Email signature banner: how to use it for your campaigns

Every day, your teams send emails to customers, candidates and partners. The signature at the bottom of each one is almost certain to be read. Used well, an email signature banner turns that space into a small campaign channel, with no extra send. Used badly, it is just noise. Here is how to put it to work in your campaigns.

What is a banner in an email signature for?

A banner is a clickable image placed under the contact details. It carries one timely message to people you are already in touch with. The most common uses:

• An event or trade show: announce your presence, a booth, a talk, a meeting slot to book.
• A webinar: date, topic and registration link, in the weeks leading up to it.
• A launch: a new product, an offer, a recent publication.
• Hiring: "we are hiring", with a link to your job page, useful when every employee has a network.
• Company news: an annual report, a certification, an open day.

Its strength is the audience: recipients already know the sender, and the message arrives inside a real conversation, not as one more newsletter. Its role stays modest: catch the eye and send people to a page that does the actual persuading.

Best practices: one message, one link, a set duration

An effective banner comes down to a few simple rules.

1. One message. A banner announcing a webinar, a trade show and an offer gets none of them across. Pick what matters most this month.
2. One link. It leads to a page built for that message: registration, programme, openings. Not the site's home page.
3. Reasonable dimensions. The banner must fit within the width of the signature, around 600 pixels at most, so it does not overflow on a phone. Keep the file light and the height modest: it should not take more room than the contact details.
4. Readable text. A few words, large, with strong contrast. If the text is unreadable on a phone screen, it is unreadable for half your readers.
5. Alternative text. Some email clients block images, so the alt text should say the essentials ("Webinar on 12 November: register"), letting the message get through even without the image.
6. A limited duration. A start date and an end date. No banner "until further notice".

A simple test: show the banner for three seconds to a colleague who does not know the campaign. If they cannot say what is being offered, simplify.

Remember the signature itself too: the banner complements the basics, it does not replace them. Our guide on what to put in a professional email signature covers that foundation.

Targeting: not everyone needs to see the same banner

A hiring campaign makes no sense in the signature of teams that are not recruiting. An invitation to a trade show makes no sense for a subsidiary that will not exhibit. The closer the banner is to what the sender actually does, the more natural it looks to the recipient.

Think about the audience before designing the visual:

• by team or department: sales for a trade show invitation, HR for hiring, support for a product update;
• by subsidiary or country: a local event concerns local teams, in their language;
• by language: the banner, its text and its alt text should be in the language of the person writing, not that of head office.

Tight targeting has another benefit: it stops messages from piling up. If two campaigns reach the same people at the same time, one of them is one too many.

Planning: a calendar instead of improvised banners

The most useful banners are prepared. Get into the habit of keeping a short campaign calendar, with, for each campaign:

• the message and the landing page;
• the team, subsidiary or language concerned;
• the start and end dates;
• the person who approves the visual;
• what you intend to measure.

Plan the end from the start. For an event, a sensible end is the day after the event, not the following month. Leave a gap between two campaigns too, even a few days: it keeps a banner from being replaced before it has been seen, and gives you time to review the results.

One last practical point: a signature is deployed across many computers. If everyone has to paste the image themselves, you will get different versions, some of them out of date. It is better to have a single place to manage it, applying the same banner to the whole audience on the same dates.

Mistakes to avoid

• The permanent banner. It ends up unseen and, worse, announcing a past event. Every banner has an end date.
• A heavy image. It slows display and weighs down every message sent.
• An image with no alt text. If images are blocked, the recipient sees an empty box, or nothing at all.
• Several campaigns at once. Two banners stacked compete with each other, and the signature becomes a noticeboard.
• Tiny text. On a phone, it disappears.
• A link to a generic page. A reader who clicked should find at once what was promised.
• The same banner for everyone. It speaks to everybody and to nobody.
• A visual outside your brand guidelines. The signature is part of your brand: colours, typography and tone should follow the rest of your communication.

Measuring clicks without fooling yourself

To know whether a campaign worked, the most reliable measure is to count clicks on the banner. Open counts are misleading: some email clients load images in advance or through an intermediary server, which skews the numbers. A click, by contrast, is a deliberate action.

A few habits help you read the results:

• Set a question before launching. For example: how many people registered for the webinar thanks to this banner?
• Use campaign parameters in the link (UTM parameters), so that visits coming from the signature show up separately from other sources in your web analytics tool.
• Compare like with like. Relate clicks to the number of people who received the banner, rather than comparing raw totals between teams of different sizes.
• Test one variable at a time. Two visuals or two wordings, on comparable groups, with only one thing changing.
• Keep the measurement in perspective. A signature reaches fewer people than a newsletter. Modest numbers are normal; what matters is the trend from one campaign to the next.

When the campaign ends, write down what you learned: which message, visual and audience worked best. That is what makes the next campaign better.

In short

A signature banner carries one timely message: an event, trade show, hiring drive, launch or webinar. It works when it is single, readable, light, backed by alt text, aimed at the relevant teams and limited in time. The classic mistakes are the permanent banner, the heavy image and stacked campaigns. Measure clicks, not opens. Brandesk lets you schedule banners with start and end dates, target them by department, subsidiary or group and follow their clicks; see the company email signature page.