Your recipe for success
on the Internet.
on the Internet.
Your email signature is like an electronic business card - and should include all of your important details such as name, title and a variety of contact details including phone numbers, email address and social media links.
However, given we all use different email programs, and all of these programs handle our mail in a unique way, have you ever thought about how your signature appears to your recipients?
We have a few tips for you to use to create a professional, usable and efficient email signature for use in your emails so that your email signature comes across with the same professionalism as your business.
When sending an email to your recipient, only include your signature on the first email in the topic you send to them. Including your signature in every email on the same topic is a waste of digital space - there's no reason why your recipient should download your signature with every single email in the thread.
It's a fact that email clients are varied in their HTML and CSS support, however use of basic HTML and simple CSS can enable you to create a neatly styled and well-formatted signature that will work in the majority of email clients. Check out the Guide to CSS support in email for a chart of what works and what doesn't.
As well as images, you can then also add links to your social media profiles as well as your business's website to make it easy for your recipients to click through.
We may be time poor, but remember good manners. Writing "Regards, Jane Smith" in your signature is a lazy way to implement a farewell - and it means that no matter what the tone of your email, it will always end with "Regards, Jane Smith". Take the time to farewell your email by typing an appropriate valediction and your name.
If you only take away one thing from this post, it is this: do not embed your images in your signature. All images should be resized to a web-friendly size and format using an image editor, and absolutely linked to a file on your web server. The HTML used to place the images in your signature should not do any resizing of images.
If you embed your images, they come up as attachments in your email. Imagine trying to find a specific email with an attachment if all of your emails appear as if they have attachments?
Following on from the varied support of HTML and CSS, some email applications block images by default, and some users even turn off images purposely to save bandwidth. But what if you have your phone number in your image? Well then these recipients won't see your details. Images are great to use for your logo or a social media icon, but never for any important content.
All of our email applications handle signatures differently, so its best to consult the help documents for your application, and if all else fails, Google is never far away. To get you started with two of the most popular email applications - Apple Mail for Mac OSX and Microsoft Office for Windows.