Email signature examples & best practices for 2021. Learn how to create the best email signature with examples, professional tips, and design templates.
An email signature is a powerful way to convey your professionalism to your readers and give them the information they need to contact you. An email signature is placed at the bottom of each mail, which helps leave a great impression and makes you stand out from your peers.
Take a look at the content in the left side menu or the slider below to find quick access to laser-focused email signature examples and tips, arranged by professionals and features.
WiseStamp has been around since 2009. That’s a lot of time to expand and perfect our selection of email signatures. So, if you have a specific need in mind (feature, design, style, etc.), you’ll find specific examples and guidelines for that here.
To give yourself a professional email signature you don’t really need to know how to make an email signature, with all the design and coding practices that go into it. These days all you need is a good email signature generator.
Try the WiseStamp email signature generator for free.
A professional email signature includes the essential information about you and your business. It will include your name, job title, company, phone number, address, and website link. A truly professional signature will include your image and company logo, social media icons, and a call to action, but it can actually do much more.
Let’s see how a truly professional email signature is made.
Your email signature is a great opportunity to present yourself and what you do in a beautiful and professional way. If you do it right you’ll build trust and connect with your clients more significantly with each mail you send.
This article is intended to show you exactly how it’s done, so stay tuned. We’ll go over how to make the best use of each moving part in your signature block.
We will not cover email signature design best practices, and if that’s your focus, click the link for our comprehensive article about that, plus lots of cool email signature design examples.
3 things that make a professional email signature:
All good email signatures do these 3 things. You had better do the same if you care to make a professional impression, gain your readers’ attention, and earn your readers’ engagement.
Follow this article to learn how it’s done.
Note:
A personal email signature is used in a slightly different way than a business email signature for professionals. If you intend to use your signature for your private email, I advise that you read our page tailored for making a personal email signature.
There are 5 must-have elements that make up any good email footer template. These elements complement each other to create an effective professional email signature format. In order to create an impact for you and your organization, you want to do it correctly and get the small details right.
By the end of this section, you’ll learn how to create a good-looking formal email signature that will make a good impact on your peers and leave a lasting impression.
A good email signature has 5 major components (and some extras). We’ll dedicate the rest of the article to showing you how to nail each component.
Let’s look into each element separately, to see how it’s used best.
It may feel right to cover everything you do in your work email signature, especially when you start using advanced features and add-ons like buttons and banners. But in order to be effective, it’s a good idea to be concise. Because of the very limited email signature format, if it’s not strictly essential, it’s noise.
When confronted with limited space, structure and format is everything. Your signature format will make or break the impression you leave on your readers. That’s why using a clean and organized email signature format is a basic requirement for any professional signature.
So, what to do?
Use short but clear wording. You don’t need to say Chief Executive Officer – just write CEO, and definitely don’t use Wizard of Light Bulb Moments for Marketing Director (true story).
Avoid vague or misleading titles. So, it’s a no-go on Communications Ambassador or Under Secretary to the Sub-Committee.
Include all building blocks of a basic email signature format :
The point of adding your contact details is, unsurprisingly, to help people contact you. The more options you add, the less clear it becomes what the best way is to get in contact with you. This makes it less likely that anyone will follow through.
So, what to do?
See how it’s done in the example below:* Click the image to create your own signature with WiseStamp
Your email signature block may be the last thing people see in your mail but that also means that’s the impression they will take with them.
Your image and logo are the most memorable elements in your email signature. Yet there are more bad examples out there than good ones for how images are used. Why are so many people content with having such bad design as their lasting impression? Well… because adding a nice, responsive, well-designed signature to your mail is not so simple.
You may think that making an email signature with a logo is just drag-and-drop, but if you’ve ever tried to do it yourself you know that this is not the case. Even if you use an email signature editor, that really doesn’t solve the problem. You still have to install the code manually into the email client’s HTML file.
It doesn’t really matter which email provider you’re using, the WiseStamp generator can auto-install your email signature in your email (with just one click). You can check out how it works specifically for Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, iPhone, or Yahoo.
But even using a generator, there is still room for things to go wrong. There’re ways to ensure your image will look great no matter what.
Your image and logo are literally your face, or your company’s face, when it comes to email communication – so make them attractive. Attractiveness creates trust, makes you more memorable, and increases compliance. Doing this wrong can also hurt your reputation and your brand.
I) It’s always better to smile
Smiling faces have been shown to increase engagement and positively influence people’s willingness to do business with you. But, this is a fine art. Make your smile natural and friendly and confident, not smug, not condescending, not shy, and definitely not fake.
II) Use only high quality images
A low-quality image is by now standard for dodgy and spammy content on the web. Any low-quality images you use may associate you with this type of distrusted content. So use only high-quality pictures.
III) Make sure your image isn’t trimmed
Our email signature generator (and most others) use a square or a circle frame to present your image. So, your safe bet would be to use 1×1 (square) picture proportions (around 250x250px is good). Otherwise, pieces you like about yourself may be left out 🙂
IV) Give your image a clean background
You don’t want to drown your nice smile against a noisy background (like in the right pic). Instead give yourself a clean and contrasting background that makes your face bright and clear.
A GIF email signature can be the most efficient use of your limited signature space. Using a GIF-like the one below will permit you to showcase both you and your company in a way that is esthetically pleasing and not too overwhelming.
It will also make your email signature eye-catching and increase exposure.
There are loads of other animation options that we talk about in the bonus section below.
What is a Call-to-Action? Well, it’s more or less what it sounds like – it’s an invitation for your prospects to take you up on an offer.
In practice CTAs take the following forms:
An effective CTA should be polite yet assertive, and above all, easy to understand and easy to follow through. So, how do you do that?
In a nutshell? Think of a typical person your message is meant for, then think about what you can provide that they really need. Offer them that in words they understand and relate to, and present it in a way that visually sticks out (easier said than done?
We have an entire post about CTA email signatures, but in order to keep us on course let’s break it down here.
I) Decide on just 1 action – that will give you (and your users) the most benefit
The main challenge here is giving up on secondary options you’d want people to get onboard with. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too (turns out your mom knew a thing or two about email signature marketing ha…?) – sometimes “less is more”.
So, decide on 1 CTA:
II) Make it easy to take action
Now that you have just 1 request from your audience make sure that you’re not asking for too much.
Asking someone to marry you is just 1 request right? But it’s certainly not a small or easy decision to make. Be modest with what you ask. Use low commitment words like “see” or “let’s talk” instead of “buy” or “enroll”.
All you need to do is convince people to take the first step, not go the whole way. Once they take that step they have slightly committed and you can try to convince them to go further.
III) Be as clear and descriptive as you can (in 2-5 words)
Let’s say you’re a Marketing Director and you want to send people to your sales landing page. A button text saying “Visit my sales page” is clear on what you want people to do, but it doesn’t really describe what you offer your prospects in terms of benefit. Instead try something like “Stay 2 nights get the third for FREE”.
IV) Make your call-to-action visually stand-out
This one is kind of straightforward, no? If you don’t see the CTA you’re not going to click it. Simple.
Give your button and/or banner some “pop” with a solid splash of color, just make sure that the button is a different color than its background and that the text is easy to read.
V) Verify that all links work and lead to the right place
Imagine you go through all the trouble of making a nice email signature (it’s actually really easy with our generator) and even make a great call to action, only to lead people to broken or missing links. Not ideal, right?
So after you’ve completed your signature, go over all the buttons, social icons, and other details and see that everything is correct and working properly.
Throughout this article I’ve been telling you to keep what you offer to a minimum, well… when it comes to social media buttons you can let loose.
The small and compact nature of social icons means that you can go all-in and use them all, and they will refreshingly look better and more complete (unlike before, this time “More is more”).
Add to your email signature any of your social media assets that are alive and kicking, so long as it’s relevant to your professional goals.
What you shouldn’t do is add stale, unkept, or dead social channels that will make you look more bad than good.
As a matter of fact, you have lots of cool ways to present your social media assets beyond icons, such as full-fledged buttons and videos. Check out our page on social media icons and buttons for email signatures that drive clicks, you’ll find some cool examples in there.
It’s a good option to use elegant animations in your email signature. Animation is a great eye-catcher, and you should use it to bring attention to your otherwise unnoticed email footer.
Best animations you could use:
You should try our animated signature GIF maker see some examples for how it’s done, and make your own animated email signature.
The important thing in animation is not to go overboard. Getting too freaky can be counterproductive.
If there’s too much movement in your signature it can get very hard to focus on actually reading. The motion will compete against the information to which you wanted to pull people’s attention in the first place. And it can be seriously annoying.
Let’s go over what that means…
Making use of your limited real-estate, grabbing attention or just plain being a cool feature is well and good but they’re not true value in and of themselves.
To really add value they must compliment you or your brand in a meaningful way.
For example, you can use an image strip add-on to add GIFs that show you or your product in action, or you could add a special handwritten animated sign-off to give a personal feel to your signature. Another thing that does the trick is adding your business slogan in addition to your photo and logo like dynamic typing effect.
We’ve been working with lots of people from a great many professions through the years and we got enough requests to build dedicated add-ons to answer specific industry needs:
If you’re a lawyer, an artist, a travel agent, an eco-activist, or even an astronaut, you’ll likely find what you need here or in our full list of featured add-ons.
It’s really easy to set up. Once you’ve finished putting in your details in our signature generator, just go over to the add-ons section > choose the one with the hammer called “Disclaimer” > Then choose one of our pre-made disclaimers or customize one on your own > click “add” and you’re done.
Visit our post on email disclaimers to learn more about important details that go into making them and how to use them correctly.
Pictures speak louder than words (is that the saying?) so let them drive your message home. If you have a cool, creative, and good-looking product – make a show of it and pull people in with strong visuals. Images and videos are known to have high click rates.
BTW, there’s a WiseStamp Instagram gallery add-on that makes adding Instagram images and links to your email signature no hassle at all.
Getting people interested enough to click on your video is a powerful thing. It gives you the opportunity to tell the full story about what you do or what you offer. There is no other way to tell a story right out of your email signature. So, make the best of your signature real estate and add your latest sales video to your signature block. You can set up a thumbnail that’s auto-generated directly from Youtube with our video signature add-on.
Show anyone you write a little bit more about who you are and what you care about using a green signature footer or some nice email signature quotes.
If you care about the environment, then that’s easy, just go to our email signature editor > add your personal and contact details > then add the green footer add-on from our add-ons section > choose a pre-made version you like, and voila!
For a bit of self-expression you can add a signature quote from our pre-made list (funny, motivational, business, and more) or insert one of your own. Go and grab it from the add-n section.
Over 1.3 million professionals use their WiseStamp signature to stand out professionally.
Choose your best fit from 100s of email signature design templates for all major email clients, including Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Mac Mail, and more.
