A great email signature can help your business by building your image and credibility as well as making it easier for people to contact you. In this short post I look at what things a good signature block can do for you, what you want to put in, and what you should leave out.
The most important thing to remember… Your signature block needs to be as small as possible particularly since so many emails are only a few lines long… but it still has to achieve several objectives.
The objectives of a good signature block
A good signature block should do most if not all of the following for you:
- Let people know who you are
- Let people know how they can contact you
- Show people who may not know you what you or your company does
- If possible, convince people who don’t know you that you are a credible person that they can safely work with
- If you use social media a lot, let them connect you via your preferred social media website.
What you should include:
- Your Name
- Your Title (Optional but very useful, particularly if you have an important or at least important sounding title)
- Your company name
- (Optional) Your company logo
- (Optional) Logo or text details of any awards or memberships that build your credibility. Keep this as short as possible. Don’t list too many things or it loses it’s impact.
- A tag line that makes it easy to understand what you and your company do (Optional only if your company name is immediately recognizable)
- Your Phone Number
- Your web site address
What you do not need to include
Personally I feel that it is a waste of space to include the following:
- Your email address (they already know that sine they received the email from you)
- You fax number (unless you are in an industry/country that still makes use of fax)
- Your postal or physical address (they can always ask for this if they need it)
What do you think?
I hope that you find this article useful.
Do you have your own tips for better email signatures? Please share your ideas with other readers by leaving a comment on this post.
Great post, it’s nice to see others understanding the importance of having a well deigned email signature!
Fully agree. My pet complaint is when signature logos etc cause the attachment icon to show and each shows as an attachment. Very irritating to open a numer of attachments to find that they are just facebook etc logos.
I think address is important. When I receive emails with an address it makes it easier for me to know which regional office it relates to. Otherwise I agree with everything else.
Personally, it annoys me when people omit their email address. I’m not always in Outlook (which makes it easy) when I want to add their details to my Contacts file and, if I’m not, finding and copying their email address from the body of the email can be a real pain and just causes me extra unnecessary work.
Nice. Butr would disagree on the omittance of email address. Two reasons:
1) All too often, when emails are forwarded to me and I need to respond to one of the people who contributed in the thread, the emaila addresses in the ‘to’ or ‘cc’ lines are not showing the actual email address but only the persons’ names. In such case it is handy(necessary to be able to pick up email addresses in the signature lines…
2) Almost every day I need to copy and paste an email address into e.g. an excel file or other. I am always extremely grateful of those people who had the courtesy of including their email address in their signature and not obliging me to go through the hoops of right-clicking on the sender’s name in the ‘from’ field to then select the email part and do a copy-and-paste from there.
My conclusion? Including your email address in your signature is a matter of courtesy and aiding others with their productivity – however small a contribtion it may be…