Mobile Friendly Email Signature: Best Practices & Tips

01.11.2022
Read time: 7 min
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Mobile Friendly Email Signature: Best Practices & Tips
Try Publicate For Free Today
02.03.2022
Read time: 13 min

In 2020, 81% of all emails sent were read on mobile devices. This statistic alone explains why it’s so important to use a mobile friendly email signature. When you’re sending emails and email newsletters, your signature is more than just a name. That’s why we’re going to share how you can use an online tool to create a mobile friendly email signature that will pack a punch and be memorable to your email recipients. 

Person reading email on phone

Photo from Pexels

What is the Best Mobile Friendly Email Signature?       

You may be wondering what else is in a mobile friendly email signature besides a name. The best email signatures represent your personal or company branding, too. 

When done right, they can even play on the emotions of your recipients to help build trust in your brand. In some instances, it also can be used as a way to drive traffic to your site or call upon your recipients to take an action, such as scheduling a call or demo with you. In essence, an email signature is an effective marketing tool. 

What are the Benefits of a Mobile Friendly Email Signature?   

A good mobile friendly email signature can go a long way. Remember when people relied on business cards for business? Creative and easy-to-read business cards could have made the difference between a vendor you’d call or one that you’d forget about. Same thing for email signatures! 

Some advantages of incorporating a well-designed mobile friendly email signature include:

  • Sharing who you are 
  • Providing your contact information including website address
  • Spreading your company or personal brand’s mission or message 
  • Promote your business goals with clickable signatures 

How are Mobile Friendly Email Signatures Different from Desktop?   

Mobile email signature templates have a different setup than desktop templates, and for good reason. For starters, they are shorter in width to ensure that they’ll fit properly into mobile device screens. Mobile devices tend to have resolutions that are about 380px in width, so every element included in your signature needs to fit within that range. 

When you’re designing your mobile-email signature from scratch or using HTML, you’ll need to test across screen sizes and perform some trial-and-error. Alternatively, you can use an email signature builder tool that will remove the guesswork and provide you with an array of customizable design templates that are already built with the best practices in mind. 

All you have to do is drag-and-drop elements and input your desired information to make it your own. 

How Your Existing or Default Mobile Email Signature Might Be Damaging Your Brand?   

You probably haven’t paid this much attention to your signature before. Or, if you have, you may not have fully appreciated its value-added possibility. But now that you’re reading this, you’re can see just how important it is.. 

With a default mobile email signature like “sent from iPhone,” attached to each of your emails, you may actually be hurting your brand or company’s brand. 

Default sign-offs are:

  • Outdated: Default is run of the mill. It’s what everyone has, so it puts you in the pack with…everyone else. An engaging mobile friendly email signature can create opportunities for interaction and customer growth – don’t waste the opportunity! 
  • Excuses, excuses: If you leave the “message sent from iPhone” or “Please excuse typos” default sign-off, then you’re making an excuse for mistakes or brevity. Of course, mistakes.

What to Include in Your Mobile Friendly Email Signature?   

Knowing the downfalls of a default signature leads us to the solution of what you should include in your mobile friendly email signature. Consider this your design checklist:

  • Your name
  • Job title
  • Address
  • Phone number 
  • Brand logo / company name 
  • Company website 
  • Social media buttons
  • A marketing banner

It may be useful to also include a legal disclaimer about the content of your email to showcase that it is legally compliant. This is most important when you are sending external email newsletters for marketing purposes. 

If you’re not sure how to include all of this, especially if you have a big team and require consistency, an email signature tool can make things easy. With many customizable templates to choose from, you don’t need any designers or coders, and you can add all the elements you want or need without hassle.

What are Best Practices for Creating a Mobile Friendly Email Signature?   

Once you have all the above details in hand, it’s time to get to creating your very own mobile friendly email signature. 

Keep in mind these recommendations to make the most of it:

1. Choose Wisely

If you’re using a template, take a look at what you have to include and choose the layout accordingly. For example, your logo will dictate a lot about the layout of your signature. If it’s a wide logo, then a vertical template can be helpful.This is because you don’t want to make your signature wider than the width of mobile devices because it will affect how it’s viewed. 

2. Image Awareness 

If you add an image to your email signature, then be sure to remember that it’s not responsive. This means that it won’t automatically adjust to your recipient’s screen size. That’s why it’s best to leave out any very large images or logos in your signature. Instead, optimize imagery for mobile devices first. 

3. Shorten Links

Perhaps your email address and website’s URL are both long. Having too many lengthy items will add to the width of your signature. Instead, you can consider shortening the email address and URL into call-to-action links, such as “Email Me” or “Visit website.” 

4. Be Simple

Just like one of the best recommendations we have for sending email newsletters is to be short and sweet, the same rule holds for email signatures. Less is more. Include essential information and leave out anything obtuse or unnecessary. The same can be said about fonts– make sure they are easy to read. 

5. Leverage Tools

You don’t have to be a designer to create a beautiful email signature with access to the best free email signature generator. 

With a tool like Publicate’s email signature designer, you can create a professional and memorable mobile friendly email signature simply. The drag-and-drop user-friendly functionality makes it easy for anyone (regardless of your tech-savviness) to create an beautiful and high performing email signature. 

How to Fix Email Signatures that Aren’t Responsive to Screen Sizes?       

The great thing about mobile-friendly email signatures is that you don’t have to use a mobile device to create them. An email signature tool like Publicate provides a web-based tool to design your mobile-friendly email signature on a desktop and then ensures that it will be responsive across all screen sizes including mobile devices.

This is important because not every email client renders content the same. So, if you create an email signature in the Mail app on an iPhone, for example, it may appear correctly in your own email’s body, 

But, when you send out an email to other email service providers, it could become distorted because there are some email clients that don’t include headers in HTML once they’ve been sent. And, the header is what contains the code to dictate the screen size. 

What Format Should Mobile Friendly Email Signatures Be?

There are a few different email coding formats that exist and are worth considering. 

They include:

1. Mobile-First Format

As a format tailored to mobile users, the email signature will be focused on mobile friendliness first. While that’s great for readers on mobile devices, it can appear funky on desktops. 

2. Flexible Format

A flexible format could appear as intended across all different screen sizes. But, at the same time, you may have to sacrifice your design and creativity to make this form fit all functions. 

3. Responsive Format

A responsive format will cover all your bases as it responds to screen sizes and its respective email client. If you choose to create a responsive format yourself, you’ll need some coding capabilities. 

Alternatively, you can use a tool like Publicate to handle the technicalities while you focus on content and design! 

Person designing email signature on computer

Photo from Pexels

Why Use an Email Signature Tool to Create a Mobile Friendly Email Signature?   

To avoid the time-consuming aspect of having to create and test your mobile friendly email signature across devices and email clients, you can use an email signature tool instead. An email signature tool like Publicate offers mobile friendly email signatures without the need for any coding knowledge. 

Just like Publicate’s web-based email builder, you gain access to a wide array of templates that can be easily exported to Gmail, Outlook, or any email service provider of your choice. 

Design is simple with drag and drop plus you can make use of the image editing tool to crop and resize your signature and its elements however you like. With a tool like Publicate’s email signature builder, designing a professional email signature is made easy. 

Signing Off

Now that you know the value of a mobile friendly email signature, it’s time to get to designing your very own one that can represent your brand and become an important asset to help you achieve your business goals. Ready to get started? Sign up now! 

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