How to make a mobile-friendly email signature

Email penetration in the US and Europe currently stands at around 90%, and roughly 47 percent of people view their emails using their mobile devices.

With so many users receiving email on mobile, it’s more important than ever to make sure that you’re sending an email using a mobile-friendly signature.

Why?

Your email signature not only injects personality into your email but also provides all the contact information your clients need if they ever needed to reach you.

In the business world, that matters. 

If you don’t optimize your signature for mobile screens, chances are that it’s not having the intended effect.

This article explores everything you need to know about how to make email signature mobile-friendly.

What is the best email signature?

An email signature is more than just your name and title. It is also a major part of your personal branding.

The best email signature can do any of the following:

• Identify who you are and what you do.
• Elicit some kind of emotion from your recipients.
• Exude professionalism and build trust.
• Prompt them to take some kind of action.
• Drive traffic to your company’s website.

Ultimately, the signature you need to create boils down to how you reap the full marketing potential of your mobile signatures.

It’s possible to create a mobile signature using simple text, but there are other, more sophisticated solutions that can help you create an even stronger connection with readers.

For example, you could use a tool like CreateMySignature to create an image of your handwritten signature in seconds and incorporate that into your emails for a touch of added professionalism.

If you’re trying to be consistent, you could even take that signature and incorporate it with an e-signing platform like PandaDoc so that the signatures your clients see in emails are the same that you use to sign electronic documents. You can also create a digital signature in Gmail.

Remember: In business, consistency matters. Email is the first (and, often, most constant) point of contact that many clients will have with you. 

Staying consistent from the start can go a long way toward establishing yourself as reliable and trustworthy.

How do I create a professional email signature that’s mobile-friendly?

Mobile-friendly signatures need to look and feel professional while remaining functional across multiple devices.

Finding the balance between professionalism and functionality is the name of the game.

Here’s a closer look at what you might (or might not) include in a professional email signature:

• Your photo (great for establishing credibility and trust).
• Your name, job title, and company.
• Your professional social handles (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.)
• Your phone number, work address, and website URL.
• A company logo.
• A memorable call to action.
• A disclaimer.

Depending on your situation, many of these may not be called for. 

You might also prefer to use some objects over others. 

For example, a company logo may be more important if you’re part of a larger organization than a professional portrait.

Whatever you do, don’t use an inspirational quote or overload your signature with too much information. 

Keep in mind that mobile screens are smaller, and there simply isn’t enough room on a smartphone screen to display everything. 

Clean, simple, and clutter-free are what you should be going for when building a professional email signature.

With those basics out of the way, here are a few tips you can use to create a professional mobile email signature to bump up conversions.

Layout

When building for mobile, always consider the width of the mobile screen.

You need to arrange all of your information in such a way that your email signature is visible while avoiding line breaks and word wrapping that will break your layout. 

The best approach is to split your contact information into multiple lines.

Using this approach, you can ensure that every line of text fits on your recipient’s screen, making it cumbersome for them to deal with broken lines of text or having to scroll to the side just to read your entire mobile signature.

Images

Working with images can be tricky. 

You’ll need to ensure that any image you use in your signature is correctly sized and optimized for a mobile device.

Keep in mind that if you send a large image through an email client like Microsoft Outlook, it may look huge when viewed on a mobile email client or through the native windows from an email service provider like Gmail, Yahoo, or Apple Mail!

While some clients will load images automatically, you should also keep in mind that privacy settings — especially on work devices — may prevent those images from loading.

With that in mind, it’s important not to put any information exclusively in an image attached to your signature. 

For example, if you include your company logo, you should still add the name of the company to the typed portion of your email signature.

Using correctly, images can be a powerful tool — but they can also be difficult to manage and will dramatically increase the size of any text-based email.

Loading times

Emails load on all sorts of devices, connected to all sorts of networks, with all sorts of performance issues.

A huge part of optimizing your email signature to be mobile-friendly involves minimizing the size of your signature block. 

That includes optimizing or removing images and keeping information to a minimum to ensure that things load quickly.

Signature blocks embedded with large amounts of unnecessary formatting and code, including color profiles or layouts requiring complex HTML and CSS support to render properly, could be costing you valuable business if your recipients never actually get to the point of loading your email.

What is the best size for an email signature?

Email clients like Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail allow users to create customized signatures that are automatically inserted at the bottom of emails.

These signature builders provide a fair amount of flexibility in terms of signature creation — but it’s very easy to go overboard.

As a rule of thumb, shorter is better when it comes to mobile signatures. 

Excessively large or convoluted signatures are less likely to be read, and that raises the chances that the masterfully-crafted sales pitch you sent out in a new email might end up in your recipient’s spam folder.

How to fix email signatures that aren’t adaptive/responsive to screen sizes

In the mobile landscape, not all phones (or their onboard email clients) are created equal.

When designing mobile-friendly signatures, it can be difficult to know and understand how your email signature will render on any given device.

So, how can you fix it?

One option is to use well-known third-party solutions like CodeTwo, an email signature generator that ensures your signature is always optimized.

If you’re not looking for a paid service, however, there are a couple of things you can do to change that and make your emails more adaptive.

1. Make the email signature design smaller

Bigger isn’t always better. Overly large logos or graphics may not pan out the way you expect them to when viewed on mobile devices.

If you intend to send images with your email, be sure to optimize them. 

It doesn’t matter whether you create them using a premium platform like Photoshop or through a free design tool like Canva. Do your best to minimize the content load.

Less is more.

2. Use the right email signature template

Vertical signature templates tend to work better for mobile viewing, especially if your company logo is wide.

This is because, while the width of the screen is limited, the vertical space on a mobile device is infinite.

If you have the know-how to create email signatures from scratch, doing so with vertical space in mind can lead to some interesting results. 

Dedicated tools like Exclaimer also have signature templates that are designed to render perfectly on every device (Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, etc.)

3. Split long addresses into separate lines

Remember, the idea is for your email recipients to avoid having to scroll just to see your whole signature.

Splitting your contact information into three or four separate lines would be ideal.

Replace long URLs with anchor text

If your email or website links are unusually long, you can use anchor text instead to keep things short and tidy.

For instance, rather than have something like:

johndoe@excessivelylongwebsiteaddress.com and https://excessivelylongwebsiteaddress.com

You could hyperlink:

Email me or Visit website

The same rule applies to your social media links.

What format should email signatures be?

There are three main types of email coding formats. Each comes with its own set of pros and cons.

1. Mobile-first format

This email signature look prioritizes mobile-friendliness over everything else. The email signature is custom-tailored to mobile users.

While this may not sound like a bad thing, the problem with a mobile-first formatting approach is that it sacrifices desktop design.

The result? Awkward-looking signatures when viewed on larger screens.

Nonetheless, if the majority of your clients come from mobile traffic then you have nothing to worry about.

2. Flexible format

If you’re not sure of the level of impact your email marketing efforts have on your brand then an email signature with a flexible layout might be what you need to turn things around. 

Not only are they easier to create, but they also look great on virtually all screen sizes.

On the flip side, they might water down your brand’s creative potential, since flexible formats require a higher degree of simplicity to translate across different types of email clients.

3. Responsive format

While this delivers remarkable results, it is often the most difficult to pull off.

In this case, specialized code is often required in order to instruct the signature to cater to a specific device or email client.

For instance, a customer viewing your email on their iPhone may just see a simple CTA button.

However, if they were to open it on their desktop client, they can view multiple CTAs, social media icons, more text, and larger images.

Keep email signatures consistent with the rest of your brand

However, you choose to set up your email, remember: first impressions matter.

Having a mobile-friendly signature is about more than just saving a few pixels. It’s also a great opportunity to make a first and consistent impression for your brand.

Use a tool like CreateMySignature to create a free email signature, then incorporate that same signature into legally binding documents with PandaDoc.

PandaDoc is UETA and ESIGN compliant, which means your clients can sign legally binding documents remotely on their devices.

They don’t physically have to come to you to sign contracts and other related paperwork.

Talk about closing deals rapidly!

PandaDoc also comes with insightful analytics to help take the guesswork out of the whole process.

You’ll know the moment a client or prospect opens a document you emailed to them, reads through it, adds comments, or e-signs it.

You’ll have your finger on the pulse every step of the way.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial and learn how you can unify your outreach and email documentation with the right tools for the job.