Everybody knows how important and difficult that first impression can be.
Thank God we have email signatures, which makes it easier. These signatures are a bit like a business card, which points out the way for the client to contact you. Don’t make your clients work hard to get your phone number.
Email signatures have some rules that you should follow to avoid the mistakes.
Data contained in a signature
Every email signature should at least contain the following points:
Your name
Company name
Phone number
Website link — make sure it is a working link
Beauty in simplicity
Don’t forget that your signature should not have too many graphic object, your client could of get lost. It’s also good to use colors easy to read, light yellow is not the best option. Don’t use fancy looking fonts and stick to your company colors.
Try to avoid putting pictures with a size bigger than 50kb, it can make the loading of your signature slower and uncomfortable for your client.
Never use Comic Sans font.
Please, just don’t. You would maybe like to use your favourite font but keep in mind, not every font is web safe and addressee might not have the same font available to them, changing the whole design of your signature.
Use web safe fonts such as Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Verdana,… Which work in most browsers.
Make sure your signature is up to date
An inactive telephone number or website will make the signature useless so watch out for this.
Add Twitter and Facebook icons
Adding these icons will increase the number of your followers and your social network will grow.
Never leave “Sent from my iPhone” in your email
Ever. Nobody will be amazed by the fact that you have an iPhone, even if you think it will show you’re always able to be active and respond quicker.
All of your employees should have same design as your company
Corporate identity shows structure in your company which makes a good impression.
And how to ensure that all employees will have signature consistent, always up to date and without any mistakes? For this you can use the SignatureSatori application.
Make it slim
Wide signatures may have a problem to fit in the window of all browsers or email software. Standard size is 650 pixels, lower would be better.
Never make signature just as one picture
Don’t make your client to work hard, he would much rather copy-paste your contact details in the signature than look you up in the Yellow Pages. Animated GIFs in your signature are not recommended, an email browser like Outlook is automatically throwing emails with GIFs to your spam inbox as they are viewed as dangerous content.
