What makes a good email signature (and what to leave out)
· 5 min read
An email signature is read in a second and skimmed on a phone. Most of the advice about them is aesthetic; the parts that actually matter are about restraint, contrast and how mail clients render HTML.
Include what a reply needs
A signature answers one question: how does this person reach me and who are they? Everything past that competes with the message.
- Name, and the job title that explains why you're emailing.
- Company name, and a logo if you have one.
- One reliable phone number — not three.
- Your email address, which matters more than people expect when messages get forwarded.
- A website, and only the social profiles you actually maintain.
What to leave out
Inspirational quotes, large images of handwritten signatures, and full postal addresses all add height without adding use. Long legal disclaimers push the actual message off a phone screen entirely — keep them short, or keep them for the industries that legally require them.
Avoid background images. Outlook renders them inconsistently, and text over an image that fails to load can become unreadable.
Design for the worst client, not the best
Signatures must survive Outlook, which uses a rendering engine that ignores much modern CSS. That is why well-built signatures are still table-based with inline styles.
Keep total width around 400 to 600 pixels. Wider layouts wrap awkwardly on mobile.
Check contrast: light grey text on white looks refined on your monitor and disappears on a phone in daylight.
Consistency across a team
Left to themselves, a ten-person team produces ten different signatures. The fix is a single template where individual details are filled in per person, rather than a document everyone edits by hand.
In Mudra this is what merge fields do: one template containing tokens such as {FullName} and {JobTitle} renders each person's own details.
Frequently asked
Should I put my photo in my email signature?＋
It helps in relationship-led work such as sales, recruiting and real estate, where recognition matters. It adds little in internal or transactional email. If you use one, keep it small and hosted at a URL rather than embedded.
How long should an email disclaimer be?＋
As short as your obligations allow. A one or two line confidentiality notice is normal. Multi-paragraph disclaimers are longer than most of the emails they follow and are routinely ignored.
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