How To Write A Professional Email Signature (2023)

A professional email signature will increase your response rate.

A signature allows your recipients to find out more information about you, which helps build your credibility.

In this article, I will show you how to write the perfect signature; I will also cover the following:

• How to write a professional email signature
• Reasons to add a signature to your cold emails
• Should you include links in your signature?
• Should you include an image in your signature?
• What if you’re using secondary domains?

How to write a professional email signature

I recommend that you follow the following format when creating your signature:

1st line: Name & title
2nd line: Company name
3rd line: Office address
4th line: Personal and office phone numbers
5th line: Email and domain

Below is an example of how this would look for my email address [email protected]:

George Wauchope | Founder
Emailchaser
13423 Streetname, Dallas, TX 28377
P: (832) 555 6453 O: (832) 532 6458
[email protected] | emailchaser.com

I recommend that you send your cold emails with Emailchaser because you are able to easily add a signature when creating campaigns.

Reasons to add a signature to your cold emails

There are two main reasons why you should add a signature to your cold emails:

1. A signature will dramatically increase your response rate.

2. A signature helps you stay compliant with laws and regulations such as the CAN-SPAM Act.

Regarding the first reason, people will only respond to your emails if they trust that you are a legitimate person.

A professional signature allows your recipients to quickly see key pieces of information about you and your company; this helps them decide whether to respond or not.

Regarding the second reason, most countries have anti-spam laws that require email senders to state their physical address.

The CAN-SPAM Act in the United States requires email senders to mention their physical location. The signature is the perfect place to add this information.

You can learn more about the legality of cold email by reading my article Cold Email vs Spam: Is It Legal To Send Unsolicited Email?

Should you include links in your signature?

I recommend that you don’t include any hyperlinks in your signature.

Adding links to your email (body or signature) can negatively impact your deliverability, meaning that your cold emails are more likely to go to spam.

I am not saying that just because you add a link to your email that it will go to spam. You might be ok adding a link or two.

However, in my opinion, it’s not worth the risk.

I recommend that you read my article Does Adding Links To A Cold Email Affect Deliverability? In this article, I discuss further how links can negatively affect your deliverability.

If you send your cold emails with Emailchaser, then your emails will be plain text by default (no links). You can read my other article Plain Text vs HTML to learn more about the difference.

Should you include an image in your signature?

You should not include any images in your signature.

Images can negatively affect your deliverability, meaning that your cold emails are more likely to go to spam.

I recommend that you only have plain text in your signature to be safe. If you send your cold email campaigns with Emailchaser, then your signature will be in plain text by default.

You can still set up a profile picture on your email account (which I recommend), but a profile picture is not the same thing as having an inline image in your signature.

What if you’re using secondary domains?

If you are scaling your cold email campaigns, then you need to use secondary domains to create additional email addresses so that you can increase your sending volume.

You can learn more about this in my article How To Safely Scale Up Your Cold Email Outreach.

The slightly confusing part of having secondary domains is that it then makes you ask the question: what should I write in my email signature for each email address?

Since each email address is associated with a different domain, should you include a different email address and domain in each signature?

In my opinion, it’s best that you include the email address and domain name that is associated with the secondary domain in your signature. Otherwise, you may confuse your recipients by having a different email address or domain in your signature than the email address that you sent your email from.

For example, below is how I would set up my email signature for [email protected] (remember that emailchaserpro.com redirects to emailchaser.com):

George Wauchope | Founder
Emailchaser
13423 Streetname, Dallas, TX 28377
P: (832) 555 6453 O: (832) 532 6458
[email protected] | emailchaserpro.com

The domain emailchaserpro.com is a secondary domain I used to create this email address (since I don’t want to send cold emails from my primary domain). You can see in the above example that I wrote: [email protected] | emailchaserpro.com

I am not writing my primary domain’s email and domain in the signature, I simply write the email and domain from my secondary domain in my signature.

Emailchaser allows you to add custom variables to your signature, meaning that it will automatically update the email address and domain in your signature to whatever your sending email address is.

This becomes useful when you send from many different email addresses. For example, you might be sending emails from 30 different email addresses in a single campaign; in this scenario, using custom variables in your signature allows you to update your signature automatically for each specific email address.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The best email signatures follow the following format:

1st line: Name & title
2nd line: Company name
3rd line: Office address
4th line: Personal and office phone numbers
5th line: Email and domain

Below is an example of how this would look for my email address [email protected]:

George Wauchope | Founder
Emailchaser
13423 Streetname, Dallas, TX 28377
P: (832) 555 6453 O: (832) 532 6458
[email protected] | emailchaser.com

I recommend that you send your cold email campaigns with Emailchaser as it allows you to easily add a plain text signature when creating campaigns.