Email marketing makes up a large percentage of revenue for most businesses, and marketers are always trying to figure out how to prompt CTAs and generate and retain their audience. One way is with well-designed email signatures. Let's look at how to do that.
Creating an effective email marketing signature that will boost the response rate needs to be well-designed using a graphics application or an email signature generator. Then you will need to include personality (fonts, colors), information, social media icons, a CTA, and any legal info.
This article will break down what you need to understand in order to create an email signature that will help prompt a CTA (response) from your audience more often. We go over what applications to use and what elements to include in its creation. Read on to see what they are.
Why Create an Effective Email Marketing Signature?
You might be thinking why an email signature is such an important aspect to focus on when you should consider the content and targeted campaigns to substantiate and increase user and customer acquisition through your marketing campaigns, right?
Your main aspect as a marketer should be trying to increase leads (boost response rate) while reducing marketing costs, and at most times, this can be pretty difficult to achieve. Not only can a good email signature boost response rates, and lower costs, it is effectively almost free to make and has an ROI of up to 34,000%.
Consider that only 52% of professionals have a suitable email signature, and only about a quarter provides their cellphone number. Moreover, only about 60% will add details on the organization or company that they represent or work for.
Thus it is essential to understand and to be able to create an email signature that resonates with your customers. This is not so difficult to understand, seeing as your customers and potential customers are receiving loads of emails every day and tailoring one that is unique, fresh, and informative. The signature also needs to show that your mails come from a real person and not an automated mailing system as it will help you to boost response times and retain more users.
How to Create an Effective Email Marketing Signature
There are four main methods by which you can create email signatures that pretty much everyone in the digital field uses, and they consist of:
Take note that going into detail on how to use some of these processes and applications is beyond this article's scope, but we do outline the procedure and encompass what your email signature should include.
Let's get started.
1. Using Text-based Email Signatures
This type of Email signature is probably what most people who know very little about marketing and your “average joe” employee. It's simple, and you do not need a degree to figure it out.
Most Email applications like Gmail and Outlook (MS Office) will have a section that allows you to input a signature in text format. Below, you can see how to create your text-based signature in Gmail.
Now it is not enough to go into your email account and just type in “john doe – head of marketing,” then input your phone number and company. This lacks design, appeal, intrigue, and substance, and your audience can see that you put no effort into it.
Thus, you should try to avoid this type of design whenever possible.
2. Using Graphic Design Application
Using a graphics application like Photoshop or Canva can be great. However, consideration needs to be taken into account that some knowledge of using these pieces of software needs to be known. Although Canva is an online graphics tool that is free to use (for the most part) and it is great if you don't know much about graphic design as there is an array of templates, fonts, images, and more that you can use to help create your very own customized signature.
Here's a sample template you can use in Canva:
If you have some knowledge of the Adobe suite of products, you would want to use Illustrator and/or Photoshop to come up with your signature. The scale and depth of these two applications are vast, and your options will only be limited by your creativity, but you will need to know how to use the applications.
Creating signatures in these applications will leave you with some sort of an image file (whether it is a jpeg, png, etc.,) which you will need to copy and paste into your emails each time or if the signature section allows you to insert an image, then this would be done once.
You will only need to consider that each time something about the information that you included in the signature changes (phone number, email address, etc.,) you will need to go and “redesign” and produce the image.
3. Using HTML and CSS
One step above graphic design applications is to attempt to use HTML and CSS to create email signatures. This can be done, but you would need a comprehensive understanding of HTML and CSS to complete this job correctly.
Alas, this is an option that will not suit most people, and although it is a viable one, if you are reading this article, then you probably want an easy and effective way to create a good email marketing signature without having to learn a new skill that will take a considerable amount of time. However, if you are interested in learning how to do this, you can read this article that covers how to do it.
4. Using Email Signature Generator
This is probably the easiest and most effective way to create a signature that will help boost your marketing and prompt a better (and more often) response. Many online offer free, trial, and paid versions of email signature generators that you can check out no matter what email platform you use.
Here are some:
These generators are great and require no skill in terms of knowledge of how to use the software (or any graphics design knowledge). Simply follow the prompts and pick from their templates to help you create the perfect signature.
Tips in Creating an Effective Email Marketing Signature
Now that you know how to create a signature using the correct tools, you will also need to understand what aspects of a signature you need to include in the design phase in order to prompt and boost a response from your audience.
Here are some elements you will want to implement into your signature when you are creating it:
To make an attractive signature that will prompt a CTA from your audience, you will need to combine different elements and incorporate some best practices.
These include:
Then many marketers and individuals alike always ask how it is possible to include a CTA in an email signature. The answer is simple enough.
Design the signature that, when clicked on, has a source URL to which the user will be taken. In the signature, create wording and imagery like:
This will prompt the user more than you think, and it should be noted that about 45% of consumers say that when they feel the interaction is personalized, it will make them more likely to purchase or interact with the brand again.
The last two things you should consider are to always place any social media icons linking to those profiles and then add any legal information like a disclaimer. This will prompt the user to respond and potentially visit your social media pages, and in some cases, these also lend to the credibility of you are a person or the company.
Final Thoughts
We discovered that you would want to create an email signature using an email signature generator for the most part and especially if you have no previous knowledge of graphic design. They are simple enough to use and give a wide selection of templates to choose from in addition to other tools, fonts, colors, images, etc.
Remember that you will want to make the signature attractive and create it in a way that resembles you or your company incorporating a specific style, a personalized photo, a CTA, and any social media icons and legal information.
(Related: 10 Costly Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid)