Most small companies send hundreds of emails a week, and every one ends with a signature. In some companies each person has their own: three fonts, two logos, a quote, a banner from a campaign that ended last year. Nobody decided it. It simply happened, one email at a time.
A signature standard is a short agreement that fixes this. It takes about an hour to set up and a few minutes a year to keep alive.
Why it matters more than it looks
A signature is often the only place where a recipient finds your phone number, your role and your company name together. A customer forwarding your email to their finance department needs to know who you are. A new contact deciding whether you are a real company looks at the same few lines.
An inconsistent signature also costs you in small ways. Old phone numbers lead to missed calls. Large images slow down the email or get blocked, so the recipient sees an empty box. A signature that was designed on a desktop screen can be unreadable on a phone, where many emails are opened first.
What to include
Keep the list short. A good default for a small company:
- Full name and role. The role tells the recipient why you are writing to them.
- Company name in the form you use in contracts and invoices.
- One phone number. A direct line or a mobile if the person wants to be called on it; otherwise the main number. Not three.
- Website address, written as text so it can be copied.
- Legal details if your country requires them. Rules differ between countries and between types of company, for example a registration number, a registered office or a tax ID. Check the requirements that apply to you or ask your accountant, and put the result into the template once.
- An optional single line such as the office address or opening hours, if customers often ask for them.
Leave out quotes, long disclaimers copied from another company, social media icons for every network and promotional banners. If you need a banner for a campaign, agree on a start and an end date and who removes it.
One template, built to be readable
Use one layout for everyone. The details that make it work in practice:
- Use real text, not a picture of text. Images of text cannot be copied, are not read aloud by screen readers and are often blocked by default.
- Keep the logo small or leave it out. If you use it, give it a short description (alt text) so the signature still makes sense when the image does not load.
- Use a standard font and one or two sizes. The signature should look like part of the email, not a poster.
- Make sure the contrast is good and the text is large enough to read on a phone. General advice on readable design is collected in the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative design tips.
- Make links obvious, and use as few as possible.
- Test it by sending an email to yourself and opening it on a phone, in a web mail and in your desktop mail program.
The general idea of the signature block, and the habit of keeping it short, is described in Wikipedia, Signature block.
Who updates it
A template without an owner is out of date within a year. Write down two things:
- One owner. Usually the office manager or whoever looks after the website. The owner changes the template, tells everyone and checks that it was applied.
- One place for the current version. A shared page or a document with the template, a short instruction for installing it in your mail program, and the date of the last change.
If your mail system allows a central signature that is added automatically, use it, since then nobody has to copy anything. If not, the owner sends the new version to everyone and asks for a quick confirmation.
New employees get the signature on their first day, together with their email account. People who leave get their signature removed or their mailbox closed together with their other access, so a former employee does not appear as a contact. Our article on company email and shared calendar rules covers the other agreements worth making for company mail.
Review twice a year
Put two dates in the calendar, for example January and July. At each date the owner checks:
- Are the name of the company, address and website still right?
- Does the phone number still work?
- Does the legal line still match the current rules and your invoices?
- Is any campaign banner still in use that should have ended?
- Does the template still look right on a phone?
Outside of these dates, change the template whenever a detail changes: a new website, a moved office, a new brand look. A short reminder in your list of tasks for such a change prevents most outdated signatures. If you also have a shared writing style, a one-page voice guide for company emails and web text fits well beside it.
A first step
Open the last five emails you sent and look at your own signature. Write down what is missing and what is too much. Then agree the list above with your team, build the template, send it to a colleague for a test and name the owner. The whole work is a small task that can be done in an afternoon.
If your emails, website and campaigns are not yet working as one system, see our marketing systems service.
