How to Write Your Email Signature – Part 4

Whooooboy! Last week was A. WEEK. if y’know what I mean. It started with my computer glitching so badly that I couldn’t send or receive emails OR go to any websites other than Facebook or YouTube. Yikes!!

Turns out I had to renew my DHCP lease, which is a funky little thing I’d never even heard of buried deep in my Internet TCP/IP settings. 

Tech is an amazing thing! And it can create such headaches because it’s become so complex! Living with that paradox – relying on tech but not understanding it – is just one of the many, many, MANY stressors that we deal with each and every day.

(the week ended with our youngest getting t-boned during the storm and probably writing off the beautiful, little red car he just got 3 weeks ago… but that’s a story for another day… suffice it to say it was a week I was happy to see end!)

When Life is Chaotic, Focus on What You CAN Control

So, knowing that there is so much of life that we can’t control and that there are thousands of little details that we need to juggle every day, let’s nail our email signature to knock one thing off of our To Do list. Let’s do this!

Up to this point, we’ve looked at 3 of the 5 pieces of a solid email signature section: the Valediction or Closer, our Name and Designations, and the Marketing Ask or Call-To-Action. You can find all of those over on the PowerHouse Blog.

Today, we’re going to look at the How to Contact section. What to include and what to leave out.

4 Ways to Improve Your Email Signature

Before we dive into that, I wanted to give you some overall suggestions for crafting your clean and converting email signature:

1. Keep it to about 7 lines or less.

Nobody wants to read a novel at the end of your email. This will keep everyone out of overwhelm and leaning in as they move through your signature block.

2. Use clean design with minimal colours + fonts.

Keep it quickly scannable to their eye and stay far away from super-fancy design.

The more images and blinking lights and fancy things you have, the more likely your email is to get filtered out into spam OR simply to break because the coding doesn’t carry through.

Yes, logos, pictures, and gifs are all very cool and can be well done BUT, almost every time, they just end up making your signature look cluttered. Be sparing with the elements you choose.

3. Use pipes.

These vertical bars ‘|’, found above the ‘\’ symbol on your keyboard are an elegant way to create space between the information in your signature. For example:

Coach | Speaker | Trainer

In some fonts, the pipe ‘|’ is the same as the lower-case ‘l’ and the upper-case ‘I’ so just be aware in case it creates confusion. You could also use the tilde, ~, or just a simple dash, -.

4. Keep it mobile friendly.

Format it to be short and narrow. Avoid really long lines that carry on off of the screen or wrap in weird ways. Make it scrollable.

All right! Let’s talk:

4. The Address + Contact Information

How much to include? How much is too much? Too little?

Let’s Talk Legal

First things first, let’s talk legal. Different jurisdictions have different requirements for the information every marketing email MUST contain.

To be safe, check out the legislation that affects your communications. And it isn’t just about where you live anymore, it’s also about where the receiver lives. I live in Canada but if someone joins my list from California or Europe, I have to comply with their standards. It’s a murky and evolving field of case law and governments are scrambling to keep ahead of shady phishers and scammers so the requirements for transparency and opt-outability are pretty darn stringent.

In most cases, you should include a full street address in your emails, as well as your preferred email address, and phone number. If you’re sending marketing emails, there should be a two-click opt-out option.

Phew! That’s that part taken care of… the legal.

What About Including Social Media Icons in Your Email Signature?

Now, what about social media icons? How many should you include?

Okay, I think we have to be really careful here because many of us have a ‘presence’ on most of the major social media platforms BUT that doesn’t mean we should include them all.

Here are my criteria for inclusion in the precious real estate of my email signature:

1. Am I keeping that feed up-to-date?

2. Is that feed on-brand?

And, most important:

3. Is that feed where I WANT THEM TO GO?

Be Selective in Your Email Signature to Avoid Overwhelm

I tend to choose one or two options and leave out the rest. Sometimes, it’ll be my LinkedIn and sometimes it’ll be Instagram. I almost always include a link to the PowerHouse because that’s my favourite place to connect on these here Internets with my people.

So, think about what you want them to go and where you want them to connect with you and what feeds are really looking sharp and include those.

Avoid giving too many options or you’ll end up putting them in overwhelm and they’ll go… nowhere.

Remember: You’re here to change the world and we’re here to help.

You have control over the quality of your email signature, infuse it with intention and magic and watch it work for you every dang day to bring new people closer to your ‘Yes!’. 

Vanessa Long

Vanessa Long is creator of the Seasons of Success and author of Discovering Your Passionate Purpose. Focused on providing straight-forward, no b.s. solutions, strategies, and support to move you from where you are to where you yearn to be. It’s time to tap into your purpose and build a life that expresses all of who you were designed to be.