As a sales professional, your email signature (a.k.a your sales email signature) should convey relevant details about your background and value proposition. These details should include your profile information, contact details, and social proof, among others.
But how do you optimize your signature block to maximize its impact, convey the information you want, and leave better client impressions? What can you do to avoid a cluttered email signature that can create a negative perception of your professional identity?
Continue reading to learn the top seven best practices for optimizing your sales email signature.
Table of contents
- Why should sales professionals optimize their email signatures?
- Top 7 tips for an optimized sales email signature
- 5 Creative email signature design ideas for sales professionals
- Boost your sales email signature’s potential with a digital business card
- Frequently asked questions about sales email signatures
But first, why sales professionals should optimize their email signatures
Optimizing your sales email signatures has three key benefits:
- Go beyond the basics and share more valuable information with your audience. An optimized email signature conveys additional, relevant details without overwhelming recipients. Moreover, your recipients might mistake your cold emails as spam if they only see your most basic details.
- Project a higher level of professionalism and credibility. An optimized email signature is minimal yet contains enough information about your credibility. This shapes a better perception of your identity as a sales professional.
- Get better results via email. An optimized email signature works as a CTA. Recipients are more likely to take your desired action and move deeper in your sales funnel, such as by scheduling a meeting or requesting a product demo.
Top 7 tips for an optimized sales email signature
- Keep your email signature clean and concise
- Ensure to include the essentials in your signature block
- Carefully choose the details to add to your sales email signature
- Include your unique branding elements in your sales email signature
- Use your sales email signature to build trust and credibility
- Track your email signature engagement
- Optimize your email signature for mobile use
1. Keep your email signature clean and concise
Experts, including Grammarly, recommend keeping email signatures tidy and concise. This approach should also apply to your sales email signature.
A concise email signature leaves no room for confusion and does not overwhelm clients with too much information and a cluttered design.
Failing to strike a balance between being concise and informative can result in a cluttered email signature.
While brevity is recommended in your email signature design, it can limit your information-sharing to just the basics. You can go beyond this limitation by adding a digital business card (or e-business card) to your email signature.
This way, you maintain a clean email signature design by delegating most information sharing to your digital business card.
LEARN: Why Adding a Digital Business Card To Your Email Signature is a Smart Idea
2. Ensure to include the essentials in your signature block
Your sales professional email signature must include your basic information, such as your name, professional headshot, title, and company name. You may also include a few contact details (e.g., a phone number and an email address) and links to external resources.
These basic details are your prospect’s first glimpse of who you are and what you do. Adding these details also helps you quickly establish communication with these prospects. Just remember not to clog your email signature design with excessive details.
You may want to include as many relevant details as possible in your email signature. However, displaying more than the basics can compromise your signature block’s clean appearance.
Adding an e-business card to your email signature can help. Your recipients can view all your necessary details upon accessing your card via a link or QR Code.
This lets you showcase value-adding content your regular email signature space cannot accommodate.
LEARN: What Information to Include in Your Digital Business Card
3. Carefully choose the details to add to your sales email signature
Avoid displaying unnecessary details in your sales email signature, such as links to web pages and social handles that do not reflect your professional identity.
Stick to the contact details, external resources, and social proof that are helpful to your audience.
For instance, if you are an enterprise sales representative, your high-ticket clients might expect to see client testimonials and in-depth product guides before deciding to do business with you.
Remember, providing relevant information to your clients demonstrates that you understand their needs, making it easier for them to take the next steps.
Your email signature lets you share essential details with prospects. But did you know you can also provide a way for these prospects to share their information?
Digital business cards offer two-way contact sharing, allowing two parties to conveniently exchange contact details. Upon accessing your card from your signature block, prospects can submit a form via your card, including their contact information and a custom message, among others.
These form submissions become lead entries in your virtual address book, where you can view and manage your collected leads. You can also integrate this address book into your organization’s CRM (Salesforce or 700+ other CRM tools via Zapier).
4. Include your unique branding elements in your sales email signature
Include your company logo, colors, typography, and other visual identifiers in your email signature.
When thoughtfully incorporated, these visual elements contribute to a cohesive and appealing representation of your brand. You promote recognition, establish a unique identity among a sea of emails, and strengthen connections with your target audience.
Your unique branding elements shouldn’t stop with your email signature.
For instance, if you add your digital business card to your signature block, customize it per your unique branding guidelines.
Digital business cards allow extensive visual customizations, letting you maintain a consistent brand identity across all your channels.
5. Use your sales email signature to build trust and credibility
Your email signature can show potential customers that you are reliable and trustworthy—and that your products or services can benefit them.
Add links to resources in your email signature that strengthen your credibility, including:
- Case studies demonstrating your product’s effectiveness
- Your company’s thought-leadership blog
- Internal and external client reviews and testimonials
- Relevant social media profiles with an active audience engagement
Building social proof involves actively presenting evidence of your expertise and credibility. If you have accumulated a substantial amount of social proof over time, you may be unable to include them in your email signature due to space constraints.
Adding an e-business card to your sales email signature solves this issue. Your interactive digital business card can house multimedia content, including any number of links to reviews and resources that strengthen your credibility.
6. Track your email signature engagement
Tracking your email signature engagement provides valuable insights into your recipient’s behavior. With these insights, you can optimize your signature block for better impact.
Use email tracking software to monitor click-through rates, dwell time, and other behavior metrics associated with your email signature.
You can also manually add tracking identifiers to monitor your email signature’s performance via a web analytics platform.
When a prospect accesses your e-business card through your sales email signature, it signifies higher intent in your services than simply reading or clicking a link. It shows that they want to learn more about you and your services.
Digital business cards allow you to better track these high-intent engagements. You can track total card views, total unique viewers, number of contact saves, and more.
7. Optimize your email signature for mobile use
Using an email signature suitable only for desktops can negatively impact a sizable portion of your recipients who open your emails on a mobile device.
For instance, the signature block only optimized for desktops can appear visually squashed with text wrapping—to accommodate a smaller screen size.
Optimize your sales email signature for mobile devices since many clients and prospects will likely read your emails on their smartphones.
You can refer to this guide on optimizing an email signature for mobile devices.
If you include your digital business card in your sales email signature, ensure to provide mobile users quick access to it via a URL.
You can easily get the URL of each digital business card you create through a specialized digital business card solution.
You can then add it directly to your email signature block alongside your digital business card QR Code.
5 Creative email signature design ideas for sales professionals
Boost your sales email signature’s potential with a digital business card
An effective way to implement the best email signature optimizations we covered in this post is by adding a digital business card to your signature block.
A digital business card in your sales email signature lets you strike a balance between being concise and informative. You present an easy-to-read email signature while providing recipients instant access to relevant information that takes them further down your sales funnel.
In addition, you also leverage several other features that can enhance your email’s networking potential.
For instance, with Uniqode’s digital business card solution, you can use Two-Way Contact Sharing to capture leads directly via the card in your signature block. Adding an e-business to your email signature also lets you add another tracking layer, as you can measure card engagement metrics.
To add a digital business card to your sales email signature, create a free digital business card with Uniqode by clicking below.
Frequently asked questions about sales email signatures
How do I optimize my email signature for a sales email?
Follow these tips to optimize your email signature:
- Keep your sales email signature clean and uncluttered.
- Include the basics. Add your profile information and contact details.
- Ensure that you only share relevant information with your target audience.
- Include your brand’s distinct visual elements in your signature block.
- Add external links to content that showcase your expertise and credibility.
- Track your email signature engagement so you can analyze its performance.
- Optimize your sales email signature for mobile users.
You can implement most of these optimization techniques by adding a digital business card to your email signature. You maintain a concise signature block while sharing as much relevant information as your audience requires.
What should I include in my sales email signature?
Include these elements when creating and designing your sales email signature:
- Your name, job title, and company name
- A professional headshot
- Your company’s logo and branding elements
- Your most notable certifications and achievements
- A small number of URLs and social icons
- A link to your digital business card to share additional relevant information