While most people remember to pay attention to the content of the email, watch out for spelling errors. Be friendly and polite, most don’t care much for designing the right signature – what fonts should be used, whether or not a headshot is appropriate, etc. At a glance, an email signature might seem insignificant – the reality is, it’s a free and effective way to brand every message you send. To be in charge of the impression your emails make, help your javascript development team avoid the common pitfalls of creating email signatures. They should know a couple of tried-and-true tips that marketers use to leverage their full potential.
4 Reasons to Care About Email Signatures
According to recent statistics, there are almost 4 billion email users. In total, we send over 2 billion emails per year. Since we connect to thousands of people via email, treating it as a low-level communication tool is not sensible. Other than a huge exposure of your email signatures, here are a couple more reasons to care about getting them right.
1. Improving brand recognition
Putting a company’s logo, website, and social media accounts next to the signature helps a recipient of the email remember the brand better. When a signature is well-designed, it creates a link between a brand and its representative, increasing both brand awareness and personal credibility.
2. Represents your online business card
An email signature is a way to help people get in touch with the email sender. It gives people the possibility to attach the address, website, or other contact info to the email without distracting the recipient from the content of the message. In case a prospective customer wants to connect via mobile phone or social media, he will be able to reach out effortlessly.
3. Proof of professionalism
Seeing a sender’s job title at the company is a trust factor for many email recipients. This way, the other party can immediately understand how much decision-making power you have at the organization, what your main professional competencies are, and which questions should be discussed with you. Email signatures help save you and the email recipient time by knowing which topics for discussion are relevant.
4. Helps stand out from other brands
Most businesses operate in competitive environments – there are hundreds of companies with similar product lines and positionings. That’s why the smallest means are as good as any to differentiate yourself from competitors. A set of unified corporate email signature standards will help the email recipient remember your email out of dozens of similar offers in the inbox. Some businesses use signatures successfully to introduce returning clients to new products or promote social causes they believe in.
7 Tips to Make the Most Out of Your Email Signature
As much as putting the signature into emails can improve conversion rates drastically. Having said that, since it’s an important marketing tool, it’s better to follow the best tips and practices when coming up with the layout, design, and content. To help you create a memorable email signature that fully represents the values of your business, we collected a couple of useful tips:
Tip #1. Less is more
It’s a popular saying in the design and javascript in email realm, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s easy to get carried away when putting contact information into the signature and clutter it with links, phones, and addresses. The bad news is, the reader will likely get confused having to deal with a pile of data. Other than that, content-heavy signatures will slow down the loading speed of the letter, discouraging the recipient to open the email. The standard structure of a corporate signature goes as follows:
Sender’s name and last name Company the sender’s employed at; Job title; Social media links; Photo or logo (optional).
Tip #2. Use colors to catch attention
A catchy signature is the one that meets the eye – it means, it should be different from the plain-text body of the email. Don’t be afraid to add a stroke of brightness to a corporate email by incorporating your company’s brand colors into the signature. When it comes to creating a custom signature or using a javascript email signature generator to build one, there are ground rules to follow:
Choose one or two primary colors to leverage on in the signature; Don’t use more than two colors; Avoid contrasting colors; Make sure the color of decorative elements does not steal from the text of the signature.
Tip #3. Add social media icons
Most likely, your business has social media accounts. To attract more visitors to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other corporate pages, consider adding hyperlinked social media icons to the email signature. This way, you will offer an email recipient a way to get to know the business and connect with the brand on a deeper level. Although icons do add visual weight to the signature and reduce the email loading time by a small margin, the amount of time needed to process a symbol is smaller than that of reading a link. Choosing social media icons for email signature instead of URLs reduces the clunkiness of the signature, making the email more aesthetically pleasing.
Tip #4. Create a mobile-friendly design
These days, it’s more common for people to read emails via smartphones – according to statistics, 41% of all email users use mobile devices to check their inbox. When ‘thinking mobile’, choose larger fonts and icon sizes to increase the legibility of email signatures. Other than that, increase the gaps between clickable elements to ensure a user will not struggle to hit the right button.
Tip #5. Add a call-to-action
CTAs are common for all marketing content – however, a fair share of business managers don’t put them into email signatures. Adding a call-to-action to a signature is a powerful way to encourage people to visit the company’s website or connect with the brand via social media. Adding links to videos under a signature is another conversion-booster since Gmail users will see them in a thumbnail below. Depending on your company’s current marketing goals and priorities, you should hire a freelance javascript programmer to update the CTA and encourage the recipients to take the actions that are most relevant to your brand at the moment.
Tip #6. Attach trackers to links
Even if an email signature does have hyperlinks and social media icons, a business manager needs to ensure people actually interact with these items. The fix is simple – use your team’s javascript developer skills to attach a UTM tracker to every clickable component of the signature to see how many people clicked on it, when it happened, and what type of device an active user was using.
Tip #7. Use space dividers to stay stylish
If you’re not a designer, cramming different types of information together (logo, social media links, etc) may be challenging. To make sure you don’t have to give up any relevant data and will not compromise the design of the signature, use space dividers to group all information into clusters. It’s a stylish and hassle-free way to make it seem like your signature was designed professionally.
Psychology of Email Signatures
Although it might seem spontaneous, all marketing practices are deeply rooted in science and have to do with neurology and psychology. Like any content, email signatures tend to leave an emotional footprint in readers’ brains. The most crucial components that can alter the way the email is seen and perceived are the color palette of the signature and the font you choose. Let’s take a closer look at each of these components and analyze their psychological impact.
Colors
Colors are a good way to appeal to a particular audience or convey a chosen emotion – be it trust, reliability, excitement, or anything else. Here is how you can choose the right color for the email signature based on the basic knowledge of your audience:
Gender:
while most men name blue, green, and black as their favorite colors, women usually go with blue, purple, green, and red.
Message.
You can choose colors depending on the emotion the company should transmit. Yellow, for instance, is strongly linked to optimism and happiness, red is the color of youthfulness and excitement, purple is associated with harmony and creativity, green – with growth, white – with calm and peace.
Composition rules.
If you’re using several colors, the rules of color complementation will come in handy. For instance, choosing the shades that occupy the same color triad on the spectrum is a well-established practice.
Fonts
Other than increasing the legibility of the text, fonts are perceived unconsciously as well. Here is the psychological meaning of most popular fonts according to the study conducted at Wichita State University.
Serif fonts are linked to maturity, stability, and practicality. Sans-Serif fonts don’t form a strong link to a particular trait. These are multi-purpose fonts that will be a safe bet for any type of email. Script fonts come across as casual and, according to some respondents, feminine. Modern fonts are usually perceived as ‘to-the-point’ and ‘assertive’. Monospace fonts were seen as ‘unimaginative’, ‘boring’, and ‘dull’.
Conclusion
Although it’s not the decisive factor in increasing or lowering conversion rates, an email signature is highly impactful. It creates the brand’s image, helps get across the values of the brand, and proves the professionalism of the sender. When designing email signatures, start by imagining the email recipient. Think about which device this person uses to read emails, what concerns or doubts about yourself or the company the reader is likely to have, and what the ways to mitigate these doubts are. By following the basic rules of design and composition, optimizing the email signature to mobile devices, and taking your time to learn about the psychology of signature components, you will be able to create a memorable, creative, and non-distracting way to sign off every text you send.
