While email is an old technology, it is continuing to grow in importance as a communication tool for all businesses. Email signatures are aspect of communicating with your customers. They serve a dual purpose to keep your contact information visible and easy to find while also showing people your companies personality and branding.
HTML Email Signatures are Challenging
Developing an email signature can be challenging for some organizations because it involves a lot of different people in the mix. For example you may need a designer to make the signature, a developer to code the signature, and the IT department’s involvement to install the signature company wide. Most companies simply don’t take the time to bother with doing all of this well and email signatures are often a quick solution rather than a well thought out tactic.
Coding an html email signature is especially challenging because of the many email browsers on the market today. There are many popular pieces of software like Outlook, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird. Then there are many web-based services like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook online, as well as many newcomers in the space every day. Each of these email clients render HTML code in a different way. So the developer must be aware of the eccentricities of these pieces of software and be able to find the best solution that fits all of them well. Most web designers and developers simply aren’t patient enough to put the work into testing their email signatures to make sure they perform well across the board.
Email Signature Generators Are a Solution
One popular alternative to coding your own email signature is to use an email signature generator. There are typically online tools that allow you to enter your contact information into fields and then have it render out formatted HTML that you can copy and paste into your signature area of your email client. Some of them have templates that you can choose from and you can customize the colors or put your logo in place. Oftentimes they will allow you to paste in the URL of an image for your logo or other ad you want to appear there. They will also allow you to link to your social media pages online.
An Email Signature Generator with Creative Freedom
These signature generators are valuable tools because they don’t require you to know HTML and have a complex understanding of what email clients allow for which HTML tags. But the downside is that you don’t have creative freedom to choose what you want, or reorganize the signature in the way you would prefer. You get what you given and there often aren’t many options to change the signature.
One such email signature generator that does allow for more creative freedom is signature.email. You can still begin with a template starting point but then you can begin to drag and drop the fields in the way you want to rearrange them. You can change almost anything from fonts to colors to backgrounds. Every line and fields can be customized to your hearts content.
A Popular Solution for Branding Firms
This kind of solution works well for web designers because it allows them to match their branding guidelines they have developed and be able to respond to client feedback when it comes.
One of the challenging aspects of email signatures is distributing them for an entire company. Most companies keep it simple and each employee just copies and pastes the signature from one person to the next. This works for awhile but often results in the copy and paste telephone game where the HTML from the signature starts to get messed up over time and fonts and colors get off. The result of this is that the company starts to look unprofessional to its clients.
Branding agencies especially want to maintain control over the logo they have created and cringe when the email signature is especially terrible, but they often feel like there isn’t much they can do about it because it is hard to control as a vendor.
Some signature generators allow you to work with your IT team to install the signature template for all employees. But this is often too much set up for something that isn’t of high importance for the company.
One solution for this is a sharing link that contains the template for the email signature and then allows each employee to visit the link and fill in their contact information and then copy and paste it directly into their email browser. This is a simpler alternative that allows companies to maintain consistency without spending a great deal of time or money on these solutions.
Use an Email Signature For Your Company Today
A company will probably need to experiment for awhile to arrive at the solution that works best for them. Try out various email signature generators and see which one works best for you.