Email Signatures

As companies grow and add more employees, it is important to set up a Best Practices policy for Company Email Signatures. How important is it to standardize company signature lines? It’s VERY important and here are a few reasons why.

1. Spam filtering software is becoming more and more restrictive. In this day of cyber-attacks, having too much “bling” in your email signature can cause Spam filters to flag emails coming from a company’s domain; ultimately not allowing any emails to come through from the entire company.
2. Professionalism is key when trying to communicate affectively and retain customers. Having too many options in a signature line can be distracting to the recipients and can damage a company’s brand.
3. Too many font choices. Some employees like to have a different font for each line of their signature. Keep the entire signature in plain text. A plain text signature is more likely to get past Spam filters and they are easier to read and more elegant.

Other tips and recommendations:

1. Keep it simple and only include the essentials; First and Last name, title, company name, phone number(s), small company logo, and a link to the company website. Less is better with signature lines.
2. Including your email address isn’t necessary, they already have that since you emailed them.
3. Use only 1 font style, preferably one that isn’t a Script font and try to use a single font color. If a custom font is used from your computer, it may not display correctly on the recipient’s end.
4. To make your name stands out, try to use a slightly larger font size than the rest of the signature information. Standard font size for emails is either 11 or 12.
5. If you want to include an image of some sort, only include the company logo. Don’t include anything that doesn’t pertain to the company. Also, do not include images that are “hotlinked” (images that are on the internet and must be downloaded separately, instead of images which are included in your signature).
6. Make sure your signature automatically gets added to your outgoing emails by your email program. There are usually two different settings for automatically adding a signature to an outgoing email; one setting for new emails and one setting for email replies. It can be very frustrating to receive an email only to find that there isn’t a signature line with a call back number.