Business Toolbox: How to Standardize Your E-mail Signature

E-mail is the workhorse of communication for your business. It’s likely to be your first point of personal contact with prospective customers as well as your go-to vehicle for conducting day-to-day conversations with existing clients. As a result, your e-mail signature is an important – but all too often overlooked – extension of your brand. Just as you wouldn’t mail a letter or a proposal printed on any old paper stock, you should give equal consideration to creating and implementing a standardized corporate e-mail signature. However, this is where things get a little tricky. While your e-mail signature serves as your electronic business card, it doesn’t play by the same rules of branding that govern your stationery, website design or even participation in social media networks. Here are five common misconceptions that can lead you astray when crafting your signature:

1. If I’m going to represent my brand, I must include my logo.

According to conventional thinking, your company’s brand and logo are one and the same. However, as counterintuitive as it might seem, it is best not to include your logo in your e-mail signature. Why? Because it is difficult to control how images are interpreted and displayed by different e-mail clients. Most e-mail applications either store images as attachments or block them, resulting in a broken image. Therefore, if you construct your signature around a logo, and that image frequently is not displayed, it compromises the consistency and professionalism that you are trying to achieve. The best, most universally replicable alternative is to integrate your corporate colors in your signature, albeit with restraint. For example, you might choose to display your company name in one of your corporate colors, which will make it the most prominent element while also employing one of the primary elements of your visual brand.

2. Personality, personality, personality...it’s all about personality, right?

In marketing, yes. On Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you’ll never get anywhere without personality. However, when it comes to e-mail, make sure your messages are friendly and personable, but keep your signature strictly professional. The one and only purpose of an e-mail signature is to let the recipient know who sent the message and provide a way for them to get in touch with you. You might think it’s fun to include your favorite quotation in every e-mail, but in doing so, you run the risk of unknowingly offending a client or prospect. And never include any non-company-related information in your corporate e-mail signature. Not a link to your personal blog, not the URL of your side-project website, not your Facebook, Twitter or Skype details. That’s only asking for trouble.

3. It’s important to make a lasting impression.

The only impression you want your e-mail signature to make is professionalism. If your clients remember your signature and not the point of your message, there’s a problem. Don’t give into the temptation to experiment with large, bold or multi-colored text. Don’t try to use the typeface from your logo; more often than not, it won’t be displayed properly by the recipient’s e-mail client. Stick with simple, plain, web-safe fonts in the same size as the body of your message, and you can’t go wrong. Returning to the example of mailing a letter or a proposal, there’s a reason you would never print your correspondence on multi-colored florescent paper. Like your letterhead, your signature should reflect the legitimacy and gravity of your business-related communication. It should never compete with your message or in any way distract from the information you need to convey.

4. I need to make sure that my clients can reach me by any and every means necessary.

There’s no question that great customer service is a key competitive edge in today’s marketplace. And it’s understandable why giving your clients your direct office line, 800 number, cell phone, fax number, IM handle, mailing address and LinkedIn profile would seem to convey that you are accessible at their convenience through any number of channels. However, a much better way to serve your clients is to provide the one method of contact through which they can almost always reach you. Most of the time, this will be a phone number (pick one: work or mobile). Then, rather than having to sift through a dozen different means of communication to identify the one they need or play guessing games about which one will connect them to you in the most expedient manner, it will be right there for them to find at a glance. As a rule, there’s no need to include your fax number or your mailing address in your e-mail signature. In the unlikely event that your client needs to send you something by fax or mail, you can either include this information in the body of your message, or they can jump over to your website, where these details should always be readily available.

5. I want to drive traffic to my blog / encourage people to follow me on Twitter / promote a limited-time offer.

These are all great marketing objectives. However, you must always keep in mind that e-mail is, first and foremost, a platform for communication between one human being and another. You wouldn’t wrap up a phone conversation with your client by asking them to be your friend on Facebook, and you wouldn’t conclude a sales meeting by making a blatant plug for your blog. Your e-mails aren’t billboards for your marketing message du jour; always keep it personal and professional. Including your website URL in your signature is a good way to indirectly promote your business, its presence on various social media networks and targeted marketing efforts without cluttering up your e-mail messages. If your customer or prospect clicks through to your site, they should be presented with all of these options – most likely before they ever leave the cover page.

Best practices for a professional e-mail signature

Follow these tried-and-true guidelines to ensure your e-mail signature is polished, professional and customer-friendly:

• Focus on providing only the most essential information about who you are and how you can be reached in an effective and unobtrusive way.
• Limit your signature to four lines (the accepted standard), with a maximum of 72 characters per line to optimize how it is displayed in different e-mail applications. Combine different types of information on one line by using pipes (|) to separate the text.
• Typically, you should include only your name, job title, company, primary method of contact and corporate web address. Don't repeat your e-mail address in your signature.
• Write out the URL for your company website rather than using hyperlinked text.
• Create different signatures for different purposes. For example, you might have one version for e-mails you send to vendors that includes your office line and another for client correspondence that provides your cell number.
• Always add a signature to replies, but include fewer details. For example, whereas your primary e-mail signature would most likely include your name, position, company name, contact information and web address, your reply signature might provide only your name, primary form of contact and web URL.
• Don’t include a legal disclaimer unless required to do so. The best practice is not to transmit confidential information in plain text in e-mails because that information could easily be extracted or forwarded.
• Use a signature delimiter to create visual separation between your signature and the body of your e-mail. The standard protocol recognized by most e-mail clients is two hyphens followed by a space and a line break (-- ).
• Don't use HTML formatting, as it can interfere with how your signature is displayed in some e-mail clients.
• Simple, plain text in the same size as the body of your e-mail is best. Employ bold or colored text very sparingly for emphasis, and use only your corporate colors.
• Don't use an image as your signature, and avoid including images in your signature.
• Be sure to test your signature in as many different e-mail clients as you can (including web-based applications like Gmail). Don't forget to also check how your signature looks when forwarded to ensure that all lines wrap correctly.

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Cashing In: 5 Ways to Optimize Your Website's Conversion Rate

Got a website? Check. Strong traffic numbers? Check. Think you’ve got this online marketing thing licked? Think again. It doesn’t matter how many people are coming to your site if they aren’t taking action once they get there. If you want to make those traffic numbers count, you must find a way to convert visitors into customers. Some people would have you believe that all it takes is a nice website and a great product, and you’ll have customers beating down your doors. By this mode of thinking, if your sales are lackluster, it’s most likely an indication that something is wrong with your products, so you work day and night tweaking and tinkering your offering to give the people what you think they want. In reality, it’s more likely that you’ve overlooked some key elements in the design of your website, and now it’s costing you. If your website is performing well in traffic numbers but lacking in sales, it’s time to re-evaluate your site. Here are five key elements to examine and improve to ensure that you’re maximizing your opportunities to capture customers online:

1. Tell them where to go and what to do.

It’s a fact as simple as it is true: when you have a product or service to sell, you want to make sure people know exactly how to buy that product or service. There’s no point in saying you offer consulting services unless you provide a straightforward path to contact and hire you. There’s no point in displaying a product when there’s no immediately visible way to purchase it. Make sure you present a call to action that is obvious and direct. Look at your website through the eyes of the most technologically challenged user – one who has no clue how to navigate through a website or purchase something online. At every step of the way, do you provide the easiest and most direct route from Point A to Point B so that they can progress intuitively through your site? If you have a picture of a product, is there a call to action next to it? Remember, too, that a call to action is not a wordy description that says “Hey, this item is on sale like many others, so look at them all blah blah blah.” It’s a concise statement of action – usually in the form of a button or link – that prompts the user to take the next step. Maybe you want them to “buy now” or maybe you want them to “learn more.” Whatever the next logical step might be, it must be clearly stated. Attention spans on the Web are short; if your site is lacking calls to action, chances are good that you’re losing many conversions to the ever-present element of distraction.

2. Put the kibosh on clutter.

The universal rule of the Web is that less is more. Clutter comes in many forms – too many pictures, too much copy, too many buttons and links. Whatever is clogging up your site, get rid of it immediately. In order to determine what should stay and what should go, you must identify the primary goal of your website and make sure everything is geared toward that one singular objective. If your site exists to sell your products, then sell on every page. Even on your “About” page, your customer cares less about where you went to school and more about how your products came to be. You need a clear message – one that’s easy to understand and easy to share. Don’t stuff every last thing you do down someone’s throat and expect them to make a decision. Give them choices, but don’t make them think too much. You’ll only confuse your visitors, and a confused visitor is not going to stick around and figure it out; they’ll just go elsewhere instead.

3. Focus on feelings, not features.

It’s always difficult to fight the temptation to cover every single aspect and feature of your product or service in painstaking detail in order to make sure that visitors have all the information they could possibly need to make a decision. Sometimes this works, but more often than not, it doesn’t. Why? Because people don’t really spend their money on the products that have the most bells and whistles; they spend their money on what makes them feel good on the inside. They buy things they believe will make them a better person or make their lives easier or solve a problem they face every day. People don’t purchase iPods because they like the device itself; they purchase iPods because doing so makes them feel like part of a greater tribe of iPod (and, by extension, Apple) enthusiasts. Features are really only a secondary consideration. In trying to convert potential customers, your most important job is to convey how you can fulfill their deeper needs. Figure out how your products or services connect with people on an emotional level, bottle up that feeling and build your website around it.

4. Don’t ask for too much.

Don’t you hate when you walk into a clothing store and an associate follows you around constantly pestering you with questions? Doesn’t it irk you when you’re ready to check out and they ask you to sign up for their store credit card and their rewards card and to give them your email address so they can put you on their mailing list? Don’t make the same mistakes online. It’s critically important to provide a user experience that makes your visitors feel at ease. Avoid using pop-ups and other disruptive elements that create hassles during the shopping process. And when it’s time to check out, just let them check out. Don’t require them to create an account, don’t make them answer a laundry list of questions about their purchase and don’t make them give you a bunch of personal information. In short, don’t make your customers jump through hoops to spend money with you. If you try to get more information out of your customers than you actually need to process their order, you’ll raise red flags of mistrust. They’ll immediately recognize your game, and they’ll likely jump ship mid-transaction in order to avoid being bombarded with future marketing. In reality, all you need to be able to continue your relationship with that customer is an email address and permission to send them updates from time to time.

5. Be creative within reason.

Of course you want your website to be memorable. You want visitors to be wowed by its design. You want a unique look and feel that sets your company apart from your competitors. All of these are valid goals as long as you keep the level of creativity within reason. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel in an attempt to be remembered for originality and innovation. If your site deviates too far from familiar conventions, you’ll end up alienating a lot of potential customers because they’ll have no idea how to get around and find what they need. Be creative, but don’t overdo it. After all, less is more.

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