Every day we receive dozens of emails from colleagues, partners, clients. It is surprising to note how often the email signature is poorly utilized or indeed entirely absent. The truth is that, in addition to serving as an useful reminder, your signature can be transformed into an effective marketing tool to promote your business.
Let’s go through some of the characteristics that an effective signature should have.
Contact details
Above all else, this essential information should never be left out: it must allow you to be easily identified and contacted by your recipients. In particular: Name, Surname, Company name, Business Telephone and Fax number, and Link to your website. It is also a good common practice to include the sender’s role or responsibility within the company, beneath the first line with their name.
Logo
Including a logo in your signature is another sure way of catching your readers’ attention, but it could also be seen as irritating if excessively heavy or failing to display correctly. You should thus use only very light logos (3kb max file size), optimized by the web (.jpg, .gif, .png format) and hosted on your webserver.
Tag Line
If you would like to communicate further information about your company, you can add on a brief tag line, or a quote reflecting your company philosophy.
Social Networks Profiles
Add links to any social networking sites of which you are a member, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin. Your readers will be happy to find out more detailed information about you and your business.
Marketing Awards
Have you recently launched a new product? Are you about to take part in an important event? Have you won a prestigious award? All it takes is a line of text to share these things with your daily contacts. However, you should take care not to make too much of your achievements.
Disclaimer – Privacy policy
If you want to include some text regarding privacy or disclaimers, ensure this doesn’t add on a further 10 lines to your signature! A better approach is to include a link to a purpose-built web page. This will help you avoid excessively heavy emails and would also give you the opportunity to provide the information in several languages.
It happens quite often collegues within a single company use a variety of fonts and styles for their email signatures. This is something to be avoided since it could cause your brand image to lack clarity from the perspective of your contacts. It is a better idea to opt for a standard template.
To conclude, a professional signature represents the opportunity to make a brand impression in a manner that is non-intrusive and absolutely free.
Why not make the most of it?