You might be thinking “sure I know what that is, it’s the thing that goes at the end of an email, simple.” and basically you’d be right. An email signature is how you sign off your emails. It can easily be set up to automatically be attached to the end of an email. What you might not know, is there is a wrong way to create one and a right way.
THE WRONG WAYS:
The Least Wrong Way:
Sometimes you’ll see a name, contact number, and web address that’s blue and underlined to indicate it’s a link. Simple enough, but not that interesting. It doesn’t have a logo, doesn’t look that appealing and it doesn’t really attract people to find out more. It does the job though!
The Most Wrong Way:
It might not seem like it, but the worst thing you could do, is have an amazingly designed email signature and then save it as a .png or a .jpg and use that. This might be what a designer does, especially if they are less experienced or from say, a website that does it on the cheap… *Cough, 99Designs/Fiverr, cough* The problem with this is that when you send an email with a .png or .jpg the person receiving the email will see either a blank box or get the email signature as an attachment. It may look beautiful, but it’s not really doing a whole lot for the business. It’s actually just a pain or confusing for the person receiving the email.
THE RIGHT WAY:
The right way is more time consuming for a designer and includes a different skill set. To make a proper, functioning… and I when I say functioning I mean you can click on a website that’s NOT underlined and blue, you can click on social media icons, there’s a logo that’s not an attachment… it needs to be coded in HTML. What’s HTML? HTML, is coding that you would normally associate with websites. Doing it this way, the links like social media and your logo are actually “hosted” online. Meaning, they live in the internet, so they aren’t just an image any more.
It gets more complicated from here, but if you’re a new designer or you’re working with a designer who wants to send you .png for your email signature, ask them about making it into HTML. They may even be happy to do it because they’ll then be learning something new for next time. Keep in mind though, your designs are more limited when you design with HTML, but it’s better to have a basic linkable email signature, than a blank box.
