June 16, 2020
Business email signatures typically consist of three primary components - key contact information, company logo, and one or more hyperlinks. Of these, it is generally the logo that drives the layout. Logos can be more-or-less horizontal, squarish / roundish, or vertical. We’ve developed two primary layouts that we generally employ, depending on the shape of the logo.
While we are willing and able to execute almost any design you have in mind, the ten years we’ve spent in designing email signatures has taught us to focus more than anything on the way the signatures actually perform in day-to-day use. Performance, that is, the way they display when someone receives an email message is the one true measure of success. If you had to quantify this measure of success, you’d want to look at:
How frequently does your email signature appear perfectly?
When it doesn’t appear perfectly, is all your contact information still readily available?
Does your signature create readability problems on smartphones?
When your signature degrades, does the degraded version render acceptably, or is it really a mess?
Is the signature you are using as technically reliable as is possible?
Assessing the content requirements and arriving at the optimal layout is always the first step in a successful email signature program.
also for the use of fonts, we strongly recommend to use existing fonts on google fonts (https://fonts.google.com/)
because the font you want as the font in your signature, not necessarily the recipient of the email has/has not yet installed the font on the device.
until (June 2020)
Android has not been able to support for input custom signature/Html/gif from smartphones. Android can only display the signature sent/send from the desktop.
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Links only work when you are in “read mode.” An accurate test of the links in your email signature is to compose a message to yourself and send it. When it arrives in your inbox, test the links while reading the message (but before clicking REPLY).
Q : Sometimes when I reply to a message the logo in my signature is missing.
A : Microsoft Outlook will reply to messages in the format in which they were received (plain-text, rich-text, or HTML). Most of the email message you receive will be formatted as HTML. What that means is that when you click reply, your signature will show up as expected. However, some of the messages you receive are formatted as “plain text” - because this was the format that the person who sent them to you used. When you click reply to a plain-text message the graphics in your signature will be missing and the font formatting will be removed. There is nothing wrong, this is just how Outlook processes the formatting of replies (and forwards).
Q : When people reply to my messages my signature sometimes looks goofed up.
A : Email programs have two “modes” of operation - reading and composing. Your email signature consists of very simple and straightforward HTML. Almost every email program these days - on computers, tablets, and phones - will display HTML formatting. (Phones sometimes need to rearrange it a bit because of the small viewing space, but graphics usually appear and clicks on links virtually always work.
However, as soon as someone clicks REPLY to your message, their email program has shifted from reading mode to composing mode. There are still a good deal of email programs that do not deal with HTML as expected when composing. As a result, your signature may become goofed-up at the instant the recipient clicks reply. Images may disappear, and hyperlinks may become inoperable. Do not panic if your email signature doesn’t come back to you looking as nice as when you sent it out - the chances are very high that the recipient saw it as it was intended.
Q : Sometimes my signature appears as an attachment.
A : We understand that this is annoying and we do everything in our power to prevent it. However, we can virtually assure all of our customers that this will happen from time-to-time. In today’s environment there are two kinds of computers (PC & Mac), three mobile device platforms (Android, iOS, BlackBerry), six versions of Outlook, webmail, and then within each of these we have a variety of user configurable settings that dictate how email is processed. It’s virtually assured that you’ll occasionally hit upon a combination in the send-receive-reply process that triggers an attachment.
In general terms, the individual vendors are most compatible with one another. That is, Outlook-to-Outlook-and back to-Outlook should always work very well. The same is true with Gmail-Gmail-Gmail and iPhone-iPhone-iPhone. It’s some of the cross-vendor combinations that sometimes yield an attachment (Outlook to iPhone and back to Outlook, for example).
There is no special trick that can be done to eliminate this problem 100% of the time. Good signature coding, and proper signature installation will minimize it. Beyond that, we all simply have to live with the occasional attachments.
Q : I’m confused by how images work, and don’t work, in signatures.
A : The reason this is so confusing is that there are two completely different ways that email programs send images. Microsoft Outlook(1) 2007 and 2010 (on PC’s) converts all images into what’s called a “Base64 image” and then embeds the images into your actual email. The images travel with the email message itself. All other email programs only send a “reference” to the images in the email message. When the email gets received, the images are not a part of it - rather, there is an instruction that basically says “go get the images from this server and show them to me now.”
(1) Microsoft Outlook 2013 and 2016 may or may not convert images to Base64 - it depends on how you install the signature. The instructions we provide for installing signatures will lead to the images NOT being converted to Base64 and embedded in Outlook 2013 or 2016 messages.
There are pros and cons associated with each approach, but it’s really irrelevant unless you actually plan to change the email program you are using, which is a fairly rare decision. Both approaches are in widespread use, and none of us have any control over what email program the people that we send email to use. The best we can do is to understand this enough to put our minds at ease with regards to how our email signatures are working.
As a general rule-of-thumb, images embedded in email messages (created by certain signature installation techniques into Outlook on a PC) are less likely to be blocked than images that are “downloaded” from a server for display. What this means is that it’s not really accurate to compare the performance of one person’s signature to another person’s signature. If one person is sending from Outlook and another person from Gmail, for example, it’s their email programs that are different, not their signatures.
It’s also useful to understand that Apple mobile devices (and some email programs on a Mac) will not know what to do with Base64 images that they have received in an email from Outlook. They display the images just fine, but as soon as the user clicks REPLY, the images get stripped out as illustrated below.
Unless you have used the “embedded images” installation approach to installing into Outlook, the issue of image-blocking, the “Red X” and the prompt to “click here to download images” is unavoidable with some email recipients. Image blocking is a user setting in most email, and so it’s the user’s choice to either have it turned on or off. It is very important to realize that if someone has image blocking turned on, your email signature will not jump out at them as looking “broken” - it will look quite ordinary to them as a high percentage of the email they receive will have the exact same red x’s and prompts to “download images” - those are all normal things for a person with image blocking activated.
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