With the evolution of online communication, web performance strategies such as SEO friendly written content such as blogs or social networking sites such as Twitter or Google+ have dominated online marketing strategies. Now considered a forgotten marketing tool, the email signature is perhaps the most efficient of all when you consider the low-cost, high-return strategy.

Now let’s use our business as an example. As a web development agency based in Cheshire, for example let’s say 10 employees send at least 10 emails a day, essentially this provides over 100 marketing opportunities for interacting with other businesses and customers.

It costs absolutely nothing to set up an email signature in any type of email platform such as Gmail or Outlook so because there is little to no-cost, any return you get from interaction is considered a high-return marketing strategy.

4 reasons why email signature marketing is crucial

• Instant Contact Information
• First Impressions
• Promotional Marketing Tool
• Opportunity to be Creative

Instant Contact Information

Instead of worrying about losing a potential customer because they may have lost the business card you gave them, an email signature keeps your contact information in your customer’s fingertips so they can access at any time.

An email signature allows businesses to add any relevant information they want, the name of the employee, the phone number, contact address and even your personal email address so customers can easily find the information they need to get in contact with you.

First Impressions

There isn’t any do overs in email marketing, your first impressions will say a lot about the professionalism of your business. By having a simple, clean signature that includes the company logo you communicate a higher level of legitimacy and professionalism along with instant brand recognition when dealing with new customers.

Promotional Marketing Tool

Is your business on social media, do you have an event, news or even a product or service that you want to push? Well with email signature marketing, you can promote anything you wish! By simply adding an image, an icon or even a snippet of text with the relevant hyperlink is a very creative way to extend your marketing reach that costs nothing to achieve.

For example, if I wanted to promote ‘Web Development’ services in ‘Cheshire’ it would be very easy to add that service with a hyperlink to the untitled™ website along with the relevant social media platforms so you can easily follow our services.

Opportunity to be Creative

Unless your email signature stands out, once people have read the content of your email, they tend to ignore it so it needs to be creative, short and straight to the point.

If you have any HTML or Graphic Design skills, an email signature allows you to be creative so you can artwork along with opportunities to add a tagline in a unique layout that will allow you to stand out from the crowd.

Conclusion

The general rule of thumb is to try and keep your email signature on longer than the content of the majority of your emails which is roughly about 2 or 3 lines. By presenting a professional first impression you will always remain fresh in the minds of your email recipients.

If you would like assistance in creating a Gmail Email Signature or would like us to design one for your business, please don’t hesitate to give us a call to chat things through. You can call James Cox on 01565 653616 or you can send us a tweet @untitledtm.

How to build your own email marketing signature in Gmail

First things first, this tutorial is purely for GMAIL (or Google Apps) users, if you don’t have a GMAIL account, you can create your own GMAIL account here. For those of you who do have an account, once you have logged in, in the far right-hand corner you will see an icon that almost looks like a wheel or a bolt, this is the GMAIL settings.

Once you have clicked on the icon, you will be presented with a drop-down menu. As seen in the screenshot, scroll down until you find ‘Settings’

Once you are on the GMAIL settings, make sure you remain on the General settings. Scroll down the page until you come across Signature as shown below.

If you need to add an image, a logo or a custom graphic signature to your Gmail account, you will need to make sure the picture or image is available on a public server (a valid URL to the image)

To do this you can upload the image to your web host or blog, or use a graphic found on the web providing you do not violate any copyright terms. If you don’t have any of these, you could always use a free image hosting service.

Once you have the URL of your image, simply paste the URL and you should see the image appear as shown in the screenshot above.

Once you are happy with the layout of your new email signature, make sure you save your changes.