Outlook Email Signature

Among the common email clients used by individuals and teams today, Outlook is one of the most popular. Creating an Outlook email signature is easy!

The first step is determining what to use for your email signature template. Outlook offers a few different options. First, if you’re looking to create a personal email signature, Outlook includes simple options to utilize within their email signature settings.

Follow these steps in Outlook:

1. Sign in to your email account
2. Go to “Settings” and then “View all Outlooks Settings”
3. Select “Mail” and then click “Compose and Reply”
4. Customize your email signature in the “Email Signature” box
5. Click “Save”

The process above works really well for one or two employees, but becomes more difficult (and takes up a lot of time) as you scale it across your entire company. This is where Sigstr can help!

If you’d like to create email signature template outlook options for many employees to use, an email signature marketing platform like Sigstr makes it easy. You can standardize your signatures across all team members while rolling them out with zero end-user involvement. The best part? With Sigstr email signature campaign banners, every email becomes more than just a brand impression. You can turn thousands of employee email sends into thousands of new marketing opportunities that promote your most important initiatives.

Create Signature in Gmail

Just like Outlook, many teams and single users today use Gmail for their email sending. There are many ways to edit your personal email signature. Gmail users can follow these steps.

Create signature in Gmail:

1. Sign into your Gmail account
2. Find the gear icon (in the top right), then select settings
3. Scroll down to the email signature edit box
4. Add in text, links, or photos in a way that best represents your email signature
5. Click “Save Changes” at the bottom

Of course these steps work best for individual email signatures in each employee’s account. It’s a quick and easy way to update your own professional Gmail signature, but how do you scale it? Free email signature templates for Gmail may be one option, but it still doesn’t provide a way to add the same template to all employees at the same time.

For companies with more than fifty employees, we recommend using Sigstr’s G Suite Integration to push employee email signatures out automatically, all at the same time. If this doesn’t work best for your team, it’s also possible to go through a one-time installation process. This includes sending a welcome email to each employee that includes easy steps on how to copy and paste a standardized email signature template into his or her Gmail settings. After completing these steps, they won’t have to manually update their email signature ever again!

Personal Email Signatures

As opposed to a company or standard corporate email signature, a personal email signature should effectively promote the sender’s personal brand. Before deciding between a company email signature versus a personal email signature, first ask yourself a few questions:

• Is this for my personal email account? Or is this for my company’s email account?
• If company, would my organization want me promoting my personal brand over the company brand?
• If personal, what’s the best way to make a positive personal brand impression with every email email I send?

It’s necessary to keep in mind that personal email signature templates are very different than email signature templates for a company or organization. Here are a few basic guidelines for personal email signature etiquette:

• Include your name (full name preferably) and headshot if you really want to stand out.
• Don’t feel like you have to include multiple lines of contact information – a simple phone number works great! Minimal social media links or icons are acceptable if you’re focused on increasing followers – we recommended Twitter and LinkedIn first.
• Consider using bolded text and one or two different colors.
• A call-to-action banner (located below the business card portion of the email signature) is encouraged but not required.

One component we don’t recommend is personal email signature quotes. We’ll talk through the pros and cons of this email signature item more in-depth below. In summary, an email signature for personal account purposes should stand out and promote an individual’s personal brand in a positive way.

If you’re looking for a good starting point with email signature marketing, consider a personal email signature generator. There are many options available for this approach, which we list out in the paragraph below.

Free Email Signature Generator

Although a free email signature generator has limitations, especially when used for multiple users, it also has many benefits. The most obvious? It doesn’t cost you a single thing (besides your time for customization). There are many great resources for free email signature templates, including Sigstr! Here are a few of our other favorites:

• HubSpot
• WiseStamp
• Drift

If you’re looking for even more email signature templates, free download options are available (although sometimes hard to find). When customizing your email signature through a free tool like this, there are a lot of choices to make. What should I include? What should I not include? What looks best? We put together a list of recommendations that can help guide you through this process:

• Choose which fields you feel are most important to include. Most times, this list includes first name, last name, title, phone number, and social media information.
• Take notice of emails you’re receiving from those you admire most and see what stands out. Screenshot your favorite examples for a source of inspiration and adapt them to your own personal brand.
• Be mindful about the space you’re taking up. If this will be included in every email you send, you’ll need to find a balance between eye-catching engagement with a non-intrusive format.

In addition to the favorite examples you find from your own inbox, we also have several resources that can help. Our 36 Creative Use Cases for Email Signature Marketing ebook includes many examples of amazing email signatures (and campaign banners) used by respected sales and marketing teams (check it out here). This content especially focuses on the email signature banner, which is basically an ad for this high volume channel. Teams today are using this email real estate in so many ways that we decided to break it out into categories. Depending on what’s most important for your personal email signature templates, free resources like this can at least jumpstart your creative juices!

• Account Based Marketing
• Events (trade shows, conferences, dinners, or happy hours)
• Content (ebooks, case studies, videos, or blog posts)
• Product (free trial sign-up, demos, ratings, or reviews)
• Customers & Partners (education, support, referral program, or user groups)
• For a Good Cause (philanthropy, fundraisers, or charity work)

Email Signature Quotes

Quite possibly the most debated item of these types of messages, email signature quotes are loved by some and hated by most. Sigstr has spent the last three plus years analyzing funny email signature quotes, unique email signature quotes, and business email signature quotes to see what works best. Although we can laugh at this example as a candidate for the funny email signatures hall of fame, we also wanted to visually show what not to do with email signature quotes.