What are the best practices for centrally managed email signatures? Email signatures are a useful tool for businesses, but they need to be handled carefully to be as effective as they can be. For big businesses, it makes sense to centrally manage email signatures. That prevents a situation where everyone within the company has their own signature.
Such a situation would be disastrous as far as building your brand is concerned. On top of that, legal issues liabilities may arise for a company should certain information on an email signature turn out to be missing or incorrect. The following are the things to keep in mind when centrally managing email signatures;
Come up with an email signature blueprint
The first thing that you need to do is to come up with an email signature blueprint for your business. Large organizations will have different departments with different requirements, but there should be a core template that will showcase the company’s core symbols.
It’s important to make sure that the main components of your signature, such as colors, logos and other brand related materials are similar for everyone within your organisation. We are not saying that everyone’s signature should be the same, but the template should be as similar as is possible.
One thing about email signatures is that they are a good tool for boosting the visibility of your brand. That visibility can only be boosted by people seeing the same symbols for your brand in their inboxes. It will not work if everyone uses a different logo and different colors as an example.
Appoint one person to manage your email signatures
Centrally managing email signatures usually entails appointing one person to handle the task. Again, the goal should be to come up with uniformity in your email signatures. That’s important for large businesses.
When people receive messages from your company, there should be no doubt that they are communicating with you. Otherwise most of your messages will be deleted before being read. But how does centrally managing email signatures work?
Get Crossware to centrally manage your email signatures
Are there tools out there that allow businesses to centrally manage their email signatures? The answer is yes. It’s where we come in as Crossware. We are one of the world’s best known email signature management companies.
With Crossware you can create email signatures for everyone within your Organization no matter how big it may be. Our tool allows you to manage signatures for everyone from one dashboard.
That’s important considering what we have already been talking about. Crossware allows businesses to maintain control of the core elements of their signature, while still allowing departments within the company to customize the signature to suit their particular requirements.
What if you wish to make changes to your signature? How do you do so quickly for a company that has 1000 employees, as an example? With Crossware, you can make these changes within minutes. You can make and deploy your changes from your central management console in a matter of minutes.
Educate employees on the need to stick to the template
One common failing for organizations is that there is often no education for employees regarding the importance of sticking to the core email signature template. The result is that you will get situations where some people skip email signatures altogether.
It’s important, once you have come up with the core blueprint of email signatures within your company, to make sure that everyone is aware that they need to stick to it. Again, this is something that you can simplify using Crossware.
Our software gives you control, ensuring that all emails coming from your servers have an email signature bearing your brand’s information.
Make sure that your signature is consistent across all devices
A lot of people now access their emails on their phones or on their tablets. Some do so on extra large computer monitors. That brings out a lot of challenges for businesses looking to boost their visibility using email signatures.
How do you make sure that your signature is consistent on all devices? We have previously written on how to create responsive signatures for your emails. These signatures maintain the same look whatever the device on which they are accesses.
Remember your signature is first and foremost about perceptions. If it does not look good, people will not trust that your emails really are coming from a genuine company. Crossware makes it easy for businesses to create email signatures that are consistent across the board.
Large organizations should allow for some flexibility in design
Throughout this article, we have emphasized on the need to have a consistent design for email signatures across an organization. But does that mean everyone’s signature should be the same?
The answer is no. For large businesses, there should be leeway to edit the signature to suit a department’s particular needs. One way of doing this is by coming up with a number of templates from which departments can choose.
You can also get input from various departments before coming up with a central design for your signature. Remember to maintain consistency. Your email signature represents your brand and it should always be as good as it can be.
The great thing is that with a centralized email signature management tool like Crossware, everyone within your company can come up with stunning email signatures in minutes. You can learn more about our software by signing up for our free trial.