Your email signature has great potential as a marketing tool, whether driving traffic to your website or informing recipients of new products and services that you are offering. According to Statista, a provider of market and consumer data, 269 billion emails were sent and received every day last year. Why not make use of this free advertising opportunity by including a call-to-action?
Get the basics right
The key purpose of your email signature is to convey important contact information. This should be kept clean and easy to read, and standard across your organisation. This is also a good space to promote your social media channels and gain valuable followers, whether for your blog, or for company pages on external sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Alternatively, you can link to your own page, for example, a recruitment consultant may want to link their signature to their LinkedIn profile.
Taking it to the next level
You can also make use of your signature to showcase promotional material, and this can be constantly updated. Some examples of what you can feature include:
Awards your company has won
Occasions e.g. marking International Women's Day and linking to your website's diversity and inclusion page to share your efforts as an organisation
Launches e.g. announcing your expansion into a new market
Events e.g. inviting interested email recipients to register for a conference
Marketing campaigns e.g. linking to your latest market trends report
Promote content e.g. a series of articles on your blog with a particular theme
Case studies e.g. a section on your website showcasing the work you have done for a particular client or market
By hyperlinking these to relevant pages on your website, you can drive your contacts to visit your site and learn more about your offering, and take some action. The advantage of this medium is that you are largely dealing with people who already know you or your brand in some sense, so you can align what you are conveying with what they will want to know or hear about.
Internal communication
Email signatures can also be useful within your organisation. You can configure your mail client to show specific signatures for internal communications, or even narrow it down further by team. For example, the Human Resources team's emails can feature a signature related to your employee value proposition that directs people to the intranet.
Design and testing
In terms of design, ensure that all essential information such as contact details is in free text format, and not as an image, as some mail clients do not show images on initial load. Remember that the images you use will affect the size of your email, so don't use too many large images. Any text within images should be large enough to remain readable on mobile.
Always ensure that your email signature is tested across multiple mail clients, as they tend to have differing code requirements. Image resolution on Outlook can often be an issue, as it tends to auto-compress any images above 96 dpi, resulting in blurry, poor quality images. Ensuring your designer provides correctly sized artwork prevents this.
If you are looking for help with designing and coding an email signature, get in touch!