Email Signatures, Marketing

The Math, History, and Science Behind Email Signatures

Does your company rely on your employees to promote your most important initiatives, or to ensure their email signatures are always up-to-date with your brand standards? While some employees may be careful to curate the perfect message and will use the correct brand standards, that’s usually not the case. Asking employees to manually update their email signature template pulls them away from their primary job. It’s a distraction, and every update request costs your employees time and your company money. At the same time, your employees may not even know how or where to begin.
That’s why we’re taking you back to school with an ebook that’s focused on the math, history, and science of email signatures, ensuring your company is putting this valuable resource to use.
Math
A single employee will send (on average) 28 emails per day or 10,000 emails annually. Each of those emails represent an opportunity to drive brand awareness and engagement. Let’s say your company has just 100 employees – that’s 1 million impressions a year! What if your company has 500 employee or 5,000? The number of impressions pile up quickly.
Why not use your gmail signature template to promote your newsletter, success stories, past projects, events, or new diverse service or product offerings?
History
Most of us are familiar with the dreaded company-wide email that we’ve received far too many times. That email includes a list of items each employee in your company needs to do. On average, it likely takes your employees about 5 minutes each to update their email signatures. Add up your number of employees and that’s a lot of precious company time spent on just updating their email signatures. Maybe this process seems ridiculous to you, but for many companies, this is still how they have to operate.
According to this ChiefMarTech.com graphic, the marketing technology landscape is continuing to evolve and change. In just 5 years, it has become entirely different for the world of marketers. But some categories have remained the same – “Email Marketing” has grown significantly. This is a result of employee email continuing to be such a staple in today’s business world and this important business channel won’t be slowing down anytime soon (just ask Gary Vaynerchuk about it).
Science
We’ve all seen a few doozy email signatures, and maybe we’ve even been guilty of some of the no-no’s: Comic Sans font, multi-color rainbow colors, inspirational quotes, 10 links to social media accounts, etc. The science behind a great email signature is surprisingly simple. Here are some tips:
The Do’s

  • Keep it simple and to the point
  • Include basic contact information that’s not overwhelming
  • Use a clean, eye-catching design

The Don’ts

  • Inspirational quotes
  • A reiteration of the sender’s email address (often hyperlinked)
  • Too many fonts
  • Too much text, period

As you can see, a lot of thought and strategy can go into an email signature format. It can be overwhelming, but we’re to help! Download your complimentary copy of the ebook, “Back to School on Email Signatures” as a navigation guide through the world of professional email signatures. We think you’ll enjoy it. Maybe laugh at a few bad examples, and find some inspiration for your own email signature in our “trophy case”.
Let us know what you think – we’d love to hear your feedback! We always enjoy listening to new ideas and seeing cool designs. And if we can help in any way, feel free to reach out! Request a demo or sign up for a free trial here.
Sigstr case study SalesLoft email signatures