Our new email signature is cooler than you realize

An email signature is an awkward bit of text at the bottom of an email message. In the big picture of a tech startup still clawing its way toward breakeven, I guess it’s pretty trivial! At the same time, we can’t just ignore it forever.

The email signature is actually a powerful marketing tool. At least, that’s how I’m justifying the time I put into this “little” project. We send hundreds of messages every day, and many of them go to people outside of Simplifya. Each of these is an impression, an opportunity for someone to learn a little bit about the company. Used properly, it’s also an opportunity to take an action that directly benefits the company. So if we’re going to update our email signature, let’s do it the right way!

Email signature best practices

If you search for “email signature best practices” you’ll quickly realize there’s no shortage of advice on this topic. After spending waaay too much time researching and analyzing, I came up with a short list of the best practices that were most relevant to Simplifya.

From that short list, Dave and I worked through a few designs, testing each on multiple browsers and devices. After picking a winner, I optimized the code by running it through two of the more reputable online code validators. Some of you geeks will appreciate that this signature processes in about 7ms!

I’m sure down the road we’ll question why we did this the way we did it, so the best practices are documented below:

• Five or fewer lines of text, excluding the fine print. This forces you to think hard about the information that is most important.
  • We eliminated the snail mail address because HELLO, the only reason the recipient is seeing the signature is because they are reading email. The people who attach a degree of legitimacy to having a snail mail address can find it on our website. By the way, the logo also serves as a hyperlink to our website.
  • We eliminated the email address because the recipient can obviously reply without having to type your email address, and because it’s now common knowledge that you can look at the message header to see the sender’s actual email address.
  • We compromised on reducing the confidentiality and disclaimer notices to a hyperlink. I lobbied to get rid of them entirely, but an attorney politely suggested otherwise. 😉
• One font with no more than two sizes and two colors. The font is a standard san-serif font available on all devices. From our color palette, we chose Blue 1 for the accent bar, the name, and the link; Gray 1 for the rest. The name is slightly larger while Simplifya is bold.
• Mobile friendly. We’re implementing a more vertical design that doesn’t cause wrapping when viewed on a mobile phone. This was also part of the impetus to remove the snail mail address.
• Social icons. The more images in an email, the more likely the message will get flagged as spam. While this used to include images for social icons, spam filters are now smart enough to let them pass.
• Room for a CTA. Most importantly, this new design creates room for a Call To Action, something I really want to begin using now that we have more than a handful of employees. You may have noticed that Dave did this on his own when he added a link for people to vote for Simplifya in the California Cannabis Awards. I have some ideas in the hopper and hope to share something soon.

Signatures as a Service

You know we’re a SaaS company, right? That’s Software as a Service.

To be technically hip then, we of course use a SaaS product for our email signatures, which some refer to as Signatures as a Service. We now subscribe to a product developed specifically for G Suite called MailDoodler. Among it’s benefits:

• Branding. All signatures will have the same design, logo, fonts, colors, and style. If we want to change any of it, we can do it centrally and employees don’t need to do anything.
• Marketing. With central control over signatures, we can now insert marketing banners to promote specific initiatives and track their performance. Over time, you will see these banners automatically come and go from your signature.
• Mobile. For those using the Gmail app on their phones, the email signature also applies to messages sent via the app. If you needed a reason to begin using the Gmail app (versus the built-in mail app that came with your phone), this is a good one!
• Optimization. Much of the art and science of email has to do with deliverability. It’s frustrating because you only find out when your messages are marked as spam, delivered without images, or not delivered at all when someone tells you. At least now, if you run into a deliverability issue, you’ll know that it’s almost certainly not the result of your signature. It is optimized to pass spam filters and render quickly, and look good on a wide variety of devices in the process!

Next steps

Our presence in the social media channels shown in our email signature has been minimal. This will be the early focus of our marketing intern, just creating some content for each so that when people click on the icons, they get a reasonable experience. We can work on outbound marketing campaigns once this minimum standard is met. It’s another step forward in the evolution of a startup!