By Kamil Glaser, Senior Technical Marketing Specialist at CodeTwo. CodeTwo were finalists in the ‘Best Software-as-a-Service (Outside USA)‘ category at The 2024/25 Cloud Awards.

Email signatures and disclaimers – you may hate them, but they have become a business standard.

The simple fact that some people have grown to hate signatures and disclaimers stems from one simple fact: not everyone follows best signature-related practices. Here’s a few guidelines to keep in mind when designing and deploying an email signature. If you follow them, signatures should transform from appalling to appealing.

Why do I need signatures?

Before we dive into detailed best practice guide, it’s good to ask yourself the most basic of all email signature-related questions: why do I need them? After all, traditional letters usually end only with a full name, so why should emails be any different?

Business correspondence requires a high level of professionalism. Email continues to be the primary digital contact channel for most companies. Despite prophecies that social media will kill email as digital contact channel, there’s been a constant growth in usage of email, with the current number of emails sent daily exceeding 370 billion (source) That’s why it’s crucial to look after each aspect of email, especially the signature.

An email signature is the digital version of a business card. It provides alternative contact methods, lets your recipients know who they are dealing with, and suggests they are corresponding with an actual human being and not a bot. And those human interactions are becoming exceedingly rare but much sought after. In short, a signature’s purpose is to create a good impression. Outdated contact information, unprofessional elements, bad design – any of those elements can make you, the company’s representative, untrustworthy. A professional email signature carries the company’s visual identity and is one of the multiple elements which tell your recipients that doing business with you is the good choice.

Best email signature practices

I’ve broken down the best practices into 3 groups: Content, Design and Deployment.

Content

1. Only up-to-date contact details are acceptable. The most fundamental reason for creating email signatures is to give recipients an idea of who they are dealing with. Outdated contact information gives a warning that something is wrong.
2. Signatures need to be useful. Modern email signatures aren’t limited to your name and title. They can include elements like one-click customer satisfaction surveys or meeting links to make it easier to contact you via the preferred channel. It’s also a good place to promote your unique selling value.
3. Signatures and disclaimers can help you stay compliant. There are regulations (e.g. CASL) which require you to include your company’s details like name, address and registration number in commercial correspondence. Adding this data into your footer is what most recipients have grown to expect.
4. Nobody likes signatures bigger than the email’s body. Always think about the recipient when composing an email signature. Is the information relevant to them? Don’t let the marketing opportunities cloud your judgement – recipients won’t appreciate marketing banners if they are spammed with them in every short message. The same with disclaimers – using walls of text which drown the email content itself is not the right way to achieve any level of compliance (email disclaimer examples that work).

Design

5. The business standard format for email signatures is HTML. If well-built, it should keep the right formatting, no matter what the sender uses to compose an email, and what recipients use to read it. It also allows you to include your company branding and all the additional signature content.
6. Remember about other signature formats. While HTML email signatures are dominant, you can come across other – RTF and plain text. You need to know what happens with your signatures when, for example, a user sends out a plain text email (hint: as the name suggests, your HTML signatures will be wiped clean of any formatting, including tables, and images).
7. Start out with a template or use a dedicated editor. HTML signatures, although generally used, need some nonobvious elements in their code. If you design your own email signature, it’s always good to design signatures within a dedicated tool, or at least, use a tested, well-formatted template as a starting point. Editors like MS Word add styling, which can break the layout in most email clients.
8. Design needs to be dark mode and mobile friendly. Even if most of your emails are opened in standard, light version of Outlook, you need to keep other scenarios in mind. If your recipient uses a dark mode or opens the email in a mobile device, the signature should always be displayed well. To support all email clients, you need to use the right image files and styling. Additionally, it’s best to use a compact design, especially for replies and forwards.

Deployment

9. Signatures and disclaimers should be present in every email client. In the world of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) users aren’t limited to using just a single email client. That’s why it’s crucial to make sure that signature design is unified across various devices. And that the disclaimer is added to every email.
10. Deployment shouldn’t be difficult or time-consuming. While email signatures are important, setting them up shouldn’t become a burden on IT or end users.
11. Test before you deploy. If you set up signatures for all mailboxes, even a tiny mistake can have major impact on your environment or visual identity. That’s why you should always test your designs in various scenarios, before taking the change to the production environment.
12. Users should know how signatures work. There are various deployment methods. Whichever you use, users should be aware of how it works. For example, if you add signatures on the server level and users won’t be able to see those signatures, they might want to add an additional signature on their own.