SearchIt’s five minutes before your conference call is scheduled to start. You arrive at the conference room, open your laptop and view the meeting invite – gasp – there is no call-in information. No problem! You are resourceful and a skilled typist – thank you Mavis Beacon!
You begin searching your inbox for the last message you received from the meeting organizer so that you can view the phone number in their email signature. Bingo! You find their last message, open the email, and are disappointed to find only their name. You proceed to open ten more email messages from the same individual, and each time, are met with the same disappointing result – only their name. How frustrating!
Whether this is something that has happened to you, because of you, or you were just an innocent bystander, it’s incredibly valuable for the folks you work with to include some basic information in your email signature. In our hurried world of back to back meetings, rapid fire emails, and updating your Pandora playlist, it can be a huge help!
You’ll find lots of articles on the inter-webs describing, in excruciating detail, the best design, font, color, alignment and placement of every pixel in your email signature – this blog is not that. Function and efficiency are paramount to a great email signature.
In that vein, here are some things to consider when crafting your email signature:
- Your email signature should minimally include basic contact information. Your name, best phone number to reach you at, and company are a great start.
- While it’s fine to include images in your email signature, don’t leave contact details solely in an image. The great thing about text is that you can highlight it, copy it and paste it. While images look nice and will display consistently across devices, you can do none of the aforementioned actions with an image alone. It makes for a drawn out process if your funny, talented, fantastic blog writing co-worker is trying to use the phone number captured in your email signature image to call you from their cell phone.
- Include your email signature on every email you send, not just the first email in a thread. It makes it that much easier for folks to find your contact information should the need arise. It’s how we started on this adventure!
- If you are often not available at your desk phone, include your mobile phone number in your email signature. I’ll probably get some flak for including this last tip, but in the current environment of offsite appointments, marathon meetings, and working from home, it can be hard to reach folks that are consistently not at their desk. Boundaries are a good thing when sharing your mobile phone number with your network of email cohorts – feel free to ignore that call arriving on date night.
Can you think of any other email signature tips? Feel free to share below!
