Does the Perfect Email Signature Exist?
When it comes to designing the perfect email signature, there are many questions that must be answered: What’s more important, the design or the content? Is a perfect email signature one that is universally formatted, or one that places aesthetics and calls-to-action above all else? How will your email signature appear in Windows Outlook if you’ve formatted it for the iPhone’s native email application, and vice versa?
All of these are important questions that should inform your approach to email signature design. Through this process, you might just find that there is no one perfect email signature – however, if you use the right tools, you can fine-tune your email signatures so that they are as good as they can be, based on the particular circumstances or marketing needs. Ultimately, however, an email signature that everyone can view, regardless of what device they are using, will be better than one that is customized to suit just a single platform.
Creating an Effective Email Signature
Numerous factors come into play when devising an email signature campaign. To set out creating your perfect email signature, take the following into consideration:
Design and Content
Is the perfect email signature one in which the layout is perfect? Or is it when the information provided is perfectly presented and drives readers to action? Or perhaps perfect signatures are those which contain relevant links? As you can see, a signature that is right for one business may not be right for another. In fact, a signature that is right for one department may not be right for other departments within the same organization. Your email signature – at least if you intend to use that real estate for marketing purposes – should be dynamic. It should change often in conjunction with new marketing campaigns and initiatives.
When designing your email signature, think in terms of design and content. What content do you want to include, and how do you want the signature to look? Content should be concise, clear, and impactful. You want your message to be clear – and you want people to take action. The design should serve the content; if the design overwhelms the content, your signature will be ineffective. Though it’s important to have a design that catches the eye, it’s perhaps of even greater importance that the design convey a message. You want your email signature campaigns to say something.
Distribution Formats
Design is one thing but you must remember that the platform for distributing your email signatures is, in many ways, equally as important. Consider this: without the proper distribution tools, there’s no way to ensure that your email signature will be formatted correctly on the recipient’s end. In other words, your design team may spend a day conceiving of and designing what it thinks is the perfect email signature, only to have that signature design be corrupted when it arrives in the inbox.
Designing a perfect email signature is always a challenge, but it can be made more difficult when you realize that you need to take into account every possible contingency. How you can possibly ensure that the design will be formatted correctly, regardless of the viewing device? Is it possible to design an email signature that will appear the same on desktop devices, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and in different email providers? It is – thanks to Xink.
Xink enables businesses to fine-tune their signatures to perfection. All that is required on your end is to perfect the signature design; Xink will distribute them to where they are needed. Our email signature management software makes it easy to centrally manage and distribute email signatures across a team, department, or an entire organization. And because we have built Xink to work with a wide number of third-party applications and email providers, you can rest easy knowing that your signatures will be formatted correctly, regardless of the recipient’s device or email provider.
Determining the Effectiveness of Your Signatures
So how can you measure the effectiveness of your email signature marketing campaigns? Your team has spent a great deal of time and energy trying to conceive of the perfect email signature – you want to ensure that it’s actually having an impact. What’s the solution? Our recently launched Email Client Statistics.
We now have a tool to measure how relevant and effective your email signatures really are. Your team can leverage this tool – which is intuitive and easy to use – to optimize the design and content of your email signatures. Does your signature need improvement, or is it good enough as is? Our Email Client Statistics provides invaluable data on opens, click-throughs, user device types, user email providers, and other important key indicators. With this data, you can continuously fine-tune your email signatures until you’ve arrived at the one “perfect” email signature.
At Xink, we have made some changes ourselves to our email signature. Not based on a hunch, but rather on data provided by our Email Client Statistics feature. In the end, this tool helped us refine our signature so that it was more impactful and effective. Knowing that it renders nicely on all devices (as it’s being distributed with the Xink platform) is icing on the cake.
The Perfect Email Signature is Out There – Go and Find It!
An email signature that is right for your organization will differ from one that is right for businesses in different industries. In fact, your perfect email signature may differ even from your cross-town rival. Your branding will be different, your messaging will be different, and your calls-to-action and promotions will likely differ as well. What is important when finding your perfect email signature is not allowing all of this time and effort to go to waste. If your design and copywriting team has spent the last week conceiving, designing, and writing a batch of email signature marketing campaigns, don’t let it all be for nought – distribute with Xink and ensure it reaches the right people as intended.
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