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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Guest Blogging 101 (Or How to Grow Your Audience by Giving Away Your Best Material)

Growing community and conversation around your brand is no easy feat; it requires dedication, focused effort and time. In addition to creating a platform that’s easy to navigate and top-notch content that drives engagement, you must constantly promote yourself to raise awareness and bring fresh eyes to your material. As counter-intuitive as it might sound, when you’re in the process of trying to grow a fledgling handful of followers into a thriving community of dedicated readers, one of the best ways to do so is by giving away your best posts. Why? Because in building relationships with bloggers who have already developed a community of followers whose interests overlap with your area of expertise, you can gain exposure to new readers who will then hopefully take an interest in hearing more of what you have to say. As a blogger myself, I've done this firsthand through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and strategic guest blogging opportunities. Though a bit intimidating at first, reaching out to bloggers I admire who cover similar topics has yielded valuable guest blogging opportunities that have helped me to steadily increase my reach and gain new readers for my own blog. Based on that experience, here are five secrets to success in scoring great guest blogging gigs that will help you grow your audience:

1. Know your niche.

What topics do you cover? How often do you post? What are your visitor stats? Who is your ideal reader? You need to have a strong grasp of these things so you can identify the right bloggers to connect with whose audience will most closely align with your own. It’s also important to make sure that somewhere on your site – whether it’s in the sidebar of your blog or on your about page – you have an introduction that’s crafted to quickly and succinctly orient new readers to your community. Focus on the reader’s interests by briefly explaining who you are, what topics you cover and what qualifies you as an authority in your niche. Point them to your most popular posts and invite them to subscribe to your content. And don’t forget to include a way for them to get in touch with you to pave the way for conversion from causal reader to paying customer.

2. Do your research.

You don't want to connect with just anybody out there with their own platform; you want to be strategic with the relationships you build. As a creator of content, you likely read quite a few blogs yourself. What are they? Do they cover similar topics? Is their demographic the same as yours in any way? It may be helpful to make a spreadsheet with these details, along with contact information to make your life a little easier when it comes time to reach out.

3. Become a prolific commenter.

By commenting, I mean both on your own blog in response to comments from your readers and also on blogs that you regularly read and follow. The blogging world is all about connection, community and driving conversation. If you stay silent, you’ll cut yourself off from opportunities to cultivate a more deeply engaged reader base. Although it may be impossible or impractical to reply to every single comment on every single blog post you write, you should make a habit of checking the comments section and replying to readers directly. Better yet, see if your platform has a tool that will alert you by email whenever you receive a new comment so that you can reply quickly and boost the chances of keeping the conversation going. When commenting on another author’s blog post, be sure to leave a thoughtful response. Avoid generic feedback like, “great post,” and opt instead for noting what what you found uniquely insightful or inspiring about the post, asking a question that provokes further debate and discussion or even answering a question the writer might have posed within the post itself. By doing so, you not only contribute in meaningful way to their community, but you also encourage them to check out your own blog as well.

4. Make a pitch.

Once you’ve acclimated to interacting with other bloggers and have a strong grasp of blogs that are aligned with your own blog’s niche, it’s time to reach out and make a pitch. By now, you should be very familiar with the content on the blogs you’ll be pitching to—what topics they cover, what they’ve written about recently, who runs the blog, etc. Not sure where to go from there? Here are some suggestions for crafting your message:

• Employ a tone that’s personal and friendly while keeping your request brief (no more than two paragraphs).
• Reference some of their recent posts so they can see that you are a real follower of theirs and you’re not just sending out the same pitch en masse to anybody with a blog.
• Provide links to your blog, portfolio and social media profiles to help them get a feel for your expertise, writing abilities and point of view.
• Be specific about what you’d like to write about, whether it’s a certain topic where you have expert advice to give or a series they’re doing where you can offer valuable insight.
• Follow up if you don’t hear back, allowing a week or so to make sure they’ve had time to review and process your request.

5. Become a contributor.

If you happen to have a little extra time on your hands, becoming a regular contributor on a high-traffic blog is a sure-fire way to connect with new readers who otherwise may not have found you. In addition to building your portfolio and legitimizing your expertise, being a contributor ensures major publicity for your content and exposure on a much broader level. Although developing an organic following will take some time, defining your blog’s niche, finding similar blogs to strategically connect with, engaging in the blog community through comments, pitching ideas to bloggers and contributing to high-traffic sites on a regular basis will help you develop valuable connections that will lure new readers to your blog. And when you feed these readers a steady diet of insightful, conversation-provoking content, you’ll find they’ll not only become a regular fixture in the burgeoning community that’s developing around your content and your brand, but that they’ll also become your allies in recruiting new members by sharing your great stuff within their own circles.

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