Email Signature Ideas and Best Practices

Maintain Consistency Across Company Email Signatures

It’s best practice to have company policies and templates around what team members should include in an email signature. The consistency adds professionalism, and it ensures each employee has an email signature containing everything it should.

As an employee, ask your place of business if email signature policies or templates exist. As a business owner or manager, ensure you give your employees the tools they need to craft an effective email signature that highlights the email sender and the business. If logos are to be included, ensure everyone knows what size the logo should be and how to format the signature correctly. 

Follow up with your team every once in a while and ask them to double check that their email signature is up-to-date and working correctly. An old logo, broken link, or out-of-date contact information in an email signature is confusing and unprofessional.

Include Company or Personal Branding

Your email signature should include company or personal branding. Include a company logo and match the fonts and colors to your brand. If you are using color, ensure the style is easy enough to read and that it doesn’t take away from the point: providing clear information. Pale blue may be the color of your logo, but it’s difficult to read in text form.

Prioritize and Organize

Organize your email signature based on what’s most important. What do you want your recipient to see first? Your name should always go on the first line, so the recipient knows right away who the email is from. Generally, your role or title comes next.

From there, consider information hierarchy. What’s the next most important detail? If you communicate with customers mostly by phone, you might want to include your phone number next. If it’s important to you that the recipient knows your preferred pronouns, you may want to put those close to the top.

Should Your Email Signature Include Your Email?

There’s a bit of a debate about whether or not you should include your email in your email signature. After all, you are already emailing someone. It can take up valuable real estate, but there are circumstances where an included email is helpful.  

Here are some reasons why an included email may be useful:

• If your email is passed around and forwarded to other people, your original contact information (except for your signature) may be lost along the way.
• Some email platforms, such as Outlook, don’t readily display the sender's email address. By including yours, you make it as easy as possible for someone to find your email if they need to.
• There are apps out there that scan email signatures to create contacts. Including your email with the rest of your contact information can help these apps gather everything they need in one go.

Learn more about whether or not you should include an email in your email signature.

Ensure it’s Mobile-Friendly

How often do you use your mobile device to check your email? Chances are the people you’re sending emails to are doing the same. Make sure your email signature looks just as good on a  mobile device as it does on your computer. 

Send a test email to yourself to make sure the signature translates to smaller devices. If you are including logos or more complicated elements, it can help to have your signature tested by people you know. Send it to a friend or family member and ask them to view it on their mobile device to ensure it is clear and formatted correctly.

Your signature may not translate over when you send an email from your mobile app. Test sending an email directly from your mobile device as well since many email apps have a default signature. If this is the case, update your mobile device signature as well. Test it by opening your test email on both your mobile device and desktop browser.

Test and Update Your Custom Email Signature

Test, test, test. Just because your email signature looks good to you doesn’t mean it will format correctly on other devices or browsers. Test your email signature yourself and send test emails to friends, family, or trusted colleagues to ensure it maintains your intended format.  

Don’t set up your email signature and forget about it. There are many reasons you may need to update your email signature, and reviewing it every now and again is a good idea. Add a reminder to your calendar or ongoing to-do list to review your email signature once or twice a year. Make sure it’s still formatted correctly, double check contact information, test links, and ensure any branding is up-to-date.

If your title, contact information, company information, or company branding changes, be sure to update your email signature right away. The wrong information is confusing, and it could prevent people from being able to contact you.

How to Set Up an Email Signature on Gmail

Once you know what you want to include, setting up your email signature on Gmail only takes a few simple steps. On your Gmail account, head to the settings icon (the gear⚙️) in the top right corner. Choose See all settings. Under the General tab, there’s a section for Signature. Add your email signature in the space provided. 

The menu bar allows formatting, including font type, font size, font color, bold, italicized, and underline. You can also add links here and attach any images or logos that you want to appear in your email signature.

When you’re finished making changes, scroll to the bottom of the page and choose Save Changes. Return to your inbox. When you Compose a new email, you will see your email signature in your New Message. If you don’t like what you see, head back to Settings to make changes. Don’t forget to test your email signature on other browsers and your mobile device to ensure it continues to look great.