Email Signature Design: Best Practices and Their Impact on Deliverability

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

These days, an email signature is a necessary component of professional life. A custom signature helps your branding, improves your credibility, and provides vital contact information for anyone receiving your emails. But what does good email branding and style look like? Can a bad signature hurt email deliverability? This guide will demystify everything you need to know to create a good email signature.

Understanding the Importance of Email Signatures

An email signature is like a digital handshake: it’s your last chance to make an impression at the end of every email you send. A lot more than a sign-off, it puts your professional identity into the hands of the reader.

Every email signature is a digital business card – it includes your name, position, company, contact details, some social media handles, and your company logo – it’s an easy and effective way to help you promote your brand, making your communications look trustworthy and giving an impression of a brand that is put together and can be relied upon. It’s a form of branding. If you have a good email signature, it will leave a good impression. It can also speed up communication and make it easier to deal with you, giving the reader a feeling of massively reduced effort and friction.

Best Practices for Designing an Email Signature

• Personalization is important even when creating an email signature, but the key is keeping it simple and professional and ensuring the most important information is easy to digest. 
• Responsive design is another key consideration. Modern email is read on a wide array of devices, from full desktop size to tiny mobile devices – your email signature has to look good and work correctly on all of them. When you use a responsive email signature, the formatting and imagery scale fit the device’s layout without causing any display problems.
• By keeping your email signature branded with your colors, and using your identity fonts and logos, you subtly reinforce your brand image. Contacts subconsciously associate the logo and colors with your brand. The consistent colors reinforce your brand image and create a lasting impression. Strengthening the link between your brand and the reader will leave them with a positive impression of your identity. The moment they read your message or logo, they will be transported back to your original brand’s professional and friendly world.
• The size and typestyle of your email signature is important, too. Try to keep your signature lines to about 80 characters. This keeps them from breaking too awkwardly. Keep images small (under 40KB or so) and dimensioned thoughtfully. Again, the larger and more complex they are, the longer they’ll take to load, and the more they’ll delay the reader from seeing the rest of the email.
• A call-to-action (CTA) can be incredibly effective. Maybe you want people to subscribe to your newsletter, see your latest blog post, or follow you on social media. A CTA can pique their interest, and drive traffic from your email signature to your desired destination.
• Finally, the legal checklist: compliance and disclaimers. Depending on your specific industry, you may need to include certain legally required disclaimers to ensure that your email communications are in compliance with the law and that both you and your recipients will be protected in case any legal dispute happens to arise.

Inserts, URLs, and other customizations can help to keep a professional-looking yet representative email signature. There are plenty of tools available to send emails, such as Gmail, Outlook, and other email interfaces. Regardless of the tool you use, it’s best to follow the above best practices to ensure your email signature will not only look professional but also contribute to your branding and make communicating with others easier.

How Email Signatures Affect Deliverability

Email signatures can significantly impact the deliverability of your messages. Here’s how:

• Content and Spam Filters: If you have too many links, large images, and huge blocks of HTML code in your signature, your email could get marked as spam by your recipients’ filters. Keep it simple! Keep the code clean!

• Loading Time: Bigger images or graphics in your signature can increase the loading time of an email, and the loading time can impact user experience and even lead to higher bounce rates.
• Compatibility: A non-responsive signature can’t either and, as a result, might not show correctly on every device or email client your recipients use to read your emails.
• Reputation: A polished email signature with good typography and image treatment adds to your prestige and brand appeal, encouraging recipients to take you and your communications more seriously.

In Conclusion

By understanding best practices for email signature design and how it impacts email deliverability, you can create a versatile branded asset that serves you and your business for years to come. A good email can still be effective without a signature, but the best email designs live beyond the body of the message. Learn the rules, apply them to your email signature needs, and you’ll see how a great email signature can help any email live on, elevating brand, optimizing deliverability, and however else you measure your success. And we definitely can help you with that, making sure your emails are delivered properly!

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