Your business email signature helps to provide the recipient with vital information about you and your business. The more detailed the signature the less likely you will have to worry about the back and forth of email exchanges when someone wants your contact information or access to your website. The basics behind a good email signature is that is should look good and provide easy access to you and your company. There need not be lots of clutter and links to dozens of website pages, you simply want your signature to look clean and professional. Too many people either make the mistake of not having a signature at all or over doing the signature and watering down its effectiveness. Here are a few things you should and should not have in your business email signature.
Your signature should appear professional because first impressions are everything in business. In addition to it looking good it must be useful in the way that it makes the job contacting you much easier for the recipient. If you have many employees within the company all the signatures need to be consistent except for the specific contact information for each employee. Company name, tagline and slogan can all be uniform through all employee email, than simply changing the names and contact information give your emails a much more polished and professional look. Your signature is basically your calling card at the end of each email you send and it should include some features to create that perfect signature.
Take the colors of your companies logo and try to include that into your signature. If your company uses a font and color scheme on all business cards and letterhead than adding that can increase the branding of your company. Try not to incorporate colors just to look flashy or grab a readers attention. Using bright colors and large fonts gives the appearance of being unprofessional and can hurt your reputation. You do not want to distract from the content of your email, you are simply complementing the email with a brief few lines of how the reader can reach you if they need.
Remember that not everyone uses the same email program that you use and that formatting may be difference in those programs. Using special characters because you think they increase the visual appeal of your signature may just look like garbled text and symbols on another computer screen. Keep your business email signature to fonts and hyperlinks. Four lines is usually enough space to get your company name, your name, your email address and website address into the signature.
When adding a link to a website home page or to your company profile page in the organizations website, be certain to take the time and test out that link before you send the email. Just because you have typed that address a hundred times does not ensure you made the link correct in your signature. Test your link and be certain it takes you to the page you requested and not an error page. One practice that you may want to incorporate is rather than adding the hyperlink to your email signature you just spell out the URL instead. Some email services do not open links and your information may not show correctly. By placing the written URL under your name the reader only need to copy and paste to get to your page. This is a good option if your links are getting stripped out of the emails that you send.
Try not to add too much information to your business email signature. Just because you have three phone numbers and four email addresses does not mean you should add them all. Choose the one you prefer and remove the rest. If you want to be contacted by Skype or an IM system, list those contacts in addition to your email contact if they are appropriate only. If you start listing all your social media website contacts your signature will lose all of its value. lastly you should think twice about ending your signature with an inspirational quote because you never know when something may or may not offend someone.
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