Sales Email Signature: Here’s What Makes the Best Email Signature for Sales

Don’t even try to deny it; you also see the email signature as nothing important, just a bit of copy slapped at the end of an email for who knows what, really.

I know because I’m the same. Or at least I was until I realized a simple fact – We look at those email signatures an awful lot, actually. 

You probably don’t even realize that you’re doing it, but:

• You scroll to the email signature every time you receive a message from someone new.
• Your inbox and email signatures have become your Rolodex too. That’s where you go to find someone’s phone number or other contact information. 
• Not to mention that you probably, also base your first impression about the sender based on their signature.

Based on that, it’s darn hard to dispute the signature’s effectiveness. 

But how do you create an email signature for sales, specifically? What do you include in it, and how do you design it to have the greatest impact?

Well, keep on reading to find out.

What makes email signatures so important for sales?

There are so many things we focus on with cold emails. 

We craft amazing subject lines. We write powerful intros and look for engaging ways to introduce our businesses to prospects…. 

…all the while, the people we reach out to just scroll through to the bottom to look at our signature.

Now, I’m not saying that they don’t read your emails. Of course, they do. But once done, they look at your signature to

• Discover who you are.
• Make the first impression about you and your company.
• Find out ways to learn more, like visiting your website or social media profiles.
• Decide whether you’re a trustworthy resource and more.

And then, they come back to it every time they need a refresher about who you are. 

In short, they treat the signature as your business card. Only in this case, you didn’t hand it to them but attached it to an email. 

But hey, it’s not just my impression. Consider these stats about how other sales professionals use their email signatures:

• 62% admit to using sales email signatures to promote their brands. 
• 82% of them also say that brand awareness is the primary goal they focus on with their email signatures.
• 48% of marketing and sales teams use their email signatures to drive traffic to the site or their content.
• Finally, a staggering 25% of marketers use email signatures to increase sales.

Yet, and this is something I find particularly odd, only 23% of sales reps and marketers evaluate the performance of their email signatures. 

Well, below, I’ll show you how to get the most out of your email signature for sales. And then, I’ll show you how to measure its effectiveness too.

Let’s start with the signature’s content.

What information a professional sales email signature should include

I follow this golden rule when crafting email signatures for our various sales cadences – I only include the information that’s important to my target audience. 

For example, when we run an outreach campaign inviting prospects to a webinar, I use a simple signature. Because these emails typically go to people who have interacted with Postaga before, I can include only the most basic information and have a little fun with the signature.

But the situation is different when I’m emailing prospects. In this case, I include all the information I believe the person should have to:

• See who contacted them (and that I am, in fact, a real person.)
• Make a good first impression about Postaga and me. 
• Perceive me as an authority, and
• Learn how to contact me. 

But as you can see below, even then, I keep things simple. 

That’s the key to writing email signatures for sales. You want your prospects to clearly see who contacted them, get a good feeling about you, and see where they could learn more. 

But let’s break it down to individual elements of the sales email signature.

First and last name.

Now, including the two is a given, right? Well, I thought so, too, until I discovered that only 98% of email signatures feature the sender’s name! I don’t know what the remaining 2% feature instead, but clearly, not everyone thinks that this information is critical. 

Well, it is. It’s how your prospects can identify who you are. Simply.

Eye-catching photo.

Your photo (or even the company’s logo, if you don’t feel comfortable featuring your face) will add a strong personal touch to the signature. It will help put a face to the name and make the whole message look more personal. 

Company and position.

The signature should also tell the prospect what you do at the company and, naturally, what company you work for. In many cases, the person might have heard about the company already, and seeing its name in the signature will only increase their trust in you. 

Your contact information.

Your contact details tell the prospect:

• How else they could reach you, beyond email, of course? Social media icons will let them connect with you on those platforms. The phone number will show them how they could speak with you directly, and so on.
• Add a layer of trustworthiness to your message. Seeing a phone number, an email address and the website URL confirms that they’re dealing with a real company. 

Now, many sales reps believe that the signature shouldn’t include the email address. If a person wanted to email you, they could just reply to the message, after all. Well, that’s true in many cases, but not all. 

For instance, what if the person needs to use the email elsewhere and isn’t technically savvy? You know that they could copy it from the address bar, but they might not. But they would know how to grab it from the signature. 

I recommend that you tailor this particular element of the email signature to your target audience. If you’re connecting with tech-savvy people, skip the signature. If you’re reaching an audience that’s not using technology on a daily basis, consider adding the email address there too.

(By the way, you may have noticed that I include the email address in my signature. I do so because otherwise, there’d be no contact information in the signature at all. Postaga is a software business. Like many other SaaS companies, we don’t have physical offices and don’t have dedicated phone lines to reach us.)

Your company’s website URL.

When prospects decide that they would like to learn more about you, they usually visit your site. So, the signature should make it easy for them to do that. Instead of googling your company’s name, they can click the link in the signature and start discovering your brand and products right away.

Company’s address.

This is a required element for any cold outreach campaign. Under the CAN-SPAM act, you must include your organization’s registered address in the email copy. And naturally, the email signature is the most logical place to include it. Alternatively, you could also include it in the message’s footer, as many companies do with their newsletters.

Additional elements that you could include in the sales email signature

We discussed all the must-have elements of a typical email signature for sales. But, depending on your target audience and several other factors, you can expand those with some additional information:

• Awards or accreditation you have.
• Your education level, particularly if it confirms your authority and expertise.
• Links to your blog or any other content that highlights your thought leadership, etc. 
• Link to customer reviews or other social proof. Many prospective customers will want to discover those before making a decision about engaging with you.
• Calendar link that customers could use to schedule an appointment with you.
• A call to action to promote specific product features, content, or an event.

Let’s discuss what a sales email signature should look like, then.

When it comes to designing a professional email signature, simplicity really is the key. 

First of all, you don’t want the signature’s design to overwhelm the person. Nor you’d like it to attract all the attention, making the prospect miss the gist of your message. 

But there is another advantage of that simplicity. A clean and simple design will not require an awful lot of HTML code. Such simple and neat code, on the other hand, will not impact email deliverability in any way. 

But specifically, here are some rules I recommend you follow when designing your sales email signature:

• Keep fonts and colors consistent (and ideally, keep them to a minimum.) Don’t set every bit of information in the signature with a different font, and don’t color-code anything. Doing so will only create clutter and visual chaos. 
• If you want to emphasize some information in the signature, use bold or italics. 
• Add your photo but don’t make the file too large. Most email clients like Outlook will have to download it, and the larger the image, the greater the negative impact it may have on deliverability.
• Use nice and clean social media icons. Usually, these are really small, so make sure that recipients can recognize each social media network you’re on with a quick glance at the icon.

Do’s and don’ts of creating email signatures for sales

Actually, in this section, I want to focus on the don’ts. You might be tempted to include certain elements or information in the signature, but in truth, they’re either unnecessary or even hurtful to your brand. 

So, in no particular order, this is what I strongly recommend you DO NOT include in your sales email signature:

• Nicknames. These might sound cool to you, but a prospect seeing “sales crusher” beside your name might have a different opinion about it. Similarly, don’t add nicknames or descriptions relating to your personal interests. “Lakers fan” or “Taekwondo black belt” don’t sound professional and might send the wrong message to your prospects. 
• Vague job titles. You really need to be specific here. Again, “Product rockstar” might sound cool, but your prospect would, most likely, prefer to talk to the “lead product designer” about their problem. 
• Personal website. Unless it’s related to your job or position, include the company’s website URL instead. 
• Information about favorites or interests. I have seen salespeople doing this, and I think I can understand why. Including your favorite team or show might make you look more human and help build rapport, but it rarely does. It’s your job to find something about the prospect to build that rapport with, not the other way around, after all.
• Photo with sad or silly facial expressions or casual attire. Your prospect will make their impression about it, after all. Keep it 100% professional. If you don’t have such a good-quality photo, then don’t include one at all. 

But if you’d prefer to use something fancier, then you can do it with a sales email signature generator. There are several free email signature generators – Wisestamp, Newoldstamp, and others. 

All those tools let you use email signature templates to get started right away. They also output clean HTML code, so you don’t have to worry about how the signature might affect email deliverability. 

Conclusion

Email signature seems so insignificant. Well, that is until you realize how much additional information it delivers to your prospects. They discover who you are based on the content of your email signature. They use it to make a first impression about you. Hell, in some cases, they even decide whether they trust you or not based on that short element at the bottom of your email. 

Luckily, after reading this email, you know exactly how to create a sales email signature that will help you achieve all that and more. 

Good luck!