Email signatures can be used to your advantage

19 March 2009

The email signature is the part at the end of every email that you send.

Email signatures often contain legal content such as:

  • Limited company trading as company name
  • Registered office address
  • The content of this email is confidential
  • If you receive this email in error please notify the sender and delete immediately

Once your legal requirements (if any) are taken care of you are able to add other signature content that is more beneficial.

Email signatures often contain:

  • The person's name who sent the email, and often their job role
  • A link back to the company's website
  • Other forms of contact - address and/or phone numbers
  • The company's logo
  • Branding colours or fonts
  • "Take care of the environment and don't print this email" notice

Just think, on average you may send 100 emails a week (maybe more, and in some cases maybe less) - but having your signature details ensures 100 links to your website.

Now although search engines don't crawl email signatures, there's always a chance that the person who you're emailing may click the website link.

Having your branding colours, fonts and logo at the bottom also supports your overall branding and gets your company's image fixed in their head.

Other forms of contact I think is very important, as if you read the email and feel that it's an urgency that you contact them immediately (rather than replying to the email and waiting a few days for a response) you can call them straight away and say what you need to.

Without the phone number the email receiver will next be looking for a website link that they can click on to get more ways of contacting you. If the website link is also missing then they're going to have to result in replying to the email - or if they don't think it's worth the hassle of waiting a few days for a reply they might just give up (and result in maybe some business).

Email signatures are always a good idea to keep your brand strong and also giving your clients the easiest and quickest ways of getting hold of you.

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