9 Email Signature Branding Tips to Boost Your Brand Promotions

You need to catch up if you're sleeping on using Email signatures to support your brand promotions. 

According to survey data, 62% of businesses and marketers use signatures for brand promotions. 

The figure highlights the effectiveness of Email Signatures in raising brand awareness and amplifying your existing efforts. 

However, while email marketing can help your brand promotions and other marketing initiatives, how do you use email signatures to do the same?

We've got you covered with the nine email signature branding tips below. 

1 – Follow your branding guidelines

Your email signatures are a part of your entire email marketing design, so it makes sense for them to follow your branding guidelines. 

Align your email signature designs with your email marketing and branding design standards to ensure consistency.

The branding elements you can add to create email signatures that complement your brand include the following.

• Colour palettes. Use a colour scheme that follows your branding colours. It's a great way to reinforce your brand visually, helping your email recipients remember and recognise your brand better. 
• Style. Adopt an email signature style that aligns with your company's branding. This way, your email signatures are a cohesive part of your email branding, supporting your efforts to raise brand awareness and recognition. 
• Fonts. Even the font style you use in your signature should align with your branding and brand identity. 

Use the same font styles in your email, marketing, website, and other branded and company content. 

• Branding message. Include essential parts or short taglines from your branding message in your email signatures. 
• Logo. Add an icon or thumbnail version of your logo design in your email signatures. It can be a great way to tie your marketing and transaction emails together. 

Create signatures that seamlessly act as an extension of your brand easily using a free email signature designer. 

A user-friendly email signature designer with an easy-to-use interface and essential design tools simplifies creating your branded signatures. 

Leverage tools to design email signatures that amplify your efforts to drive brand awareness and recognition.   

2 – Manage company email signatures centrally

An effective way to ensure consistent and on-brand email signatures across your company users is to control the signatures centrally. 

Popular email signature software lets you manage signatures from one space and keep employees from changing or tampering with your branded signatures.

Most email signature software allows you to update all the signatures instantly and stop users from modifying your branded signatures without approval. 

By developing a signature policy, you can keep your company email signatures looking polished, professional, and consistent with your brand. 

Doing so sets clear expectations for your employees' signatures and ensures they stay consistent with your branding guidelines. 

For example, you could develop a policy that requires your employees' company and branded email signatures to include the following main elements:

• Title or designation. Your employees' signatures should include the sender's official position or title. Including these ensures the recipients know the person who sent the email, which also encourages trust in your brand. 
• Professional names. Encourage employees to use their legal names in their company email signatures. Avoid using nicknames in the signature to make them look more professional and credible, which is always great for brand promotion. 
• Essential details. Besides the name and title, your email signatures should include other necessary contact information, such as the company phone number, employee headshot, and website link. 
• Company logo. Employee signatures should include your company logo's icon or thumbnail version.
• Social media links or icons. Include social media links that lead to the appropriate social media profiles and pages. For example, if it's a customer service email and you have a social media page dedicated to customer care, include the link in the email signature. 

3 – Keep your email signatures simple

While you can get creative with your email signatures while still keeping everything on-brand, try to stay moderate. 

Keep your branded signatures simple. 

Remember that email signatures are a small part of your email content, and getting carried away with their design can make your signatures look distracting or unprofessional. 

Make sure to make your signatures simple enough. 

Focus on designing it to provide the necessary information while aligning it with your email content and brand. 

The simple branded email signature below is a good example.

Avoid adding an extra flair that can distract recipients from your crucial information, links, or Calls-to-Action (CTAs). 

For example, it might not be fitting to include personal quotes in your email signatures, especially in marketing emails. 

Include your branding message or tagline instead. 

Avoid adding unnecessary text and let your branding elements speak for themselves. 

Follow the following tips to keep your email signatures simple.

• Stick to using one or two colours from your brand's colour scheme. 
• Use font types that align with your branding and are easy to read to keep your signatures readable, especially on smaller displays and screens. 
• Leverage white space and visual element dividers to show a more minimalistic email signature design while keeping everything visually appealing and functional. 
• Include only essential graphic and visual branded elements, so your email signatures look clear. 

Create or use available email signature templates online that you can easily customise and share with your employees to keep everything simple and consistent. 

You can add your brand elements to the template and share it with your employees, so all they need to do is add their names, titles, headshots, and other details. 

Customisable branded templates ensure your email signatures follow the same simple design while adhering to your branding guidelines. 

4 – Create your email signatures as text

Instead of a complete image, create your branded email signatures as text. 

High image-to-text ratios in short emails can trigger spam responses, so it's better to use text to avoid this. 

Text-based email signatures can also ensure recipients see your signatures in case of image loading errors or slow load speeds. 

You'll use opportunities to promote your brand in your signatures. 

Also, it's easier to modify signatures as text than images. 

You can add or change your branding and other elements in email signatures in text format quicker than editing an entire image.  

5 – Make your email signatures mobile responsive

Your branded email signatures can only support your brand promotion efforts if recipients can see the signatures correctly. 

One leading cause of this is non-mobile responsive email signatures.  

Make your email signatures mobile responsive. 

Doing so helps ensure your signatures appear as they should when viewed on tablets, smartphones, and other mobile devices. 

A mobile-friendly email signature ensures that its placement, design, key details, and branding elements look manageable on smaller screens. 

Optimise your emails and signatures for mobile displays so readers only need to zoom in or scroll down a little to see your content and signature. 

Follow these tips to help optimise your emails and email signatures for mobile displays.

• Opt for a vertical layout, so your email signature designs fit mobile display screens better. The email below uses a vertical format. 

• Include easy-to-see and tap icons and reduce the text to make navigating and opening links easy for your recipients. It helps improve the experience with your brand while leading them to your brand promotion-related landing pages and offers. 

• Use only a few images to decrease the chances of misaligning your email and email signature texts. Adding more text than images can also help your messages and signatures load more quickly.  

• Format your signatures to fit correctly on smaller screen displays. For example, you can write extended information, such as addresses, in two lines. This way, your text avoids running out of the screen on mobile device displays. 

Plus, recipients only need to scroll right and left to see their full signature and other essential details. 

Optimise your branded email signatures for mobile to help provide a seamless experience for email recipients while boosting your brand promotions. 

6 – Design your signatures to show your brand structure

Add them to your email signatures if your company has sub-brands or other constituent companies for specific products and services. 

It's one way of raising awareness for your sub-brands while promoting your leading brand in your email signatures. 

For example, display your constituent companies' logos or add clickable icons or links that take recipients directly to the designated landing pages or homepages. 

It can also help show your brand's structure to people who have yet to learn about your company. 

Displaying your sub-brands with clickable icons can help promote your constituent companies while encouraging your recipients to learn more about your brand. 

7 – Include essential images and visual elements

It's best to avoid getting carried away with images and other visual elements in your email signatures. 

However, it doesn't mean you throw them out completely. 

Use images and visuals sparingly yet strategically in your email signatures. 

Stick to the essential visual elements, such as your company logo, employee headshots, social media icons, and other branded components. 

For instance, you could add a small banner in your email signatures to promote special events, such as limited sales, webinars, and other exclusive offers.  

Providing alternative text (alt text) for your email and signature images is also good practice.

Alt text makes your images accessible to users with screen readers. It also helps recipients know what the image is about in case of errors or page loading issues. 

Keep your email and email signature images to a minimum. 

Focus on including images and graphics that reinforce your brand, messaging, email content, and CTA (among others).  

8 – Split-test your email signatures

One way to determine whether your email signatures effectively support your brand promotions is to conduct split or A/B testing.

Test variations of your branded email signatures to know which ones your recipients best respond to and help you reach your brand promotion goals. 

For instance, you could have one variant with a CTA link and another with a button. 

Consider testing the following email signature elements:

• Links. Test signature links to your blog post and other web pages and materials. Testing these helps determine whether the links are working, frustrating your recipients.  

Working links can ensure your sender reputation is good, and, in turn, you avoid the chances of a poor sender reputation hurting your deliverability rates.  

• The number of social icons. Adding too many social media links (and other links) to your email signatures can be a red flag to spam filters. Keep your signature social media links to a minimum and include only those to your most active profiles.  

You can also send test emails to your specific audience segments to assess their response to your branded email signatures. 

Also, send test emails with your branded signatures across various email service providers to see how they look.  

Track and analyse your testing results to gain valuable insights to help improve and tweak your email signatures accordingly.   

8 – Display your brand achievements and awards 

Showcase your company accreditations, awards, and achievements in your email signatures when appropriate. 

It's a great way to build trust with your email recipients and potential customers while establishing your brand's credibility. It helps amplify your brand promotions. 

However, be sure you do this tastefully and tone down the self-promotion.

Keep your promotions with brand awards in your email signatures professional and appropriate. 

Ensure these are suited for your email content. 

Avoid springing email signatures with brand awards on unrelated messages since these can make your emails and signatures seem tacky and even appear “spam-ish.”

You can also add a link that recipients can click to learn more about the type of award and why it was given to your brand.  

Amplify your brand promotions with email signatures

Email signatures are small but crucial parts of your brand promotion efforts that you can easily leverage. 

What are you waiting for? 

Start designing your email signatures to be a cohesive part of your email and other marketing initiatives branding. 

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