Both internally and externally, email is by far one of the most common methods of communication a business will use. Whether it be passing projects from department to department or engaging with a potential client, a business will send thousands of emails every single day. Even across one worker, they typically send 40 emails a day and receive over 100.
With the massive reliance on this form of communication, businesses need to have clear policies in place about the email signatures they recommend their employees to use. Email signatures are one of the best methods for creating and extending brand identity across all social media. When it comes to emails, managing unread messages can be quite a tough job. Here is how you can find unread emails in Gmail and delete them in bulk.
In this article, we’ll move through the main benefits of creating an email signature style for your business – both for internal and external use.
What is an Email Signature?
An email signature is a short text or graphic at the bottom of an email that includes further details about the person sending it. At their most basic, an email signature might just be a person’s name, saving them a few seconds here and there when not having to type out their full name.
At most complicated, email signatures can be interactive elements that could even include marketing materials. If there is a particular product launch that’s coming up, some businesses will put a link to sign up for more information in their email signature. While both ends of the spectrum are possible, it’s always best to end up somewhere in the middle.
Typically, an email signature will have core information about a person and their role in the corporate world:
- Name and Job Title
- Social media links
- Alternative methods of contact
Across these basic elements, a person will have all of the content of their email signature. The only difference between a corporate email signature and a personal one is that businesses often like to introduce elements of their own branding into a company-wide email signature.
An email signature can be a great point of branding, with company colors, links, and logos all included. While this is useful for external communication, this company-wide branding can also be a useful feature when creating a professional corporate atmosphere.
Why Use an Email Signature?
Most of the time, people focus on creating email signatures for external reasons. Whether that be creating another contact surface through branding or simply including more external contract information to streamline communication, email signatures provide a range of benefits for external communication.
Beyond that, there is a range of positive reasons to use one:
- Include Email Marketing Materials
- Legitimacy
- Constrained creativity
Let’s break these down further.
Include Email Marketing Materials
Alongside personal information, email signatures can be a fantastic place to include marketing materials for your business. As you can attach almost anything to an email, including hyperlinks to event pages or JPG images, you have the perfect place to store marketing information.
What you include can also depend on whether you’re sending internal or external emails. By quickly switching between email signature templates, you can change which format you’re sending out. This comes in handy if you want to alert employees about an internal event, with your email signature being the perfect reminder. Don’t forget to check out our detailed guide on setting up templates and canned responses in Gmail.
Equally, whenever you contact someone from outside the company, all you need to do is click on the outbound email marketing signature to change to your current promotion. With the ease of changing what’s inside your template, it will only take a few clicks to change your current offering from today’s event to one that’s taking place in the future.
Marketing materials don’t have to take up much room, but with the popularity of email, having them there is a great way to extend your marketing surfaces even further.
Legitimacy
When you receive an email that doesn’t include an email signature, due to how barebones emails normally are, they can come across as incredibly boring. The default text and color of each email also means that it’s incredibly easy to impersonate someone else on emails or create spam emails.
One way of ensuring that spammers cannot so easily impersonate anyone from your company is to create an email signature. By including many distinct markings and specifications within your brand-wide email signature, you can bring a level of legitimacy to any employees sending emails.
Instead of a barebones email, you’ll be able to ensure that you represent your company in the best possible light, with a very legitimate seeming email signature.
If you’re not sure where to get started with email signature styling for your company, then be sure to move through a list of the best email signature templates online.
Constrained Creativity
Within the corporate world, for many people, creativity isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. While creating an email signature isn’t exactly a creative pursuit, it definitely can be. If a company creates general guidelines for the email signature style that they would like to use, they can then allow employees to customize what they include in their email signatures.
Some employees, focus more on their titles and contact information, while others may take the space to include a quote or something else they find inspiring. By allowing people within the corporate world to customize their company email signature, they are then able to create a space that reflects them.
Not only does this bring an element of personality to the space, but it can also act as a form of a digital business card. By creating a personalized element, each employee within the same business can change this space to reflect them. Considering how often emails are sent, this can be a great way to bring a little bit of both creativity and individuality to the corporate space.
Final Thoughts
Email signatures are widely used across many industries, providing a fantastic base for information and branding. But, going beyond this, the corporate world can use email signatures to include branding elements in their external communications. Even when looking at internal benefits to the corporate sphere, users can bring an element of their own personality to the space.
By giving employees this flexibility, you can create a slightly less daunting internal atmosphere, with internal emails revealing a little more about the coworkers that employees come into contact with. Especially in the era of remote working, moving to small ways of improving corporate culture can bring about a larger positive change.
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