Email Signature Best Practices - A Simple Guide for 2024

M. Usama
M. Usama

Last updated on

April 18, 2024

Your email signature is your last chance to leave your customers a lasting impression and encourage them to engage with your business. This is why creating that best suits you and your business is necessary.

An email signature lets customers know more about your business, what you do, and how they can contact you. It is a good idea to optimize it to fit your business needs best. 

With the help of this guide on email signature best practices, you can create an email signature that will leave an impression on your customers and make them want to reach out to what you have to offer.

What is an email signature?

An email signature is a sign-off to your email. It lets the customers know who has sent them the email. It contains information about the business, so it also acts as a business card.

You can use your email signature to 

  • Provide contact information
  • Leave a brand message
  • Leave links to your socials and website
  • Encourage response from customers
  • Leave a CTA to increase conversions
  • Showcase your badges and awards
  • Show your personality and professionalism

Why is an email signature essential?

You should invest your time crafting a professional email signature for your business for many reasons. Some of these reasons include.

  • An email signature creates an overall image of your business and brand.
  • It is an efficient way of providing your contact information to customers.
  • It shows customers alternative communication options to connect with the business.
  • An email signature shows your professionalism and credibility.
  • It is a great marketing tool to help market your business further to your customers.
  • It is a fun way to show your business values and mission.

What to include in your email signature

An email signature is also known as an email footer, so it is much more than just your and your business's names. It can include various features, such as 

Essential components of an email signature

To help you create a sound email signature, we have compiled a few components of HTML email signature best practices. You must always include a few essential elements in your email signature.

1. Your name

Whether you are an individual emailing or a part of a team, you must leave a name to let the customers know who is reaching out to them.

2. Your position

Adding a position to your email signature helps reinforce your authority on the subject matter and lets the customers know more about your credibility as a sender. Include your name, job title, and a small work summary in the signature.

3. Company name

Adding your company's name in the email signature helps increase your brand awareness overall. This also helps your customers correlate your name with the business, giving you more credibility.

4. Contact information

Entering contact information for your business helps increase your conversion rate, as it allows the customers to reach out to a designated contact, which can help them with their queries.

Even though the customers can reply to your email for more information, adding relevant contact information helps them reach out to the correct department, which can help them reach an appropriate person to communicate with.

You can check out the following example to better understand how an email signature should look.

Email signature design best practices

Email signatures are often the most overlooked aspect of email marketing, even though it provides your overall email content with a professional and polished look. Some of the best business email signature best practices include a simplified structure, a responsive model, and consistent graphics.

If you are looking into creating an email signature for your business, consider checking out these email signature best practices.

1. Stick to this email signature size

Whether you send a long or a short email, ensure that your email signature size remains consistent. The optimum size and dimensions of your signature should be.

  • Stick to a height of 150px-200px and a width of 300px-600px. These sizes have the optimum spacing required to contain all the necessary information and can be viewed clearly on all devices.
  • Keep your signature weight under 100kb. Why? If the size of the email is larger, then it will take a longer time for it to load for the reader.

2. Choose fonts and colors wisely

Even though you can access many fonts and colors, it only means some are web-friendly. Some fonts have visibility issues on different devices. This is why you must always use a web-friendly font for your signature. Here are some fonts that are web-friendly.

  • Arial
  • Times New Roman
  • Verdana
  • Georgia
  • Helvetica
  • Garamond
  • Tahoma
  • Courier New
  • Trebuchet MS
  • Brush Script MT

When it comes to colors, consider sticking to just two primary colors. You can use your brand's colors to maintain consistency throughout the email. To ensure readability, don’t use any colors that can clash with your content and fonts.

3. Use friendly photos

If you consider adding your photo to your email signature, consider the following when choosing one.

  • Use a clean and high-quality image.
  • Focus on you without anything distracting in the background.
  • Give a smile. Be natural and friendly; this encourages readers to engage with you more.
  • Keep it small. 50px-100px display size is perfect; don’t go overboard.

4. High-quality logos only

Your company logo should be included in your email signature. This helps the customers know about your company and increases brand awareness. When adding a logo, just ensure it is high quality and optimized to fit your signature. The recommended size is 150px-300px.

5. Use alt text for all images

Adding alt text to your images allows users to utilize any assistive technology to access the information quickly. Some things you should keep in mind when adding alt text to your pictures include:

  • Briefly, just tell the reader what the image is about. Keep things under 125 characters.
  • Describe the image well and let the readers understand what they are seeing.
  • Make sure all the alt texts are aligned with the images.

6. Social media icons

Icons are easier on the eye and ensure more conversions than text links. If you are considering adding your social media accounts to your email signature, link your accounts to social media icons.

Remember to include only the relevant social media; don’t add any additional social media, only those that are yours or your business. Consider checking out the example if you need a social media icon placement idea.

7. Keep CTAs light

Ensure that your CTA’s are simple and align with your business needs. A CTA should be in the tone of the email and sound natural rather than forced into the email. Some types of CTAs you can include in your email are

  • Inline Call to Action (CTA):  An embedded hyperlink within texts can benefit readers who click on them more. This type of CTA is effective in engaging the customers further.
  • Button Call to Action (CTA): Buttons represent the quintessential CTA format. Their prominent visibility and directness simplify the subscriber's path to fulfilling the intended action effortlessly.
  • Banner Call to Action (CTA): Banner CTAs excel in catching the eye. They serve as prime tools for spotlighting enticing offers or upcoming events. However, ensure the banners are professionally crafted and adhere to your brand's guidelines.

8. Make your website link visible

Most readers scroll down to the email signature to find your website, so you should ensure that your website is placed in the line of the reader's sight. Here are a few ways to include your links in a visible manner.

  • Place the full link. It will be more visual for the customers.
  • You can include the link as anchor text to help the customers find it in-text.
  • You can link your website with a CTA using a button.
  • Hyperlink your logo with your website to lead customers to your site when they click.

9. Make use of dividers

A long paragraph of text can be hard to digest, so you should keep your text limited and divide content into different sections to make it easier for the readers to understand and digest.

10. Use the appropriate amount of whitespace

Make sure your email signature is clear and filled with the necessary information. Keep things simple and make use of the whitespace that is provided to you to your advantage.

11. Think about the design hierarchy

Ensure that important information is directly visible to the customers and move down the hierarchy from the most important to the least important information. Your primary focus should be your name, designation, company name, and logo.

12. Make your email signature mobile-friendly

Approximately 50.6% of readers use a mobile device to access their emails, so you should optimize your content and email signature to be visible on mobile devices.

Sizing, positioning, and information are essential. When designing an email signature, you must ensure it is visible on mobile devices and doesn’t seem too cluttered.

13. Format your signature as text

While having an email signature in an image form seems appealing, you should consider going against it. Since not all email providers can display images, your email might be sent to someone visually impaired. Text is your best bet to ensure your email is more accessible.

Also, since it is recommended to stick to a 60/40 text-to-image ratio, having too many images might make your email seem to spam and end up in your readers' spam folders.

Some Do’s and Don’t of Email Signatures

Having gone over the email signature best practices, let’s move on to see some do’s and don’ts of creating an email signature. Making sure that by the end of this guide, you will have the perfect idea for your email signature.

Don’t let employees choose their signature. 

While giving employees the choice to choose their signatures is a good idea, the business should create signatures for their employees to remain consistent and avoid looking unprofessional.

While a personalized signature can look good, it doesn’t necessarily comply with the business branding and imagery. To ensure you have a professional signature, it should include the following.

  • Employee Name
  • Their Position
  • Contact Information
  • Email Address
  • Website
  • Image of the Employee

Don’t use custom elements

We’ve all encountered email signatures that leave a negative impression on readers. To ensure your email signature doesn’t offend anyone, establish clear guidelines. Once you’ve selected a format for your brand’s email signature, pay attention to details like fonts, colors, and images.

Avoid common signature mistakes, such as using an unprofessional font like Comic Sans or choosing colors outside your brand’s palette.

As a general guideline, opt for a font that:

  • Complements the overall email content.
  • Has a standard system font for consistent readability.
  • Has a clean and straightforward appearance.
  • Looks appealing at the standard 12-point size.

Don’t create your signature as an image.

Since a high image-to-text ratio can trigger a spam response, it can also cause issues with the image loading and the email size increasing. Consider keeping your email signature as text. 

Don’t add extra flair.  

While adding an extra flair to your signature might seem like a good idea to set you apart, it can distract you from any important links or CTAs. Your goal should be to avoid extra content and let the brand speak for itself.

Don’t add too many offers.

Since an email signature is a sign-off to your email, you can include a brand promotion. You must add only a few promotions in your email to ensure it doesn't overwhelm the reader.

Do use brand guidelines

When creating an email signature, ensure it aligns with your business guidelines. You can use your business's colors, logos, fonts, and details in your signature. Doing so makes your email signature align with the business and your fellow employees, ensuring consistency in branding.

Do Spellcheck

No one wants to read a signature with grammatical and spelling errors, so you should review your email signature content more than once to ensure no issues.

Do keep it simple

Focus on creating a simple design for your email signature to ensure it has all the relevant information but doesn’t seem too cluttered or complex to the readers. 

Mailmunch offers practical email marketing tools, including customizable email templates to help you keep things simple yet effective.

Do make it mobile-responsive

With the rise in mobile usage, customers and people now use their mobile devices to create, respond, and read emails. More than 50.6% of emails are now viewed on mobile devices. This is why making your signature and email content more mobile-friendly is a good idea. 

Do express your values

Your ultimate goal with an email signature should be to create it in a way that showcases your brand's credibility and value. Email signatures should also reflect that since every part of your branding helps promote your business.

Wrapping Up

Now that you have gone over all the email signature best practices including the do’s and don’ts, why not try your knowledge and create your email signature? Once you have made your masterpiece, you can opt for Mailmunch to help you create, carefully crafted emails to enhance your customer's experience.

Your email signature works best when it is a cohesive part of your marketing campaign. So, to help you create a stellar email marketing campaign and signature, Mailmunch offers its users customizable email templates to help them manage and create a campaign that best reflects their business. 

Create a professional email signature with Mailmunch

Start your trial today

Author Bio

M. Usama

M. Usama is an SEO Growth Specialist and Content Marketer at Mailmunch. He is passionate about crafting engaging and informative content on email marketing and lead generation.

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