Email Signatures: 6 Tips on How to Add an Effective Logo Design
Marketers always strive to make a solid first impression on their target audiences when dealing with emails and subscriber lists.
They create emails to positively influence the audience’s perceptions with eye-catching subject lines, appealing headers, and intriguing opening messages.
These are just a few ways to stand out in a consumer’s inbox, but one factor that is frequently overlooked is the email signature.
Adding a logo to your signature can make your emails more professional. You can use email to promote new products, thank customers for signing up, or share your most recent newsletter.
Including your logo design in your email signature stamps your brand, emphasising your company’s image and voice and, as a result, increasing brand recognition and awareness.
6 Tips on Adding a Logo to Your Email Signature
1 – Create a professional design
The goal of your email signature is to leave a lasting impression in the minds of your recipients.
Therefore, in its design, you must not include too many or too few elements to make it look too distracting or dull.
Here are a few design tips that you must consider while adding the logo to your email signature:
- Keep the font and typography consistent
Always choose a font you are sure will be available on all computers. Otherwise, your email signature to your email recipients may be displayed like vanilla ice cream instead of hot chocolate.
This is because, in their systems, the desired font will not be installed. If you are too determined to use a non-generic font, it is better to resort to fallback fonts.
They are second-priority fonts used when the priority font is unavailable.
It would help if you also decided upon using serif or sans serif fonts. Using both is strongly opposed unless you want to provoke or have a negative effect. Your email signature is on the right track to looking professional with the right font used consistently.
- Have a layout that is relevant across various media and departments
Your email signature must provide relevant information to the recipients across all devices. You must, therefore, avoid broad layouts with too many fields.
Also, your staff in various departments would like to include information relevant to their role. For example, sales team members would prefer to have a banner related to discounts and vouchers.
In contrast, the marketing team would prefer a link to an informative blog post to attract prospects through their respective email signatures. It is, thus, essential to have a uniform layout relevant across the departments.
- Limit your colour palette
While deciding upon the colours to be used in the email signature, remember the phrase “less is more”.
The design should not become distracting because it is too easy to get carried away when infusing colour combinations in your email signature, which usually happens with too many colours.
Consider using less than three colours within the signature. It will have a complementary effect on the brand logo.
- Use high-quality, professional images
Images are an excellent model of establishing confidence with your email recipient. They impart warmth to an otherwise cold interaction by introducing a face into the communication.
The image, if professional, may gain credibility and boost the likelihood of subsequent interaction.
After you have decided to incorporate staff photos or your company logo in your email signatures, depending on your strategy, make sure to compress those photographs before uploading them to the web.
Nothing is more annoying than an email bloated with a huge image. If you are going to use employee images, make sure the background is white.
A translucent background can appear black, while other hues may appear strange to the eye.
2 – Create a segmented logo for email signatures
A B2B email marketing tactic that has gained popularity in the past few years is email signature marketing. It simply uses the email signatures of the employees for marketing.
Along with the name, contact details, or any other information, a logo is added; you can enable that to function as a clickable link, a call-to-action (CTA) button, or a banner containing a voucher or discount coupon, etc.
It is important to note that these marketing elements in the logo are added in a very subtle and crisp manner and showcase offers, products, and resources. All of these are done to entice prospects and drive traffic.
With the proliferation of email signature marketing platforms, organisations can segment email signatures based on the different departments within or outside the organisation.
For instance, the sales managers can make the email signature logo the call-to-action button based on their department’s goals. Take the example of the following two email signatures:
“BOOK A DEMO” is included in the sales department emails, while “TALK ABOUT US” is for the PR people.
The email signatures can be segmented even for different stages of communication with the prospects, like promotional emails, responses, forwards, cold emails, hot emails, etc.
3 – Create a mobile-friendly logo design
59% of Millennials and 67% of Generation Z check their email on their smartphone.
That means significantly more than half of your audience is on the smartphone. In short, your logo must be mobile-optimised.
Remember that not everyone will see the logo on the same screen size you had viewed while designing it. Screen sizes ought to be different for different consumers.
The sooner you plan to deal with it, the better your campaign results will be.
Another factor worth considering is that mobile screens are substantially smaller than desktop screens. Therefore, make sure your information and pictures remain legible when scaled down.
If your brand logo has become a pain in the neck, consider replacing it with a simpler version or a scalable logo signature. Also, make sure your links can be tapped clean.
In other words, ensure your links are not too small or too close together so that a tap to open Instagram opens Facebook instead.
Apart from desktop and mobile, not every receiver views their emails with the same software. Always test how your email signature looks in different email clients beforehand because HTML is rendered differently by each.
Also, when someone answers or forwards a message, see how your email signature appears in plain text format.
4 – Align your email signature logo with your brand
The recent trend regarding email signatures is that it should extend more significant branding opportunities.
The logo of your email signature must, therefore, either represent or complement the personal brand.
For instance, if you are a writer in publishing or a marketing company, the logo in your email signature might include a quill or a fountain pen inscribing a letter, maybe the initial of your name or your company’s name, in cursive writing.
The best practice concerning email signatures in more giant corporations is to have a standardised logo for the entire staff.
It is also imperative to have branded colours, typefaces, fonts, and a standard design. Therefore, the ideal practice is to appoint someone to charge everyone else’s email signature design.
The person appointed will create an email signature template for the entire organisation or a specific department. You will create respective email signatures for the entire staff.
According to the report of a survey conducted on marketers and business owners from the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, and 50 other countries, it was found that 62% of the respondents use their email signatures for marketing regularly or occasionally.
Such an increase in email signature users suggests a significant boom in the email signature market.
With the increase in users, there is also a growing need to automate email signatures. So we have several tools for generating email signatures, like HubSpot, MySignature, Newoldstamp, Designhill, and Si.gnatu.re, WiseStamp, etc.
Consider using email signature banner campaigns as a new way to promote your business. With consistent enhancements in automation, you can create a logo to launch signature banner campaigns.
It is a sophisticated way of converting an email sign-off into a marketing tool.
Some email signature marketing platforms allow you to include and edit banners in all employee signatures.
From the dashboard of these platforms, you can name your campaign, define a concise caption, include the start date and the end date, etc.
In the following example, an automated email signature is used for the “Cyber Monday – Big Sale” banner:
6 – Track the KPIs associated with the logo
Our tips so far have been on making the logo of an email signature effective by adding marketing banners, relevant information, design elements, and so on.
How about measuring the effectiveness of the logo of your email signature? After all, we must be in a position to realise the outcomes of our efforts!
Track the KPIs associated with your email signature logo. The basic ones are emails sent, clicks, and impressions.
The emails containing the signature you have sent are the starting point for evaluating the potential outcomes of your email signature and the logo-adding efforts. It works in the same way as usual email campaigns do.
How often the logo and your signatures have been seen is called impressions. By looking at impressions, you can calculate the number of times someone opened your email. And finally, the most crucial indicator is the clicks (and CTR).
With these numbers, you can always keep improving your email signature, logo, and other information.
Businesses do not leave anything unturned regarding marketing and sales to generate revenue. So you must also leverage the email signature and its logo in sign-offs with data-driven decisions by tracking the appropriate KPIs.
A Bonus Tip: Always preview the logo of your email signatures to test it
When you are satisfied that your logo and the email signature are complete, preview it in your email client in the context of a regular message.
Take a step back and consider how the average sender and recipient of this email signature will perceive and react to it.
This will help you see the areas below the radar and gain a better perspective on enhancing the logo and, consequently, the email signature.
Testing your email signature on different platforms and mobile devices is also a good idea.
Wrapping it up!
Your email signature and logo can significantly influence brand image and awareness.
Your organisation may establish long-term relationships with users by creating excellent logos for email signatures.
To leverage the maximum out of your email marketing, consider email signatures as a potential marketing channel for your company.
You can use them to advertise and drive visitors to your websites. Just keep in mind what your communication objectives are and what would be of interest to your readers.
Always strive to create a professional design that is mobile-friendly and aligns with your brand.
Segment the logo and the email signature based on the departments in your organisation and the communication stages with your prospects.
Leverage automation to create email signatures where you can use banner campaigns in the logos. Also, track the KPIs associated with the email signature.
And finally, preview your logo and email signature to detect unnoticed and correct errors.
The design of your email signature and logo is no Rocket Science. However, patience and experience are required, apart from designing and marketing skills, to get a relevant result.
We hope these six tips will help you design a professional logo and an effective email signature.
Author Bio: Rochelle Williams is a Senior Marketing Manager at Span Global Services. She has a strong marketing and advertising industry background and a deep understanding of SEO, SEM, SMO, branding, and allied marketing strategies.
