Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on May 18, 2022
By Maria Dahlqvist Canton, VP Marketing, Exclaimer
As the world shifts towards hybrid working – or out-and-out remote working – mobile usage for work purposes is more than likely to rise.
A recent study revealed almost three-quarters of respondents use smartphones for work matters, with email being the most common reason. So, making sure your corporate emails and associated email signature templates are optimised for smaller screens is increasingly vital for brand reputation and professionalism.
That’s why I’m sharing my advice on how to optimise your email signature for mobile devices, how to ensure your design works on smaller screens and the new opportunities that can arise through tailoring email signatures for mobiles.
Keep it simple
When was the last time you checked your business email signature on a mobile device? While it may look fine on a desktop, this counts for nothing if your signature template is either distorted or missing all together when viewed on mobile.
When it comes to email signature designs, less is more. You want to ensure it’s easy for recipients to contact and engage with you and your brand. Avoid including headshots or quotations where space is limited — your signature should only include the most important information.
It may seem obvious, but always include your full name, job title and email address. Not only is this useful if you’re communicating with a new recipient, but it also helps when clients forward your email onto someone else.
Additionally, include the most appropriate phone number for important contacts to get hold of you. Not forgetting to add your area code in case you email people from different countries.
And finally, include any information relevant to your readers like a link to the company website.
Remember, a mobile email signature should enhance information flow. If it’s irrelevant, don’t include it.
An eye for design
Missing images, misaligned text, and buttons too small to touch accurately are all things that will most likely end the chance of any recipient engagement, and impact on your brand reputation at the same time.
Design is the key to creating a mobile-friendly email signature and while many of the tips for designing the best email signatures apply, there are mobile-specific factors to consider.
When smartphone screen space is limited, keep information to the essentials and don’t crowd your signature design with unnecessary images. Look to use a mobile-friendly signature template to help organise your signature elements in a layout suited to the smaller screens of mobile devices.
If you include a logo, headshot or any other image, check the file size so that the size of your email does not dramatically increase in size. Also, ensure your font size can be easily read when displayed on mobile devices. Avoid colours like yellow that may be difficult to read, especially when in dark mode.
When including social media icons, don’t make it difficult for recipients to tap the right image. Limit your signature to no more than three key social channels – this makes sure icons are a user-friendly size, and nothing becomes distorted.
An effective mobile signature needs to reflect your company, not the device the email came from. That’s why you should ensure all employees use the same email signature on mobiles as they do on their desktops.
Don’t add “excuse any typos” in your signature either. If you’re telling people there may be mistakes in your message, they might start to question what else in the email could be inaccurate.
Enhance the user experience and maintain brand consistency
Every email sent from your business is a marketing opportunity, informing and encouraging recipients to engage with your brand in a number of ways. However, by not optimising your email signature, you could either miss out on several engagement opportunities or damage your brand with a default message.
Adapting your email signatures so they display correctly on both iOS and Android mobile devices is imperative. This is alongside ensuring that all necessary information is being included for the right audiences to enhance the user experience.
If you’re unable to optimise email signatures in-house, it’s worth looking to source a third-party email signature management solution to ensure all mobile devices get full HTML email signature templates guaranteed.
When it comes to enhancing the user experience for both the email sender and recipient, using email signature software can make sure signature design always render correctly across all devices regardless of where they are sent from.
Software lets you customise email signatures for different internal teams, tailor them to specific clients, and edit them in response to certain replies. And because they’re being created and managed centrally, you guarantee company-wide brand consistency to all recipients.
You could introduce client-side signatures to employees’ devices as well. This allows the user to see their signature’s when composing emails. They can then choose a specific template when composing an email, so the appropriate signature is sent to the relevant recipients.
By adapting your email signature for mobile devices, you’ll always maintain consistency across all user’s emails, no matter what device they’re using.
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