Tuesday Tip: Sign Your Emails

Unlike last week's tip, which was a bit more complex, you can follow through on this one in about 2 minutes.

Here's the deal, if you are emailing for business purposes, you want to make yourself as easy to find and accessible as possible. Without a solid email signature block you are making it difficult for the people you communicate with to reach you.

Emails are great for quick issues, but an email exchange often turns into a phone exchange, a faxing of a document, or the scheduling of a meeting. Without an email signature block, you are forcing the other person to find your contact information when you could have easily and automatically provided it in every email.

Providing contact information in your email signature block is good customer service. In fact, I find myself getting irritated when I can't find a person's phone number in their email signature... and if they don't have a website then what? Gasp... the phone book!

Examples

Here is a solid signature block, it includes the essential contact information for this person and is just 5 lines long.

John Smith
john@company.com
phone: 555-555-5555 ext. 555
fax: 444-444-4444
web: http://www.company.com

Here it is with some optional enhancements:

John Smith
Title/Position
Company Name
john@company.com
phone: 555-555-5555 ext. 555
fax: 444-444-4444
web: http://www.company.com

more information at:

http://www.company.com/news/
http://www.twitter.com/MyCompany
http://www.linkedin.com/in/myprofile/

Make Your Signature Work For You

What is often overlooked with signature blocks is how much they can do to promote yourself and your company, especially on social media. If you have a website, a blog, LinkedIn profile, Facebook page, Twitter account, or any other online marketing piece, you can push that to every person you email. I've made dozens of LinkedIn connections by including that link in my signature. In turn, those LinkedIn connections have lead to my name getting in front of hundreds, if not thousands of new potential clients.

But This Seems Too Formal

One complaint I often hear about signature blocks is that they're too formal for casual e-mails. I understand that concern, but I think providing the information is more important. What I do is sign my casual e-mails twice. I keep my signature block as is, but simply sign my first name above it and create a little space between my name and the signature block. Like this:

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...see you for dinner next week,

-Brendan

Brendan Chard

e: brendan@themodernfirm.com
w: https://www.themodernfirm.com
p: 800-741-8034 ext 801
f: 888-605-0495

Schedule a Call:
https://tungle.me/brendanchard

Connect With Us:
http://www.facebook.com/themodernfirm
http://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanchard
http://www.twitter.com/TheModernFirm

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Getting Started

You can automatically add an email signature using any email program. The easiest way to figure out how to do it in your program is to pull up the "Help" menu and search for "signature." That should take you right to it.