5 Good Tips for Creating a Professional Email Signature

Anatomy of An Email Signature

Have you ever cared to know what the average signature looked like?

Take a look at this:
John Doe
Address Book Savior
US: +1-888-564-9619
France: +33 1 55 43 79 20

Research has revealed that on the average, about 50% of professionals make use of an email signature.

Information to Include in Your Signature

Here are the information added by these professionals in their signature.

• Individual’s Name – added by 70% of professionals.
• Name of the organization – added by 58% of professionals.
• Role of the individual – added by 43% of professionals.
• Email Address – added by 39% of professionals.
• Postal Address – added by 29% of professionals.
• Land line number – added by 60% of professionals.
• Cell phone number – added by 28% of professionals.
• Skype contact – added by 5% of professionals.

Using Signatures in Social Media

Surprisingly, social media links are not common in email signatures, but from the sampled population, twitter dominates. Here is the break down.

Twitter – 7.2%
Facebook – 3%
LinkedIn – 3.2%
YouTube – 0%

Survey revealed that most real people have a real contact information added to their signatures except it is an email solely setup for marketing.

Top Five Signature Do’s and Don’ts

Here are some basic rules that governs the use of email signatures:

1. Give second thoughts to adding social media links to your email signature as it does not match your professional profile.
2. The signature should be separated from the main body of the email in the following accepted form “———“
3. An image should not be used as a signature because it is seen as an attachment by the recipient and it cannot be clicked.
4. If you decide to add an image, it is recommended that it is from a fixed URL so it does not appear as an attachment.
5. If you are dealing with an international audience, provide an international prefix.

The above information was gotten through an activity performed since 2011 where over 700 million emails were extracted and used for the purpose of this research.