Consider this. You read a lot of emails every week. The actual statistic is you read over 15 hours of emails every week. For me, most of these are work emails. That means I spend 15 hours scanning emails containing the font Arial per week. It’s consistent week after week. What is worse, is that email clients (Outlook, Gmail etc) are still technologically speaking, still in 2001. The HTML and under-the-hood tech hasn’t changed much, which doesn’t give you many options to style your email.
In my last job as Creative Director, I had to find ways of getting attention for our company. It was all about the touchpoints. How can I make the experience of “dealing” with our company a bit more pleasant with every interaction? From emails, to our printed catalogues. My job was to make you the customer, enjoy your experience or not even notice your experience of doing business with us.
I spent almost 12 years experimenting and learning what works and what doesn’t when it comes to the “UX” of our company. One of the things that did make a difference in customer interaction was our email signatures. We had more “opens” and better relationships once I changed this one thing in our company.
Our email signatures
Yes. That is true. We changed our email signatures and a few things changed when it came to customers, suppliers and our sales. All positive. Our customers recognized us and trusted us a bit more, which led to an increase in responded emails and sales.
5 Ways to Make Your Email Signature Stand Out.
1. The average email signature looks like technical text.
Brett Hooper
Designer
(555)-555-5555
brett@studio63.ca
Are you average? Aren’t you supposed to show off your creative skills? This is another opportunity for a positive, professional first impression. Your signature shouldn’t blend with your email body. Break it up with colour, and format your text so you have bolds and different type sizes. Break up the monotony of boring technical-looking signatures.
2. The images and graphics in your signature shouldn’t be attachments.
Don’t embed your images, serve them as a webpage. We use our company’s Google Drive to serve our images. Your email will load faster and won’t contain any attachments (ghost attachments). Your portfolio can be a link to a site or to a downloadable PDF, without filling up the agency’s inbox.
Example:
<A href=”http://studio63.ca”><IMG border=0 src=”https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1OOUyqueqm6xaqgxk8O5YHjBCWV0eo4K_“></a>
3. A profile photo creates a personal touchpoint.
You aren’t an email address. You are a person. We are more likely to reply to a person than to a gmail account. Use the same profile image in all touchpoints of your portfolio and personal brand.
4. Build your brand.
Your signature, your portfolio, your website should be consistent. Make sure to use the same typeface and colours throughout. If your work has the same look and feel, it will be more memorable. Your email signature will be the hardest to comply with this consistency as you can only choose a very limited set of fonts. If you want to make sure it’s exact. Use a transparent image as your contact text and links.
5. Your personal assistant.
My personal clients would always ask me to design their websites. They were always concerned with how the website looked. My concern and also my first question for them would be “what do you want your website to do for your company?” You don’t just have a website for the sake of having a website. It’s an employee. Make it work for you. Just like your signature in your email. Make sure it contains links to your website, pdf portfolio etc. Make sure the links work!
How to make a great email signature?
To make a great signature there are 2 approaches.
1.You could use any graphics program to create a transparent PNG and serve that image. The only caveat is you cannot have multiple links to provide. Unless you mix some text with your image.
2. You could use HTML and a visual code app to write it. I prefer Brackets.io as it has a built-in preview browser.
Below is an example of the code to make our signatures.
Download our template to start building your own signature today:
The After Class Dispatch
Portfolio Building Newsletter.
Sometimes we stayed after class to talk to students about design, our experiences and stories. I invite you to sign up to continue with what we believe we think is important after class. I promise we won’t send you much. The occasional email about something we think may help you out in the future.