First impressions count, and your email signature is no different. Think of it as a business card. Your email signature will help establish your brand, communicate essential information, as well as provide links to your website and social media.
As simple as setting up your email signature can be, you could be making some big mistakes. We've made a list of the five most common mistakes we see daily.
If you're not hosting all of your images in your email signature on a web server, you're doing it wrong. Some email providers or devices have default settings that block images in emails. If your signature is an image that includes your name, title, and logo, you run the chance that the recipient won't see anything. If you want to add an image, always make sure its hosted on a web server and using HTML with alt text behind it so that recipient doesn't see a blank box.
If you are using a font in your email signature that recipient doesn't have installed on their device and don't have a fallback font chosen, it's likely to look distorted or not show up at all.
This is where social media icons shine. They do a great job of eliminating the cluttered look of text links. Major social media platforms are song brand recognition, so the recipient of your email will be able to recognize the icons right away.
There are so many different ways people check their email these days. Between desktops, tablet, phones and all the various email clients it's important to make sure the HTML is cross-compatible.
Leave any inspirational quotes on the road, and never include them in your email signatures, especially work email signatures. It's cheesy and unprofessional, just like sharing cat memes.