10 Ways To Make Your Email Signature More Interesting

We include email signatures with every message we send, but often don't put much thought into the signature itself. You can make yours stand out with some simple techniques like using colors, including emoji or clever combinations of characters, images and more.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at ten ways to make your email signatures more interesting.
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So with every email we send we usually include an email signature. You can customize those in the Mail app on your Mac. But you don't have to settle for just some plain text with your name and your email address. You can make your email signatures more useful and interesting.
To access your signatures in the Mac Mail app go to Mail, Preferences, and then click on Signatures. Then you'll see a list of signatures in the middle. So here I have a basic signature. Let's see if we can do better than that. I'm going to create a new signature here. The first thing I want to do is add a divider line. You can use any number of characters for that. You could add some simple dashes. You could add a bunch of equal signs for a thicker one. You could use any character you want to create a division between the text in the email and your signature. Something like ten equal signs will usually do.
Now I usually think it's silly to have your email address repeated in the signature. It's already there if the person wants to reply to you. Instead I like to use this space for a URL. If you have a URL like this most email readers will actually make that clickable so somebody will click on that and go to your website which could be very useful. If you want to make extra sure that it's clickable you could add http with or without an s colon slash slash to it to make sure that app on the other end showing the email understands this is a URL.
Another thing you could do is you can style and color the text. Coloring is particularly unusual in a signature and will make it standout. So I can select this here. If I use the Format menu I can go to Show Colors here and I'll select a color for the selected text. Make it red, for instance. Maybe make this blue. It could help make it standout. Another thing you could do is you could add emoji characters. They're universal and should appear on most modern computers. So if you bring up the Emoji Viewer with Option Command Space you can view all of these different emojis and pick one that will help your signature standout.
Now whatever special characters and things you use in your signature if somebody can't see it then it doesn't really matter. There's a option down here, Place signature above quoted text. So if you quote a lot of text and have a response at the top instead of your signature being all the way down at the bottom where nobody is going to scroll to see it, it will be just below what you've typed. This makes it much more visible.
Now in addition to using emoji you could also use something called ASCIImoji. That's when you take standard characters and combine them to make a little illustration. If you search for ASCIImoji it will comes up with lots of websites that list them. It's basically a combination of ASCII, which is the type of characters we use on the computer, and emoji. So for instance you can just go to a website like this one. It'll show a bunch of them. You can Copy and then Paste into your signature to add a little personality.
You can also take characters and spell out text, like your name, but larger than in normal text. Search for Text Banner Generator online and you'll come up with sites that will do this for you. For instance here's an example. I could have Gary spelled out and using a bunch of different methods it could spell it out all sorts of cool interesting ways. If I find one that I really like I can paste that into my signature. You definitely don't want to use too many characters there else it will be too long and wrap around and break in the signature. But if you keep it simple like that and you remember to turn off Always match my default message font, and instead go in and choose a Fixed With font like Courrier. Once you have that set and then pasted in usually you can get it to work.
Now of course you can also include an image. So you can just drag and drop it an image from a file in the Finder into your signature. It helps if the image is already sized appropriately. So this one is a little bit too big. I would instead open it up in Preview here. Then I'll go to Tools, Adjust Size and make it something much smaller. So let's say make it 60 pixels by 60 pixels. You can see that's a little bit better. Then I could export that to a smaller file and bring that little one in. You can see that works out a little bit better. 
I don't like using images in signatures because this means that every email you send is going to have an attachment. I hate getting emails with attachments when they're really aren't attachments. There's no real document with it. It's just an image in a signature.
Now in addition to enhancing each individual signature it's useful to have multiple signatures. So you can add a new signature and have it be, maybe, a professional one. Have another one that is maybe just one for friends where you just have your first name. You can have another one, maybe, for side projects where you have some other website name there. Remember to add those to that email account. So I can add them to this account here. Now when I create a new email message coming from that account I can choose which signature to use and customize it for every email I send.
When you have many signatures for a single account you can select Choose Signature here and you can choose the default signature to use. But you can also choose At Random or In Sequential Order which means it can go through all of these and use a different one each time. This is where you could, say, put little quotes or have slightly different information about yourself each time, Your signature may standout a little bit more if it's a little bit different every time you send an email.

Comments: 3 Responses to “10 Ways To Make Your Email Signature More Interesting”

Chris Laarman

5 years ago

Gary, I always appreciate your efforts. :-)
However, this time:

I don't want any of my signatures to distract from the body of my message. (Nor do I want subject lines to.)

Gary Rosenzweig

Chris: Yes, that is actually what I do too. But I know a lot of people like to get creative with their signatures.

Ruth Burig

Thanks, Gary.....Although you lost me at the end of this segment - I will definitely be able to use most of the info. I love frequently changing my signature!

Comments Closed.

10 Ways To Make Your Email Signature More Interesting

Comments: 3 Responses to “10 Ways To Make Your Email Signature More Interesting”

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