Email signatures are a marketer’s nightmare. A person can have a sexy email signature that doesn’t display in Gmail but looks great in Outlook. It might not display correctly in mobile but look great in all other email delivery systems.

This article will outline best practices for your email signature design that increases the probability of your signature displaying correctly across all mail delivery systems.

Why do email signatures not display consistently?

Email signatures are email header metadata, much like an email’s subject line or email’s return address. When email is sent, the email’s metadata is added to the email before it is delivered to various mail delivery systems that collect and deliver email across Internet service providers (ISPs).  In short, email headers vary from mail server to mail server, and therefore so will your email signature.

Using Email Generators

Creating a signature that works for every mail delivery system is difficult. For example, an Outlook 2013 user will see your Signature different than an AOL email account or even Yahoo! Mail. There are some other things you need to be careful of when making a signature such as the number of links and pictures, complicated formatting, etc.

The simplest method is to use a free email signature creator such as Hubspot. Email signature generators allow you to create a cool signatures with simple templates that are an easy copy/paste into your email signature field.

The downfall to these signature creators is they really are not very customizable beyond the free templates they offer. There are paid subscriptions to email signature providers that guarantee some level of display assurance such as Email Signature Rescue. But even these paid email signature providers do not display correctly across all mail delivery systems all the time. If your company has more than 10 employees, it’s best to manage your signatures with a central cloud-based platform such as Xink.

Best Practices for Ensuring Display of your email signature?

Using email signature best practices below will ensure that your email signature is consistently displayed across email clients and email delivery systems. A minimum recommendation on what should be included in your email signature is as follows:

Employee full name

Position Title

Phone Number

Company Logo with link to website

Social media icons that link to company pages; private account links might make sense for some businesses.

Extras

If you work in a business to consumer (B2C) position such as mortgage or real estate, consider using your head shot in your email signature to add some personality and recognition.

If you have a big company announcement, change of address, or product launch, it’s nice to add some lead-in text to the bottom of your signature to increase conversions to your website.

The days of using a boring, plain text email signature are over. With the help of an email generator like HubSpot you can create your own signature that looks professional and displays consistent more often than not. Simply pick from one of their many templates then customize with your company logo, contact information, social media links—whatever suits your brand best. It couldn’t be simpler! Get started today and start increasing sales even more tomorrow.