Email signatures have been a core part of email functionality since the 1990s. As a small space where you can add additional information about you, your job, or your titles, this functions as a useful piece of email real estate. Primarily, it’s going to offer whoever you’re emailing more details. Yet, email signatures also serve to save you time, including info that you would have otherwise had to have typed out.
As email signatures have become more complex over the past few decades, they now have more functionality than ever before. That said, many people aren’t using them to their full potential. If you just include your name and job title in an email signature, then you’re missing out.
In this article, we’ll guide you through how you can get the most from your email signature. We’ll outline what a typical signature looks like and then walk you through a number of additions you can make to boost your signature’s utility.
Let’s dive right into it.
What Does a Typical Email Signature Look Like?
With over 345 billion emails sent every single day in 2023, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone that hasn’t seen at least one email signature. In fact, it’s likely that you’ve seen one in the last few hours, as they’re extremely common in the world of work.
However, most email signatures are only a baseline that conveys a fairly standard set of personal data:
- Name – The very first iteration of email signatures was simply to include your name, saving people from having to type out their name after every email they sent.
- Company – Including where you work and your company’s branding elements are a common part of every email signature.
- Title – Often, people will outline their title or role in a company in their email signature, giving people much-needed context about who they’re talking with.
- Additional Contact Fields – Many email signatures will include either an additional email, a phone number, or a social media account where you could also get in touch with that person.
If you only include these previous elements in your email signature, you’re wasting a big opportunity. While aspects like your name and title are useful to give further context to the recipient of your emails, it doesn’t do much on your own behalf.
Taking Your Email Signature Further
Email signatures don’t have to only be a place where other people get information about your role. They can actually become one of your most useful email marketing resources, helping you to improve this marketing stream and get better ROI from your campaigns.
Thanks to online email signature generators, you can now create comprehensive email signatures with ease. By doing this, you can add a number of extra elements that push the bounds of what you can achieve in this small space. Here are the best email signature features that you can include on a work email:
- Marketing Materials
- Conference and Webinar Links
- Case Studies
Let’s break these down further.
Marketing Materials
Your marketing team spends hours each day creating unique graphics, developing cohesive campaigns, and launching them to the world. However, with the quick turnover of this field, there are many marketing materials that don’t quite hit their mark, with most customers never even seeing them.
By incorporating infographics, marketing images, or campaign photos into your email signature, you’re able to provide your marketing team with an additional space to include useful elements. These can easily be adapted from other campaigns, making this a very low-cost method of increasing the visibility of marketing campaigns.
Considering that the average worker sends 40 emails each day, converting this space into a marketing billboard for your company will radically improve the scope of even the smallest campaign. There’s a reason that email marketing is so favored by experts; it really is a catch-all form of marketing.
Be sure to use all of the space an email signature gives you to push marketing even further.
Conference and Webinar Links
Face-to-face marketing has become increasingly popular over recent years. Due to being in different locations, online events, product demos, and video forums have become the go-to solution for emulating this close-knit form of marketing. Often, webinars are lower-budget marketing streams, meaning your business won’t have lots of extra capital to promote these events.
Even if the webinar in question is phenomenal, this can result in fairly low turn-outs. Instead of increasing the budget, you could simply put a link to the webinar landing page or signup sheet within your email signature.
As this is a very passive form of marketing, it’s good to do this far in advance, giving people enough time to see the event in their signature and click to sign up. The great thing about this is that it amplifies the reach of your marketing channels without costing you a single extra penny.
Case Studies
Especially when you’re dealing with clients, every little element of social proof can be the difference between a new conversion and another bounced prospect. Email signatures are a wonderful place to include links to customer case studies.
By including them in your email signature, or a link to them, you’re able to subtly influence your customers. Without shoving your past client’s success stories down their throats, you’re able to put the evidence of your success directly before them. Especially if you routinely contact clients via email, then having this supporting evidence only one click away can be a fantastic way of streamlining your sales channel.
If you’re not too sure how to include a case study, be sure to check out these custom email signature templates. There, you’ll find a selection of designs you can use to include further useful marketing elements in your email signatures.
Final Thoughts
Don’t sell your email signature short. This space is continuously overlooked, often reduced to only a center for general information. While getting someone’s name and job title from their signature is useful, it’s only just scratching the surface of what you can achieve within this medium.
By incorporating more comprehensive elements into your email signature, like conference links, case studies, and even further marketing materials, you’ll convert this space into a click-factory for your business. Not only will your emails get more traction, but you’ll be giving your audience a constant selection of further links they can use to interact with your brand.
Take these tips and strategies on board, and you’ll be boosting the return of your email marketing campaigns in no time.
