You are starting a new business and realise a business email signature is what you need? With your business name in place, register a domain, so that you can also set up a business email address.
Sending business emails that end with a proper signature, just looks more professional and trustworthy. It’s like showing your personal digital business card. Including various information, such as your business logo, website address and social media profiles, it creates more opportunity for brand recognition and for the receiver of your emails to connect with you in other ways too.
You might be wondering now, how should a business email signature look like? I found and personally used this handy tool to generate my business email HTML template. There are a wide variety of templates to choose from, that include all personal and company details, social media icons with their URLs, a profile image or logo, a promo banner and disclaimer.
Free Email Signature Generator
This tool takes you through all the necessary steps, that makes it easy to get to your desired outcome.
1. First choose your email platform
For those who are using Apple Mail, I can suggest choosing the Thunderbird option for now. Further down this article I’ve put down my tried and tested instructions and resource to set this up.
2. Choose your email signature template
Choosing a template of any kind, I normally focus on the layout I am after, then I just change the colours and image/s and remove the info I don’t want, for my own customised end result.
I personally aimed for one that does not look too ‘heavy’. Otherwise it can be too distracting and look confusing if the email signature is too long.
3. Complete the business info you want to use
Under Graphics you can add a profile photo or company logo. This option adds a nice personal touch.
It does not however have the option to upload an image into their tool. You need to upload the image you would like to use, onto a server or any location you know of, where you can copy the source URL. You basically need to be able to copy the link to where the image is and then paste the link into the available field on the page of the tool.
The advantage to this (and a good one), the image will stay intact with the email signature and not be sent as an attachment to the recipient.
4. Save your email signature layout
Depending on which email client you chose in step 1, here the tool will give you the steps to follow, to implement your new email signature.
Unfortunately Apple Mail is not one of those options. Looking into it myself I’ve come to realise, most probably because there are a few more hoops to jump through, but worth the effort.
Apple Mail Email Signature
In the previous section, step 1, I chose Thunderbird as the email client. This allowed me to generate and save off the HTML code.
How to save the HTML code to a plain .txt file on Mac
On Mac, go to Applications > TextEdit.app. With TextEdit open, from File > New you can open a new file. Then ensure you choose Format > Make Plain Text.
Now you can copy and paste the generated HTML code, in this new .txt file you created and save it for the next step.
From here I basically followed this tutorial to figure out all the technical side of things. This article show you where to go, to create a new email signature in Apple Mail.
I’ve come to realise, when you create your new signature (it is basically a template for the next step in the tutorial from the link shared above) and give it a name, it can take a seconds or so to come up in the dropdown below.
When this is setup, remember to close Apple Mail.
In the section ‘Find your mail signature file’ of the above mentioned tutorial, I would imagine most people setting this up will use the 2nd / non iCloud options. Also keep in mind, the /V# (# is just a place holder for which ever number) can now be anything up to 7 and more.
Navigating to the folder I’ve just used ~/Library/Mail/. From that folder, I found the /V# folder. From here I followed the rest of the path: /MailData/Signatures/ to find the most recent .mailsignature file in there.
Following the instructions, not remembering to lock the updated .mailsignature file tripped me up a bit. If you don’t lock the file you won’t see your work and changes.
Simply click on the downwards arrow, to open up the downwards window – tick the box to lock the file.
Feel free to drop me an email, showing of your new email signature!
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