If you know me, you know that I have a few pet peeves that I reiterate on a regular basis. One of my biggest grievances is when a client does not include their signature at the bottom of an email. Often, I need to locate a client’s phone number in a hurry and will scroll through an email thread to find it. Of course, if they don’t have a signature, hunting down their contact info can be frustrating!
I recently learned that several companies don’t use email signatures because they are often incompatible with Outlook 365. Signature formatting, design, brand logos, and fonts are often replaced by Outlook, breaking brand guidelines.
Like all companies, we wanted to design an email signature that was both unique and true to our brand identity. This became harder than we anticipated after we designed our ideal signature, coded it inside Outlook, and watched it break over and over again.
We ended up using CodeTwo, an external service provider that allowed us to use the original email signature we designed. Essentially, what happens is the email signature is set up in the CodeTwo system on your server, and is sent using exchange connectors. The email is intercepted in the mail flow, builds the signature according to the rules you have set up, puts it back into your email queue, and is finally sent to the recipient.
As I mentioned, Outlook 365 processes email signatures poorly and the appearance of a signature largely depends on the sender’s personal settings. For example, if you send an email from a Microsoft Surface with a high-density monitor, all images within the signature will be customized to your preferences. The recipient of your email will receive the signature in the quality it was sent in, however, it will look different depending on their system or personal settings. This can often break the original design of the signature.
The only downside to CodeTwo is that some extra time is required to set up an email signature. An example one of our developers gave was that it is like building a tiny newsletter where you will need to code the entire signature, add in images, reference fonts, etc., to ensure it comes out accurately each time. Not to mention, you will need to do your due diligence with browser and client testing to make sure the signature is stable.
If I can provide one pro tip, it is that you should take advantage of the countless ways you can customize your signatures related to the emails you are sending. For example, you could tailor signatures to specific recipients, set up rules that are applied to first emails versus subsequent emails in a thread, or create signatures that correspond to reply emails (Re:) versus forwarded emails (fwd:).
These are all useful options that allow you to customize your correspondence and the way you set up your business processes. In the below example, you can see how I have customized my signature to display Flywheel’s social icons, web address, and a link to subscribe to our newsletter.