks to make those signatures even better:
Insert signature under every user reply (rather than at the bottom of an email thread) to make recipients actually see it. Learn more
Use the fully-fledged version of company’s signature in the first email and its compact version in subsequent replies to declutter email threads. Learn more
Make your signature interactive with IM apps links, customer satisfaction surveys, etc. Learn more
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.
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.
