How Uniform E-mail Signatures Can Help Brand and Promote Your Organization
One of the first things new employees do is create a "signature block" for their e-mails. These half a dozen lines or so, consisting of your contact info, plop themselves at the bottom of every e-mail you send. Yet few people put any thought into their e-signature, let alone alter it after it's typed.
This modus operandi reflects a 1.0 mindset. Let's upgrade it.
First, think of the e-signature the same way you think of business cards: they reflect upon your organization's brand. This is why every employee's card looks the same and contains the same basic information: because each flows from a uniform design template.
Yet most organizations treat the e-signature as an afterthought. They'll hire someone to design a business card, stationary, and even envelopes and labels, but utterly neglect e-mail—which, of course, reaches far more people than do the aforementioned materials combined.
As a result, each employee fashions his own e-signature. Some people include their job title; others don't. Some link to the company Web site; others link to the company's social networks (or their own). Some prefer hyphens or periods to parenthesis in listing a phone number; others want to abbreviate "Parkway" as "Pkwy" or "Pkwy." Still others include a quotation, while others favor fancy fonts.
Everyone gets the basic info across, but these differences make your organization look sloppy and unprofessional. After all, you wouldn't allow each employee to design his own business card, would you?
By contrast, let's say you developed a template that standardized these data, so that everyone's e-signature was uniform. The template might exhibit your organization's colors, publicize your tagline, link to your Web site. Your recipients, no doubt, would be impressed that your firm is organized, detail-minded, savvy.
Equally important—yet overlooked even more—are e-mails sent from your smartphone. By default, a mobile signature consists of advertising such as, "Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry" or "Sent via iPhone." But just as you wouldn't let the vendor that printed your annual reports stamp its imprint on each page, so you shouldn't give corporate giants free ads in your e-mails. Instead, reserve this precious real estate for yourself (or at least for humor, as in "Sent using my thumbs; please excuse typoss").
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