How to Make Your Email Signature More Effective

Base is a free simple CRM and sales tracking app that can help you manage all of the leads driven from your email signature and beyond.

Think you’ve got your marketing channels covered? You might be missing a fairly obvious one: your email signature. While you might have the basics covered in your signature (phone number and website), it’s valuable real estate for your marketing.

First, Get the Basics Right

It may sound simple enough to include your contact info in your signature, but you’d be surprised how many people get it wrong. The key is to keep it short. Pick one phone number, not four. Don’t bother with your mailing address. Use hyperlinked words, rather than ugly URLs.

Avoid colored font. They’re too distracting. Look at email signatures that land in your inbox and take from the ones that you like.

What Links Do You Want to Promote?

Most people create their email signature and then never change it. But your marketing probably does change, right? If you’re promoting a new book or product on social media, update your signature to include a link to it.

If you blog, consider setting up a tool that allows email recipients to access your latest blog feed. Feedburner’s Headline Animator does this, though it may require a little tech knowledge.

You should also include links to your Twitter, Google +, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, assuming you are active on all of these channels. This helps your contacts easily connect with you on other communications platforms.

To Image or Not to Image?

Many people enjoy using a photo of themselves or their logo in their email signature. Others hate images. While this decision is highly personal, my suggestion is to avoid images altogether. They don’t render the same in every email platform; some will simply show a broken link where the photo should be, and that’s not the impression you want to leave a contact with. Photos can be distracting, and your email signature is meant to be present, quietly. Don’t overwhelm every email you send with an image.

More Tips

Here’s a great post on what not to make your email signature look like. I’m sure you have received examples of all of them!

If you’ve got a lot of information you want to include on a single line, use a pipe (|) or a colon (:) to separate them, like this:

Facebook | Twitter | G+

Look at email signature software if you’re stumped on how to get creative. Wisestamp lets you customize your email signature with changing content from your social channels, and Stationery Central customizes your signature for you.

Avoid including a quote. They’re overdone.

Here are some other tips for making your email signature more effective. Best of luck to you!

Care to share your email signature or your own tips? Just post it in the comments below!