294 billion messages per day means more than 2.8 million emails are sent every second and some 90 trillion emails are sent per year. Around 90% of these millions and trillions of message are but spam and viruses.
The genuine emails are sent by around 1.9 billion email users.
Now think about the space that you have available for your purposes immediately after your name in the signature area of the email messages that you send.
“It might be the most valuable piece of real estate you have.”
Most importantly – use it. Many have not given any thought to what is included below your name .
Here are some thoughts and ideas to get you thinking about how to get the most out of that space.
- Keep it tight and focused.
- Three lines at the most
- No Graphics
- No Graphic Signature Replica
- Always provide a phone number
- Link to an appointment setting tool
- Link to a landing page or promotion
- Link to your website/blog
- Link to your LinkedIn Profile
- Link to your Facebook Page
I have people ask why I say “no graphics” like Logo’ or signature image.
- Many business users have their email set for text only viewing so they don’t see your logo anyway
- It can add significant size to your email message, dependant on the graphics used
- Mobile devices don’t always handle them well and more than half of all email is viewed on a mobile device
- It takes up quite a bit of space that means the viewer will have to scroll down to see it all. Do you enjoy doing that? Will you do that?
If you are a Microsoft Outlook user, I recommend taking advantage of Outlook’s ability to have one signature for your original email and a different, shorter version for your reply/forwarded messages.
Here is what the Screen looks like in Outlook 2007 to select which signature goes with which email type:
You will notice in the screenshot above that you can create several signatures. Create one that is one line, with only the information that is most important to reach you quickly-I recommend your cell phone. Create several signatures with different topics, directions and promotional info, and rotate them from time to time to keep things interesting. If you are using links in your signature, have the links connected and monitored by some type of analytics package, allowing you to learn which ones are creating responses and which ones are not.
Last suggestion: stay away from bloated signatures. By bloated, I am talking about the ones that end up being 5 to 18 lines long. If you have a new message that you want to incorporate, create a new one, and leave something off that you have used previously. We tend not to read an extra long email, we definitely do not want to read your long signature area.
As you can see from one of my current signature lines above, I have incorporated a link to schedule a 15 minute phone call with me. After almost 2 months of using this web tool from TimeTrade, I counted up 17 meetings that were set up in this way. I will be writing more about this productive tool in the near future.
Recently, a question was asked at Focus.com: Do you have your LinkedIn Profile URL on Your Email Signature? if you would like to read more on this topic.
Let me know your thoughts. How do you utilize this valuable space? What is working for you?