In a recent post, we mentioned how using email encryption sends the signal that you care about your recipients’ email security. This week we’ll talk about a more overt way that you can make an impact on your customers and vendors: your email signatures.
Evolution of the Email Signature
Over the past few years, email signatures—the part at the bottom with your company or individual information like title and contact info—have become a lot like business cards, which inform or remind the recipient of who you are and what you do. What you may not know is that there are cloud services that can help you stay on-brand throughout your organization without the tedious process of setting up every employee’s signature.
Like letters before them, emails are expected to have a closing that identifies the sender and bids adieu to your recipient. The email signature could handle this, but most of us use them for identification inside and outside of an organization. It could, in its most basic form, include a title and contact info, but since emails support HTML, you can also include other elements, such as images that link out to your website, your Google or Yelp reviews, etc.
To manage these elements and to make them consistent across your company, you’ll want a centrally managed tool that is easy to use, has great design templates and dynamic signatures, and doesn’t require complicated set up or permissions configurations to use it.
A Cloud Signature Service
One of the ways that CodeTwo maintains its simplicity—if you’re using it with Microsoft 365—is by living in the cloud alongside your Microsoft account. CodeTwo lives on Microsoft Azure, so when you send an email from your account, CodeTwo attaches your signature as it’s sent out. This also means that you can send your email with CodeTwo signatures even if you use encrypted messages.
On a typical setup, CodeTwo attaches your signature at the server-level, which means that it will automatically attach the right one without having to select anything. Your signature is available no matter which platform (mobile or workstation) you’re using, so it’s always attached to the emails that it should be. CodeTwo developed their “Web Add-in for Outlook” with Microsoft to give your whole organization access to their signatures with a mouse click.
Centrally Managed Signatures
When managing the entire organization’s email signatures, you can create rules about when to attach a signature. Using CodeTwo’s management apps, like the one for Microsoft 365, you can control whose emails get what signatures attached at the bottom.
Signatures can be added conditionally, so if you want internal and external signatures to be different from one another, for instance, you can set it up that way. You can also control signatures on a per user basis, which makes it very powerful: you could set up a separate signature for your sales team, for instance, with the type of branding and information that you would want a potential customer to see.
Another important element of managing the signatures is managing the permissions and delegation, which can be done without complicated modifications to Active Directory.
Design
For a visual medium like an HTML formatted email, the quality and unity of the design is very important. If you have a designer that you work with they can use the CodeTwo management software to help you achieve brand perfection. If you don’t have a designer, though, there are plenty of great-looking templates to choose from in the Template Editor (a standalone application).
The templates help you create a design with your logo, user photos, and social media links. There are other tricks, though, like using data placeholders for Active Directory data. This lets you design a signature that is then automatically filled with the name, title, and contact information of each employee. This makes creating a consistent signature for your whole team a snap.
-Written by Derek Jeppsen on Behalf of Sean Goss and Crown Computers Team