How to Set-up and Utilize Your Gmail Signature

As I’ve mentioned before, I use Gmail for all {10} of my email address.

I love Gmail! 

I keep my Inbox neat and organized — and keep track of all the emails for my different email accounts — by setting up and utilizing  email “filters”.

However, I also create and use different signatures for each of my different email addresses.

So for example, my personal gmail signature is:

creator & editor :: Simple Organized Living

It’s simple. I like that!

But since I use different signatures for each of my email addresses — and I’m not willing to manually type out a different signature for each email I send — I rely on Gmail’s super cool feature that allows me to set up a different signature for each email address (you’ll obviously need to have those different email addresses set up already– which I’m not going to cover in this post)

STEP 1: Click on the “gear” in the top right corner of your gmail screen

STEP 2: Click on “settings”

STEP 3: You should already be in the “General” tab… but if not, click on “General”

STEP 4: Scroll down to where you see the signatures box and set up your signature

You can click on the drop-down menu to select different email addresses (if applicable) or you can just set up a signature for your single email address.

Also, you can use the editor buttons (across the top of the signature box) to add images, links, bold, italics, underlines, etc.

STEP 5: Scroll all the way down to the bottom and click “SAVE”!

Now the next time you compose a new email, your signature should show up even before you start typing anything.

A Few More Tips for Your Signature:

Keep It Simple

I don’t know about you, but I really dislike long, fancy signatures with lots of colors, fonts, graphics, links, etc. Maybe it’s because of my commitement to “simple, organized living” or maybe it’s just because I don’t like clutter… but I keep all my email signatures as simple as they can be while still directing people to my blog (or my VA blogs).

I know there are some companies that need to include disclosure languages and other legal jargon… but if that doesn’t apply to you, I’d suggest keeping things as simple as possible.

If you get an email from me personally, this is all you’re going to see:

Skip Images and Graphics

I guess this goes along with “keeping it simple” but when you use graphics in your signature, a little message box pops up whenever I open your email asking me to “show graphics”. So I need to click on that box to see your signature — for some reason, that annoys me 🙂

Remember Your URL

You would not believe how many emails I get from people {business people and other blog owners included} who include the name of their business in their signature, but don’t include the URL link… or worse, they don’t even include the name!

Hello!

Think about how many emails you send every day… and if even half of those people clicked on your website/blog link, it could have a big effect on your traffic.

However, I get an equal number of emails with 87 crazy links to every blog article, social media site, etc. etc. I don’t want to look at all that either… and I’m certainly not going to waste my time clicking on every link!

As I mentioned above, I only use ONE url link in my signature… and that’s for my blog. I figure if I send people to my blog, they can find any contact information they need (including links to my social media sites). Plus, if I only have ONE link for them to click on, they might be more curious to “learn more” and actually click on it!

 

If you don’t have an email signature set up, do it now! And if you DO have an email signature… it might just be time for a little editing 🙂

How do you set up your email signature?