You get one chance to make a first impression. When it comes to business emails, it's your email signature.
A professional email signature provides your contact information and reflects your personal and professional brand.
However, crafting a well-designed and effective email signature can be challenging, as there are several elements to consider, including fonts, color schemes, mobile-friendly design, brand consistency, and content.
We collected some professional email signatures and outlined the best practices to help you make a great first impression and enhance communication via email.
A professional email can be any email you write for internal or external purposes as a company representative, including a thank-you email, a cover letter with a resume, or discussing company ventures with the relevant partners.
An email signature is a special block at the end of an email that includes essential information about the sender (name, position, contacts) and visual elements such as a logo and photo. The email signature aims to capture recipients' attention so they immediately know who they are interacting with.
Here are five crucial steps to ensure your professional and business email signatures make the right impression.
Consider what elements you want to include in your signature besides your name and title. To do this, consider the purpose of your email, the recipient, and your company's overall marketing strategy.
When it comes to professional writing, everything matters. For example, giving several ways to contact you is essential, but do not overload the signature with unnecessary details.
Arrange all elements so that it is structured and easy to read. First, place your name and job title, then contacts and any important links.
The design of the signature should be in harmony with other elements of the business email and be simple but attractive. Try using pre-made templates in custom signature generators to make the design process easier.
Make sure you don't include anything extra in your email signature, for example:
If you send your emails using one of the popular email clients (Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, or Yahoo), create a signature there. This way, your signature will appear on every email you send.
Regarding bulk marketing emails, such as cold outreach emails, use the signature creation capabilities of the email service provider (ESP) or email marketing automation platform.
A good option to ensure your signature will be displayed correctly in all your recipients' email clients and mobile versions, and at the same time make it attractive, is not to create a signature design in HTML from scratch but to use one of the signature generators with ready-made signature templates.
Now with these tips in mind, let’s look at some examples of professional email signatures.
The examples will help you learn how to craft an excellent email signature to achieve your goals.
In this example, the signature begins with a call to action (CTA) that contains a proposal to schedule the call and a bright block with the name and slogan of the brand.
These types of emails have a thoughtful yet discreet design. All essential elements are highlighted in color, and lines set the structure. You use one additional color in tune with your brand.
In this example, there are three key elements to highlight:
Here, the email signature begins with a request to share feedback on the usefulness of the email.
Another key element is a personal photo and an original description of the activity instead of the dry official status that says "email marketer." And another exciting move is to use a button with a CTA instead of contact phones and emails.
Source: Email from Stripo
This is a simple email signature containing the most critical information - name, job title, email, website, and direct phone number. This makes it easier for the recipient to respond or, for example, copy your data.
In this example, the crucial elements of the signature are well chosen, and the email design is also worked out in detail. The icons will be in the brand color as well as the logo will be added to emphasize the brand.
This type of email signature contains important information to draw attention to and images with awards in prestigious ratings.
In this example, the name and contact details are supplemented with the brand logo and what it offers to drive attention to the service and motivate recipients to open the website.
In this signature template, the important elements are the gradient for the background, how reader-friendly the contact details are placed, and the unusual photo format.
Source: Signature template from Stripo
In this email signature template, the combination of all elements is thought out in the design. The contact information is highlighted in a font of a different color, and the color of the design and the photo are combined.
Source: Signature template from Stripo
Using essential email signature elements helps grab the recipient's attention, personalize emails, stay on brand, and grow your social presence.
Your full name is the main element to begin your signature with, so that recipients immediately get to know you. Add your job title so the recipient is clear on your profile about what problems you can help them solve. In addition, you can specify your pronouns.
You can place the name and job title in the top two lines of the signature.
If you have already listed your company name next to your job title, you can still include it again, along with your logo, to emphasize your brand. As a rule, this part of the email signature is in the same style for all company representatives and is developed centrally as an element of the brand. This is only a great solution if you need to emphasize belonging to a large famous brand.
A professional portrait is not always required, but we recommend using it to capture readers' attention and make the correspondence more personalized. Adding a personal photo makes your recipient feel they are communicating with a person, not a faceless company. Use your high-quality professional portrait for this element.
Images and visual elements add to the appeal of email signatures. Don't include photos of landscapes, family members, or anything else except your headshot.
Oddly enough, sometimes people forget to add their contact information, believing that the recipient can respond to the email. But in business correspondence or even cold offers, allowing them to contact you conveniently is critical. You can also add the site domain here so the recipient can easily access it.
Social media is another point of contact with your audience. Before deciding on a partnership, the recipient may want to follow you on social networks for some time. Therefore, interactive badges for your social media accounts in the email signature work for your reputation and add traffic to your marketing channels.
However, keep your email signature manageable: add only three to five social media icons that most reflect your professional activities.
One of the very effective blocks in the email signature is the CTA button. The CTA must match the caption's overall style and conversion goals. It can look like a call-to-action link, a button, a banner, a sale or gift icon, or even an eye-catching postscript. Ideally, it is complemented by a link to go to the company's landing page.
By including a CTA in your signature, you can:
In addition to the simple list of essential elements of an email signature, there are also certain best practices to follow while crafting professional email signatures.
Keep your email signature simple and professional rather than creative to ensure that your email recipients take your content seriously and engage with it.
Don't aim to be the most original in your niche or include as much information as possible. Including more than just the most relevant elements might overwhelm your recipients.
It's vital to match signature color combinations with your brand's overall style and include your logo. You can develop an email signature template for all company employees in which they can edit their personal information.
This will help partners who receive emails from company representatives from different departments recognize your company, providing you with brand awareness.
Divide the elements of your signature into sections to make it easy to read. Create an order for the information using separators. For example, you can place basic contact information at the top right side and separate social media icons or additional information at the bottom with a line.
As you can see below, the vertical bars separate the information visually. This saves space, helps avoid awkward line lengths, and improves the email signature design.
Source: Signature template from Stripo
While you don't need to stick to a black-and-white version of the signature, you can try a professional approach to color selection. Stay within the use of two colors and ensure they complement each other.
If you don't have a brand style or logo, choose a color from the site's primary color scheme, business cards, or other personal branding elements. Ideally, the primary font color is black or dark gray, and the other color is from your company logo.
Colors should emphasize the text of the email signature and not suppress it, so there should be a few of them.
Also, to choose a color scheme, you can hire a designer or use online color palette generators to select the perfect combination.
The best practice for professional email signatures is to use legible and web-safe fonts. The best font choices are Tahoma, Georgia, or Arial to make the signature more readable and noticeable. Fonts such as Garamond, Georgia, Calisto MT, and Lucida Bright may also be suitable. They are readable and display correctly on any device or email client.
Your email signature should have a standard font. Otherwise, it may look messy. However, you can select different font sizes, ideally between 12 to 16 pixels. Also, do not use bold, which will make the signature longer.
Always check the size of your email signature block in pixels and kilobytes.
Here are the recommended maximum dimensions:
When creating an email signature, remember that more and more people read on mobile devices every day, so it is important that your signature, like the whole email, is adaptive for different mobile devices. It means that font sizes, word wraps, buttons, and links should look attractive and easy to read. To do this, keep the number of objects in your email signature smaller and their size larger.
Compare desktop and mobile versions of the same email signature.
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Source: Signature template from Stripo
You may need to add a disclaimer for certain businesses, such as in the legal sector. This could be a privacy statement, a disclaimer, or a personal opinion.
For example, you can include a quote or an environmental reminder to prevent readers from printing your emails unnecessarily. Just ensure that your signature contains all the information the subscriber will need to stay in touch or take further action.
You can use the bottom of your email signature to promote helpful content and pages with information about you and your company. Potential customers spend most of their buyer journey trying to find information about your brand and product, so why not help them?
You can show a link to a new product launch, press release, feature update, blog, webinar, or ebook.
For example, in a bulk email, you can keep the end of the email as personal as possible without adding any official contacts. At the same time, you can add referral links.
Add ratings for your company or small images of awards to your signature. Use ratings from Google, Clutch, or other well-known profile to show that other customers trust you and offer the recipient a link to their reviews.
Use a handwritten signature to add a personal touch to your email.
Source: Signature template from Stripo
Even a tiny element of a business email, such as a signature, can be crucial for building further relationships with current or potential clients and business partners.
So take enough care to create a professional email signature that reflects you and your brand using the above examples and best practices.
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