Email signatures may sound like a small detail, but when you consider how many emails you and your firm members send each day, this represents a major marketing opportunity that could provide thousands of free “hits” to your company’s website. Hotmail and Juno built subscriber bases of millions by using email signatures (also know as “viral marketing”). This is not insignificant!

There are two things you should be sure to do when creating an email signature:

1. Make sure you and everyone in your firm uses an email signature complete with contact information, plus a brief news or action “tagline,” preferably including a link.

2. Make sure the signature is included on reply emails in addition to outgoing messages.

Adding signatures is an easy process in your email software that should take less than five minutes. If you don’t know how to do this, look it up in your email program’s “help” menu. Believe me, if this tech-phobic marketer can handle this process, you can, too.

I recommend that your signatures include both contact information and a tag line. Here is an example:

M. H. “Mac” McIntosh
Mac McIntosh, Inc.
Voice: 800-944-5553 or 401-294-7730
Fax: 800-944-5513 or 401-679-0176
Email: mcIntosh@salesleadexperts.com
Website: www.salesleadexperts.com 

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Sending emails and replies without your contact information is like leaving phone messages without giving your name clearly and your phone number. You are assuming a great deal to think that the recipient knows your information by heart and won’t need to look it up. This is a busy world. We need to make it easy for people to know who we are and how to contact us.

And using taglines to promote your products or services while you are at it, just makes sense.

Email signatures are also ideal for promoting upcoming events. For example, Mac McIntosh could use the following tagline to promote his upcoming session at DM Days New York:

Find out how to double your sales from B-to-B leads!
Join Mac McIntosh at DM Days New York, June 17-19.
Don’t miss Mac’s session June 17, 2:15 p.m.
Visit www.dmdays.com for more information.

Keep an eye out for more ideas on strong email signatures by looking for them in the emails you receive.

You can really multiply the impact of email signatures by making it a required practice in your firm.

Although your marketing department should be responsible for implementing a corporate email signature program, it’s a good idea to have a key executive send an email to everyone to launch the program.

To get started, have the senior executive send an email to everyone in your firm stating the importance of email signatures. This email should provide the specific signature instructions for the email software your company uses and the specific text to be used in the signature.

Encourage other firm members to submit additional tag line ideas. Then, distribute new signature tagline messages to everyone on a monthly basis. If you receive emails without a signature from co-workers, send them the email signature instructions with a polite reminder that this is a small, yet important detail.

Liz Taylor is President of Liz Taylor Marketing, a direct marketing firm in Tampa, Florida. Request her free guide, “How To Generate Sales Leads Without Wasting Money,” by emailing her at liz@liztaylormarketing.com.