We talk a lot about the importance of email marketing for businesses. Subscriber lists, auto-responders, welcome emails, personalization, and email automation are all essential to marketing success.
But what about your personal email communications? Did you know that you can still be marketing to customers and contacts through your personal emails without typing a word?
How?
By creating a great email signature.
Let’s talk about what a great email signature looks like.
1) Keep it simple.
Avoid too many colors or images. One or two colors are acceptable, and can help to draw attention to different elements of your signature. Keep the colors and fonts consistent with your branding, and encourage employees to use the same style signature for a more cohesive brand message.
2) Highlight important information.
Be sure that the most important information is obvious at a glance. Using dividers or good spacing, different size text, and even colors are all great way to emphasize the things your recipient will want to see (and that you want them to see). See the example of our client Clar8ty? They highlight that the individual is with customer service, and the colors of the social icons and font match the blue of the logo.
3) Include a Call to Action.
Including your website address in your email signature is not a call to action. A good call to action for your email signature is one that is specific, targeted, and regularly updated.
Something like “Click here to download my new ebook for free” or “Sign up for your free website analysis right now” are call to actions. This is how you can turn a one-time contact into a sale or subscriber. Below is an example of a call to action by author Jason B. Ladd. See how it is specific, targeted, and tells the reader exactly what he wants them to do?
4) Include social icons to your profiles.
If you’re active on any social sites, or have a personal blog, this is a great place to highlight that and really focus on personal brand building. Giving them more ways to stay in touch will help keep the lines of communication open, build trust, and build your brand.
5) Make it easy to directly connect with you.
Besides using traditional contact information like email and phone, make it easy to set up a meeting with you. Particularly if your schedule makes it difficult to connect. Here is a great example of this is in use by our client Mike O’horo.
6) Keep it Mobile Friendly.
A vast majority of people are checking email on their mobile devices at least some of the time, so it seems like a no-brainer to create mobile-friendly emails and email signatures. But people are still neglecting to check how their signatures look on mobile devices.
What makes an email signature mobile friendly? Make sure your text is large enough to read on small mobile screens, and that your links and buttons are large enough -- and spaced out enough -- for folks to tap on with their fingers.
7) Don’t forget to test it.
You should check how your email signature appears in different email clients, as well as on mobile devices. You’ve taken the time to create beautiful signature, so take the extra minute to make sure it looks great to your recipients.
Now that you know the ingredients to a perfect email signature, go create your own!
