Six ways to make a good e-mail signature
June 21, 2007 by Tris Hussey
Filed under Jobs
This post of Doug’s got me thinking…
I’ve seen every variation of every possible email signature in the world. That’s a pretty broad statement, but I am 99% sure I have seen pretty much everything one can do with their email signature. Source: Service Untitled » Sample Email Signatures – customer service and customer service experience blog
The e-mail signature is something that can be helpful or royally annoying. You see while you can help people by including your phone number, e-mail, and website… adding a graphic or quote can just drive you batty.
No matter how your e-mail program does it, here are my tips:
- Keep it short. Seven lines is good. Mine happens to be 8, because I also include a row of “=” to separate it from my text.
- Keep it simple. Leave the images for your website. I’ve also found that images and other “nifty” things make your e-mail more likely to get tagged as spam and lost.
- Spell out websites. Don’t count on the HTML signature to work all the time. Instead of making a hyperlink like “My website” use http://www.onebyonemedia.com. This also lets people copy and paste into a browser or contact card.
- Only include the information you want to share. It seems silly, but if you don’t want business calls at home, don’t give out your home phone number. If you keep one IM account just for friends, don’t put it into your sig file.
- Forget the little quotes. Yeah I had this at one time too. I even had a random quote generator for a while While you might think your quote is pithy or wise or funny, it might offend someone or just be confusing.
- Don’t attach your contact card by default. Another potential spam flag and once you’re in my contacts, I don’t need it again and again.
Look we all know that an e-mail sig file is a great thing for making sure people have your contact information, but if you follow these steps, you won’t piss as many people off with yours.
Update: After I wrote this and it started to get more Digg traffic I thought of a #7…
7. Stick with black text and simple fonts. Repeat after me, Arial is my friend. Yes, I know it’s boring. But it’s also on every machine in the world and it was designed to be easily readable on screen. Yes, there are some better ones, but Arial is a great baseline. You can count on it. Use it. Arial is your friend.
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I would like to advocate against using an image in signatures. Too often it gives the email (on Outlook at least) an ‘attached file’ paperclip icon. This can be frustrating when I want to sort through my emails with genuine attachements
Randall (of the ‘I want my advertising in this comments page’ school, but you raise reasonable points):
The reason not to jazz up a signature is because it’s a signature. It’s not mail content, it’s the same in every mail you send. The interesting bit of the mail is what you want to send that’s unique to that mail, the content itself. So why draw the reader away from it with a 72pt flashing name with alien glow effect?
On the 8, 7, 5 line thing: netiquette is *3* lines, 72 characters max per line. Admittedly this dates back to 80×25 text screens, but if you’re putting in name/job title/phone numbers, why would you put one piece of information per line:
–
John Smith, Senior wombat fiddler, Acme Inc
Office: +1 234 567 8901 Cell: +1 234 567 8902
2 lines, all people want… You could add your preferred email address – it’s in the message headers already, but modern clients tend to ‘helpfully’ hide it from view, particularly when printed.
Generally: yes, HTML is supported, but there’s rarely much point to use it in emails. When I receive emails in bizarre nonstandard fonts, it looks like tarted up spam. I know what font I like to read my messages in – and when an email arrives in plaintext I get to choose. I might be poorly sighted or have a super high res monitor, and 12/10/9pt would then be far too small, for instance.
Some of you are missing the point of putting your email address in the sig: Emails that are printed or forwarded will lose this information, and some mail clients (Lotus Notes) make it a little obtuse to see the sender’s email address. I have been in the situation of having a person’s email but not his email address, and that can be more annoying than you think.
<<<<< good point
Hmmmm that’s cool.
I made a proxy site myself, I believe the right to privacy on the internet is important, new ruling about the police in britain being able to hack into people compmuters without warrant is crazy. Anyone remeber george orwells 1984?
The best tutorial i’ve seen on this site. thanks
I am about two years too late. But why in the hell would anyone put their email in their email signature? It makes no freaking sense. <–Period.
And I do see the comments above. But I disagree that forwarded emails do not retain the signature. Every forwarded mail I get at least has a signature from the original sender. It all depends on how you have your options set in email; to add the sig to a reply/forward or not. You are probably right about Lotus Notes though, no experience with that here.