It’s difficult to make a positive lasting impression and closing business email correspondence with something that is memorable for all the right reasons is even trickier. Whether you have just changed jobs, secured a promotion or suspect your current signature isn’t making the impression you ideally want to make, if you’ve ever spent any length of time asking search engines to show you examples of the best professional business email signatures, you’re not alone.

Here are a few tips and ideas that we hope will inspire a professional signature that will capture your audience’s attention.

Keep it short and sweet

Your email signature shouldn’t exceed 4 lines, so something basic might look something like:

• Your Name
• Job Title
• Company Name (Hyperlinked to the website)
• Contact Number

There are a variety of ways to further personalise this to ensure that your correspondence always makes a positive impression.

– Integrate key Social Media profiles

If you regularly use social platforms for work, including them in your email signature can help you to effectively showcase your professional brand.

– Highlight content that illustrates your expertise

Have you written a professional article that succinctly illustrates who you are and what you can do? Or created a product that you want to shout about? Don’t be afraid to share a link to it in your signature.

– Include a Call-To-Action (CTA)

Would you like your recipient to download an eBook, sign up to a separate mailing list, or attend a webinar/event you are hosting in the near future? Incorporating a short line of text that actively prompts an action within your email signature can drive significant results in both the short and long term.

Just remember that including every social platform, product, blog post and way to contact you will definitely be far too much information, so be sure to simplify your signature insofar as you can.

Don’t include your email address

As your recipient can simply hit the reply button, including your email address in your signature will be doing little more than taking up valuable space. Omitting unnecessary information will ensure that you always have space to include the elements that will add value.

Make an impact with imagery

The human brain generally finds images more memorable than text, however, this doesn’t mean that any image will do. Rather than opting for a landscape image, including a professional headshot will help your recipients to put a face to your name, which will also be beneficial for future interviews and networking events.

Stick with the standard “Sent from My iPhone” signature

Researchers from Stanford conducted a study considering the credibility of business email correspondence that contains misspellings and/or grammatical errors sent with a standard “Sent from my iPhone” email signature. Results illustrated that recipients were markedly more likely to forgive or overlook errors in correspondence signed with “Sent from my iPhone” than in those signed with a professional signature.

If you know that your audience will be understanding, you could even add a bit of creativity and humour to this approach. Something along the lines of “iApologise for any iTypos” or “Errors and typos courtesy of my iPhone” might strike the right chord with the people you most want to remember you.