Your email signature is a useful piece of social media real estate that often gets forgotten. It's a great place to reinforce your branding, and point people to your website and social profiles. We're here to teach you how to build a beautiful, functional website signature - no coding required.
1. You'll need to collect all the elements you want to have in your email signature. We suggest the following list:
headshot
company logo
social media icons
You'll want to make sure that all of those are sized appropriately. For our example, we're going to size the headshot to 200x200 pixels and the social media icons to 50x50 pixels. Let's use Canva to achieve this in the next step.
2. Go to Canva and create a custom design that is 200x200 pixels. Select a circle frame from the elements tab, and extend it so it fills the whole design. Put your headshot in the frame. Now place your logo slightly offset. Then download the design as a PNG with a transparent background.
3. Now create a custom design that is 50x50 pixels. Select social media icons from the element tabs and customize them to your brand colors. Put each icon on a new slide and extend it to the whole design. Download them all as PNGs with transparent backgrounds.
4. Now it's time to open a new Google Doc (or any word processor, but we'll be using Google Doc because it's a free, accessible option). Insert a table that has 1 row and 2 columns. Don't worry about the black borders; we'll fix that later.
5. Click into the left column, and then click on the photo icon in the toolbar. Select "Upload from computer" and find your headshot/logo combo. After it's uploaded, pull the column divided over so it's just big enough to fit your headshot/logo combo.
6. In the right column, start typing your important information like: name, pronouns, job title, company, website, email address, phone number, company address, etc. Customize your fonts and colors to match your branding. Be sure to highlight your website and email address and hyperlink them (often Google Docs will do this automatically). Then reformat them to the color you prefer and remove the automatic underline.
7. Now it's time to add the social media icons. You can follow the process described in #5 to upload your images, or you can simply drag and drop them into the right column. After they're all in, add spaces between each of them to spread them out. Then hyperlink each one to your social media profiles.
8. Let's take care of those black borders. Hover over the border and highlight it. Hold down your shift key to highlight all of the borders. Then select the color button, and turn the borders to white.
9. Now highlight your whole signature, and copy it.
10. Go over to your Gmail (this process should be similar for any email provider), and click on the gear shift. Then click on "See all settings". Scroll down until you reach the "Signature". Click "Create New", and label your new signature.
11. Right click in the text area, and paste your signature into the box. Make sure you adjust the signature settings "FOR NEW EMAIL USE" and "ON REPLY/FORWARD USE" to use your new signature. Be sure to click "Save Changes" at the bottom of the page.
12. Now when you go to write a new email, your new signature will automatically appear.
The customization options are endless when you start designing your signature. You can even add in CTAs or links to recent news features. And if this process seems too intensive to you, reach out to us here to get a signature built for you.
