Who Are You? 23 TECH TOOLS FOR 2023 CHALLENGES

Email Signature Information

In the everyday workplace an email signature is often overlooked or misused. Springfield Public Schools has over 5,000 employees and having an email signature helps others identify who you are, what you do, and your location. While that information can be looked up if needed, a good email signature helps to identify you quickly and provides a level of professionalism to your correspondence.

Through my extensive research on this topic here are a few thoughts on creating a good email signature. When creating a good signature, make sure to include the important information, but keep it short! Quotes, colorful fonts, and stationary background take up space and are unnecessary. The only pictures should be the SPS logo, a school logo, professional picture, and/or district badges like an MIE badge.

While we do not have a set of guidelines for your digital signature here are some elements of a good email signature:

1. Name, title and company. Your name tells the reader who sent the email. If you are representing a company, you should also include your name and title at the company.
2. Contact information. Your contact information should include your business website. It should also include at least one phone number. Your email address is not necessary.
3. Social links (optional). It’s becoming increasingly important to include social media contact information in your email signature. Choose your most professional social media accounts to link to. LinkedIn is a good example. Avoid linking to frivolous or irrelevant social accounts.
4. Logo (optional). If you work for a company or own your own business, you may wish to include your logo in your email signature.
5. Photo (optional). Many email signatures include a photo of the sender. This can help the reader put your face to your name.
6. Responsive design. The usage of smartphones and other mobile devices has increased. Chances are your email recipient will open your email on a mobile device. A responsive design adjusts for mobile readers.
7. Don’t make your email signature too long or include an overwhelming amount of information. Studies have shown that recipients tend to ignore email signatures with too much information. For example, one or two phone numbers is usually enough.
8. Be careful about adding irrelevant information such as long quotes or controversial sayings. These often add nothing of value to your email signature. At the worst, a quote could offend or annoy your reader—causing you to lose business.

With the bad examples above, all three don't use universal or professional fonts. One of the examples uses a quote.

Technical Elements

Font Types

To choose the best font for your email signature, you need to look for one of the safe fonts. By “safe fonts”, I mean fonts that are available on most devices. No matter if this is PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad or Android – you can be pretty sure that the font you use in your signature is also installed on the recipients’ side. This will guarantee that the signature template will look just the way you see it on your screen.

Safe fonts are also easy to read. There are no unnecessary decorations that would negatively impact the readability of the signature’s text. Having this in mind, here is a list of the best fonts for email signatures that I have found:

• Arial
• Courier
• Georgia
• Lucida
• Palatino
• Tahoma
• Times New Roman
• Trebuchet
• Verdana

With the fonts mentioned above, you can create nice and neat email signatures. Just like the one in the example below.

Font Size

Names should be no large than 16pt., with remainder of your text being 2pt. less. Many common signatures will use a Bold 12 pt. for names, your title is set in regular 12pt. font and the remainder of text should be set in regular 10pt. font below the logo.

How to add a signature or edit your email signature:

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