So why then do business owners, the same people who hate receiving emails with huge signatures, use ridiculously long HTML email signatures themselves?

Sure, I understand that they need to market their business wherever they can, I truly do. And I understand they want to use their existing identity branding to appear consistent across every bit of correspondence they send to potential or existing clients.

But there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it.

And to understand the right way, you firstly need to resign yourself to this simple fact:

Your HTML email signature is never going to look consistent

There are many email clients out there from Outlook 2003-10 (PC & Mac variants), Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Sparrow, Eudora, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo…the list is almost endless. And many of them use different HTML rendering engines. Some of them use Firefox’s rendering engine, some Internet Explorer’s, and in the case of Outlook, it uses Microsoft Word!

And if you’re on a mobile device, your signature will look different regardless because of their different resolution screens, let alone going into the differences between how a Blackberry shows a HTML signature versus an iPhone or an Android.

On top of this, most email programs block images from loading by default. This means that many people won’t see your logo in an email signature unless they allow images to be unblocked. If you’re lucky, they’ll allow it the first time and choose to allow it all future times, but on certain machines and phones, images won’t be loaded at all. And that could be a limitation of the device itself, or a policy set by a network administrator or over zealous antivirus application.

So with all this in mind:

How can you maximise the chance of a consistent signature?

And how can you create a HTML email signature that doesn’t annoy the buggery out of the recipient?

1. Forget embedding or attaching images

And that means don’t put your logo in your email signature. Chances are the logo in your email signature is already being blocked by default. It’s being blocked because email clients see images (either embedded or attached) as potential sources for things like trojans and malware. And while chances are it’ll have none of those things in it, your email client thinks it’s better to be safe than sorry. And so do I.

Instead, why not just put the name of your business on one line in text? It’ll take up less space, and your reader still gets to  know who the email is from and the name of your company. And your recipient won’t be confused why the email says there’s an attachment but there’s not – only your email signature.

2. When programming a HTML signature, minimise columns

I recently saw an email signature that was created using a three column table. It looked really good when I opened it in Outlook on my desktop machine, but it was completely unreadable on my iPhone. Why? Because on a smaller resolution screen there’s only so much information that can fit on a single line before text starts to wrap. My iPhone was displaying three columns alright, but only about 5 characters per line in each column; this meant phone numbers and other useful contact information was unreadable.

If you stick to one column, chances are when text wraps on smaller screens everything will remain readable. It mightn’t look the same as on the desktop, but it’ll read like ordinary text and be useful if the recipient needs to refer to it.

And if you need to put more than one piece of information side by side, you can just break it up using “|” or “\”. I’ve seen plenty of people do this and it looks quite professional.

3. Don’t make your signature wider than 600px

It’s a generally accepted standard that the maximum width your email signature should be is 600px because it caters to most screens and devices without much hassle. If you make it much wider than that then even on a desktop client the reader will likely have to scroll left and right just to see it fully…you definitely don’t want to annoy clients like that.

Sometimes a width like 600px will give you enough freedom to play with two columns of information instead of one. Try it if you like, but be warned it is a risk and it could make things confusing on smaller screens.

4. Limit what information you include

You don’t need to put every piece of information about yourself in your signature. Because, guess what? Your readers just don’t care.

Things you should include are your name, title, business name and email address. If you think it’s useful you can put in your website address and business tagline (debateble) as well. You don’t have to put in your phone numbers if you prefer not to be contacted by anybody who happens to see an email of yours, so I’ll leave that one up to you. But the point is, all of this type of information is useful, it doesn’t take up much space, and it doesn’t offend.

And what not to include?

Social Networking Information

Aside from not using a logo in your signature, think twice before listing all your social network information. Do people really need to know that every time they receive an email from you? Do they really care to know? If you think maybe new clients would, then go for it, but make a second signature for email replies that excludes it – that way existing contacts don’t have to suffer it time and again.

VCards

This goes for vcards as well. It’s a bit of a modern craze at the moment to include vcard attachments in your email signature. They’re completely unnessecary. A new client may download it once, but they certainly don’t need to download it more than once, so spare them from seeing it every single time you send an email.

Quotes

You might be thinking that a quote in your email signature shows  you or your business as worldly, or warm, or quirky…maybe a combination of all three. And you may be all of those things. But your readers don’t care what Einstein, Ghandi or Robin Williams said when all they wanted from you was a response to an order enquiry. It’s a waste of space and, really, in my opinion it makes you look like less of a professional than you should be.

Disclaimers

Somewhere along the line email fell into the hands of a lawyer, who thought it would be a good idea to put a legal disclaimer at the bottom of his email signatures to cover himself from anything stupid he might say in his email correspondence. Another lawyer friend saw this and thought he had better add one, and so the story goes.

Nowadays I’m sure you’ll be hard pressed to find any business that uses a legal disclaimer that hasn’t “borrowed” it from the bottom of an email they received from another business.

They’re viral. And according to a recent article in the Chicago Tribune they may not be worth space they take up. I mean, why would you put a disclaimer on the bottom of a piece of correspondence? You’re not giving the reader a choice to abide by your terms, because they’ve already read the contents before they read your clause on having agreed to donate a kidney by reading it.

If you insist on having one, at least make sure it’s as succinct as possible and written in plain english so the recipient understands it.

“Be Green” Notices

Of all the things I dislike about email signatures this one grates me the most. The composer of the email first bombards me with all of the above, and has turned a three line email into a three pager by fault of his ridiculously long email signature. And then he has the gall to tell me not to waste paper!? Hup! How very dare you!

And to conclude…

If you do all the above, your email correspondence is not only going to render more consistently across the plethora of devices that exist and are in use today, but your signatures are going to contain only useful information that doesn’t take up more space than the contents of the email itself. That makes your readers happy, it makes me happy, and it makes mother earth happy.

Well, the folks over at Graphic Mania have created a list of ten points that will you become a Twitter marketing genius. They’ve researched what habits users find compelling and annoying, and what way of speaking best connects with your potential client base. Have a read here.

Regardless of your job industry or type, you need a well-designed business card, one that is appropriate for your trade. A business reflects your skills, professionalism and attracts clients and customer. Therefore it is absolutely vital to have a business card that brings more clients not turn them away.

They are absolutely right. Be sure to check out the post and keep their points in mind when commissioning a card for your business. After all, your business card should be quality and reflect the professionalism of your company.

If you’re like me you’ve been storing your pens and pencils in a mug or pencil cup on your desk for as long as you can remember. And it can get pretty messy in there.

Well, thanks to Singapore design firm SILNT (pronounced “silent”) there’s no more excuses. They’ve just released the “Adapter”, a flexible insert for nearly any cylindrical insert that turns it into an organised pen holder.It’s made from maple and it’s flexible rubber ring means it’ll fit into your favourite mug, and old food tin, a science beaker…just about anything round.

It’s S$30 if you want one, but you have to be quick. The first batch sold out in no time.

FARM Online Store [via Behance Network]

What does this mean? Well it means that the colours you use in your business, and the shades of those colours, all evoke certain reactions in people – your potential client base. And if your an international business, the colours you use in one region may not work as well in another. So it’s important to thoroughly consider what colour you use when branding your business.

Smashing Magazine has a thorough breakdown in colour theory. Take a look through it, then speak with your designer to see whether your business could benefit from a review of its branding.

While brief, the series does cover some common issues you may face when working with your Designer, such as whether you or the designer owns rough sketches, alternative designs etc relating to your project and what happens if there are limitations on where and how you can use your design if outlined in a contract.

It’s well worth a read if you’re thinking of hiring a Graphic Designer. You can find links to all three articles in the series by clicking here.

The use of shadows, colours, size, context of wording, font and placement on the page all matter when it comes to converting visitors into sales.

The folks over at UX Movement have made an excellent guide outlining all of this, so head on over to check it out.

But the point is, it can take you hours and even days to research and write an article that you want to share with your audience. If you’re going to that amount of effort, what’s another five minutes manually broadcasting to your followers about it? Seriously, what are you broadcasting to? Twitter? Facebook? Google+? Chances are it’s at least two of those so it won’t take you long to personalise your message a bit. And as the article says, it’ll give you a chance to:

• Stick within the character limits of each network
• Give you a chance to remove network specific artifacts, like hashtags you might use in Twitter but are useless on Facebook
• Modify wording so your message appears to be personally written to your audience.

Those are all positive things. However, one thing I would suggest keeping in mindwhen manually updating broadcast messages over social networks is not to make your messages too different from one another.

As a social network user myself, I may follow a brand on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ at the same time. I don’t want to click on an update on Facebook, then click on an update on Twitter that sounds completely fresh only to be brought back to the same article. Make your updates personal, but also make sure your readers can tell when slightly different updates link to the same information. If you don’t, I think you’re going to annoy your followers into dropping you from at least one of their social networks.

And would it really hurt to add the odd update that’s unique to one particular network or another?

Maybe you can make a special offer for Facebook followers only, or maybe you post a coupon code to Twitter only. It surely can’t hurt to encourage users to follow you on more than one social network. In fact, it can stand to increase your exposure to other potential clients/customers through friends of friends who already follow you. All it takes is a little extra effort – minutes, not hours.

So kudos to TwiBooklet. It takes a lot of time to run a business, but they’re spot on the money in asking if shaving five minutes here or there is really worth it when you risk being labelled at best impersonal or at worst a spammer. It’s food for thought.