15 Email Signature Tips That Actually Make a Difference
Short, practical rules for a signature that looks sharp in every inbox — and the mistakes that quietly make yours look amateur.
By Editorial Team, Editors, SignatureCraft · Updated 2026-10-12 · 7 min
Fifteen practical email signature tips covering content, layout, fonts, images, links and testing, with the reasoning behind each one.
Content: say less, say it clearly
1. Lead with your name, then your role. Readers scan top to bottom, and the first line should answer “who is this?” before anything else. Your job title answers the second question: “why are they writing to me?”
2. Keep it to four to six lines of contact detail. Name, title, company, one phone number, email or website. Every extra line dilutes the ones that matter, and long signatures get clipped in reply threads.
3. Pick one phone number. Listing office, mobile and fax forces the reader to decide which to use. Choose the number you actually answer.
4. Drop the quote. Inspirational quotes age badly and can clash with the tone of a difficult email. If you want personality, let the design carry it.
Layout and typography
5. Build with tables, not modern layout code. Outlook on Windows uses a word-processor engine to display email, and it ignores most modern layout techniques. Table-based signatures are the only layout that holds up everywhere.
6. Use web-safe fonts with a backup listed. Arial, Georgia, Verdana and Tahoma are installed almost everywhere. Custom fonts silently fall back to Times New Roman in many apps.
7. Set font sizes in pixels: 16–18px for your name, 13–14px for details. Anything below 12px becomes unreadable on phones.
8. Fix the line height in pixels. Relative spacing gets reinterpreted by some apps, which is why signatures suddenly look double-spaced in Outlook. Our style guide shows the exact code that prevents it.
Images and links
9. Host images online instead of embedding them. Embedded images show up as attachments or get blocked. A hosted logo loads like any web image.
10. Always add alt text to images. Many apps block images until the reader allows them; alt text means your company name still appears.
11. Keep the logo small — around 100–150px wide. A giant logo pushes your details below the fold on phones.
12. Link your phone number with a tap-to-call link so phone users can call in one tap, and make sure your email address and website are real links too.
Testing and upkeep
13. Send a test to yourself in Gmail, Outlook and on your phone before rolling it out. Each app changes something.
14. Check dark mode. Logos with see-through backgrounds and very dark text can vanish when the reader’s app flips colours.
15. Review your signature every six months. Titles, numbers and social profiles change faster than people update their signatures.
Want the code-level detail behind tips 5–8? The Signature Style Guide shows each rule with a working example next to the common mistake, exactly as Outlook and iPhone Mail display it.
Put these tips into practice
The SignatureCraft editorial team writes about email tooling, deliverability and the small design details that quietly shape how professional we look online.