15 Careless Email Signature Mistakes That We're All Guilty Of [SlideShare]

Imagine the following conversation at a party:

Person 1: Cool party, huh? My name's Scott. 

Person 2: Hey man, nice to meet you.

Person 1: Do you work around here?

Person 2: Yeah, right by the bay actually. 

Person 1: Nice, well I'm going to say hi to the host. 

Person 2: Catch you around! 

Person 1: You too. My name's Scott.

... ?

Person 2 is probably thinking, you just introduced yourself, and now you're ending the conversation by introducing yourself again?

This weird interaction is what I picture in my head every time I see someone include their email address in their email signature. How could that possibly be good email etiquette? In fact, 39% of people do this!

It turns out including an email in an email signature (sounds so wrong everytime I say it) is one of the 15 email signature mistakes we all make. The following presentation uncovers the rest:

1.  Including your email address

This is the ultimate insult. You might as well say:

p.s. Just in case you’re totally oblivious to how email works, here is my email address at the bottom of my email from the email address you just received this email from.

Thanks,
Captain Redundancy

2. Including a fax number

No, most people aren’t still living in 1994 and sending faxes. Or 1894 and riding horses to work.

3. Leaving "Sent from my iPhone" as the default signature 

This also means: 

Yes, I'm capable of grammar and spell checking. But I'm on my iPhone, so that means rules don't apply to me. Oh yeah and if I call you jerk instead of Jack, yes, that's my AutoCorrect. Deal with it! 

Instead, why don't you just proofread before you send like you would on desktop? Not that hard.

4. Not promoting your website in a unique way

Noah Kagan, CEO at Sumo, uses a unique email signature that has driven thousands of downloads for his free product. 

5. Listing every social media profile

Newsflash: No one is going to click every single social media icon. Instead, focus only on the accounts that matter most to growing your business or building your personal brand.

6. Using a large image that takes forever to load

If you use a 15 megabyte picture in your email signature, your recipient will reminisce to their dial-up internet days because your email is loading so dang slow.

7. Copying and pasting an image into your signature 

By pasting an image into your signature, it will appear as an attachment, versus embedded in the signature.  

8. Not including your phone number

There are two professional ways to get in touch with people:

1. Email
2. Phone

They obviously have the first. Don’t forget the second.

9. Forgetting an international prefix if you have international clients

If you work with international folks, it’s helpful to include the prefix for your country’s code. For example, the United States code is +1. The code for Brazil is +55. 

10. Using a corny quote

Keep the inspirational quotes on Pinterest and Tumblr, not in email signatures.

11. Colored, large, or weird fonts

Keep a clean, black font your signature. Preferably in a font that is NOT Comic Sans or something else that hurts the eyes. 

12. Sloppily inserting the full hyperlink into your website or social media accounts

Using the Gmail keyboard shortcut, use "Command + K" to insert a link. That shortcut is pretty universal so it should work for all other email clients as well. 

13. Including every service you provide

Just because you offer 57 different marketing services, doesn't mean you need to include all of them in your email signature. 

14. Using an entire image as your signature 

Including an image, such as your face or a logo, is risky because it may not work. But having your entire signature as an image is just foolish. It just won't work. Use our free email signature generator to create an easy-to-use signature now.

15. Not testing your signature in multiple email clients 

Just because it works in Gmail, doesn’t mean it works in Outlook. Test your signature in all of them.