Email Signatures: Logo or No Logo?
Many firms are moving towards a standardized email signature, complete with a logo. While they do look nice when everything works as it should, there are a few things you should consider before making the plunge.
First of all, if you want to have your logo appear on your email signature, you will need to post your logo online somewhere and then link to it (as opposed to inserting it directly into your email). But even if you do it correctly, you run the risk of it appearing as a placeholder to the recipient. That’s because it’s up to the recipient as to whether they want to see images or placeholders. If they want placeholders, there’s not much you can do about it.
Secondly, in order for it to work correctly (and not appear as an attachment), you’ll need to format your email as html. The problem is that some firms block html files and/or flag them as junk mail. Even if they don’t block the actual email, having it as html is a mark against it making the email more vulnerable to being marked as spam. (spam filters often have a “scorecard” so to speak and if there are a certain amount of marks against it, it will be marked as spam so you’re starting off with one.)
And don’t even get me started on the issues with logos and handhelds.
My advice is to make a nice looking email signature, with standard fonts but maybe play with the color and font size a little to make it interesting. Use colors that aren’t standard (please don’t use that standard blue for a hyperlink, I’m so over it!). Non-standard colors come through as they should, unless the recipient is set to text only or a handheld in which case it still looks okay, you just lose the font size and color.
Two other things to consider are logos as attachments make the email (file) size a little bigger. Not much but when you multiply it by the volume of emails sent it will add up. Also implementation (and enforcement) is a bit of an issue if you use non-standard colors (but worth it because non-standard colors are way nicer.) To get around this, create your autosignature in Word, assuming you know the RGB numbers of your logo, and you can change it there and then copy paste into Outlook.
Do you have any autosignature stories to share? If so, please comment back, I’d love to hear them.
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