When you set up your own business, there are so many things that you now have to do that sometimes its hard to remember everything!  One of the small things that sometimes gets overlooked is your email.  I often receive emails from businesses that will just have the name of the person as a signature, if I’m lucky it may include the company name 🙂

Personally I think it gives a more professional image if you at least include contact details under your name.  What’s the point in spending a small fortune setting up a great website only to be let down by your email?

I suppose the most common email programme is Outlook, the steps below show you how to set up a custom email signature:-

Firstly got to Tools (in the toolbar), and click Options.

Go to the Mail Format tab, and in the Signature section – click Signatures…

If this is the first signature you’ve created, then the preview pane should be empty – click on New…

Type in a name for the signature e.g. Business, and click Next

You can now type in the text of your signature and format it how you wish using the Font / Paragraph buttons, then click Finish.

You can then see the name of your signature (i.e. Business) and what the signature looks like in the preview pane.  Should you want to edit this signature after creating it, just highlight the signature name and click Edit, if you want to delete it totally, highlight the signature name and click remove.

If, like me, you have email through your web host (I have mine with Blacknight), then it should also be fairly straight forward:-

There should be an option called Settings or Tools somewhere on your main toolbar.

This should take you to your account settings where you can set the date / time format, language etc.  On this page should be an option called Signature or Email Signature where you can type in the details you want to appear at the end of all outgoing emails.  It’s best to include your contact details & website address (if you have one).

I also think its handy if you include your Twitter & Facebook links (again, if you have them), the more ways the recipient has of contacting you the better (in my opinion).  With this in mind, my full signature looks like this:-

It may seem quite long but all the information is there for the recipient to use (if they want to, of course :)).