Making a professional email signature can be helpful for both your personal and business emails. By following some simple tips, you can learn how to make a good email signature that is both eye-catching and easy to remember.
With over 350 billion emails sent every year and as many as 40 per person per day, email has become a centerpiece of modern business. The core difference between a person that comes across professionally online and one that appears untrustworthy is a great email signature.
From boosting your professionality to including vital information about you, your role, and your social media content links, email signatures are a great place to give the recipient of your email a little more context about who you are. Depending on your career and what industry you’re in, the perfect email signature might vary.
Email signatures are a powerful way to market yourself and your business. They can help you build relationships with potential customers and demonstrate that you’re a credible source of information or advice. By adding a signature to your email, you can create an impression of authority and professionalism.
In this article, we’ll be walking through exactly how to create a professional email signature for business use. We’ll touch on what to include, and exactly which tools are the best to make sure the final product looks amazing.
Let’s get right into it.
What Should I Include in an Email Signature?
When creating an email signature, there are several core elements that you should include. The key information is your name, your role, your company’s name, and a contact number (if necessary). With that, you’ve pretty much covered all of your bases.
If you want to stand out from the crowd and create a professional email signature, there are a few things you can do. Firstly, make sure your email looks clean and professional. Most people use Gmail as their main email client so make sure your text is easy on the eyes. Secondly, be sure to include your name and company in your signature. This will help potential clients remember who sent them the email and increase the chances of them returning it with a reply. Finally, always keep your signature relevant to the topic of the email; don’t just slap something in there because it looks cool.
Here are some general tips of best practices and additional elements that you can include in an email signature:
- Keep it concise – No one wants to read an essay at the end of your email. Be sure to keep everything as short as you possibly can. Stick to the absolutely must-know information and keep written text to a minimum.
- Logo – A great aspect to include within your email signature is a picture or logo. Especially if this is a business email, be sure to include a small image of your company’s logo to bring further visibility to the brand.
- Color – Every company that’s gone through basic branding steps will have company colors and potentially even a palette that you can select from. When crafting your email, be sure to include the company colors to bring another dimension to your email.
- Mobile optimization – Before uploading your email signature, be sure to check that it’s compatible with mobile. If you’ve used a generation tool, it should be compatible, but if you’ve made one yourself, then you should definitely double-check. Just send yourself a test email to see how the signature turned out.
- Social media icons – An additional element of your email banner can be hyperlinks to different social media accounts that you have. Be sure to relate these to your business, with LinkedIn or a business Twitter being the perfect addition.
- Animations – Flashy animations can help your email header to stand out, creating an interesting element that not many email users will have. If it fits in with your brand, this is a great aspect to incorporate.
Following these four tips will ensure you’re on the right path toward creating an effective signature. That said, don’t go too crazy – there are a few things that take away from the level of professionalism that your email signature adds.
What Not To Include in an Email Signature
While in a personal email signature, anything goes, this definitely isn’t the case for a professional working environment. There are a few things that you should avoid including in your email signature. Keep in mind that the signature is not the only place where you can include information, so don’t feel like you need to cram everything into it. There are things that will instantly come across as unprofessional if you include them within your email signature.
Be sure to avoid:
- Overfilling – When sending an email signature, this will be attached to every single email going forward. This means that when you reply ‘Sure thing’ to an email, that short message is also going to come with your full email signature. To avoid looking a little ridiculous, be sure to include only what’s needed in your signature. Short and sweet is the way forward.
- Writing your email – You’re going to be sending an email from your email account, the recipient will already have your email. Although it sounds a little obvious, you’d be surprised at the sheer amount of times that someone includes their email address in their signature sent directly from their email address. Don’t be that person.
- Crossing personal and professional – If you’re sending emails from your business account, then only include social media links that are connected to your organization. This isn’t the correct place to attach your personal Instagram account. Try to keep personal and professional separate.
That said, the flexibility of modern business ensures that pretty much any email signature will be fine. If you’re in a creative industry, many of these rules don’t apply – you’re free to construct your signature however you would like.
How to Create a Professional Email Signature
While you can craft an email signature yourself by using HTML, the easiest way of doing so is to just use an email signature generator. Once this is done, the generator will create your signature in just a couple of minutes. You can then either save it as an image or upload it to your email account.
Using a template generator is much easier than creating one yourself, and significantly faster. If you’re not too sure where to begin in terms of design, we recommend that you incorporate your brand’s colors and check out what other people in your company have done.
Double-check that there isn’t a company-wide business signature, which is common practice in many businesses. If there isn’t any prescribed format, you’re free to create your signature however you’d like. Be sure to check out some email signature examples for inspiration before you begin. Don t be afraid to utilize some existing templates or design elements. Every business has a logo, so you can use it to start off your signature. You can also incorporate your website s logo into the signature and use that as a basis for creating your own custom design.
Once you’ve created your design, you’ll just need to copy and paste it into your email signature box in your settings if you’re adding it on your iPhone. Alternatively, to add it directly to your email account, head to the settings page of your email provider and navigate to signatures. You can also set your signature up as a link to your LinkedIn profile if you want.
By following our guide, you’ll be able to create a signature that looks professional and can help to improve your overall communication skills. With that, you’ll be on your way to signing off every email with professionality and style. Best of luck!
