What should you put in a professional email signature?

A signature with too little in it looks careless. One with too much tires the reader and breaks on a phone screen. Between the two sits a simple set of content that you can define once for the whole company. Here is what to include, what to leave out, and how to keep it readable on mobile.

The essentials of a professional email signature

A good signature answers three questions: who is writing, for which company, and how to reach them. In most cases a few lines are enough:

• first and last name, in plain text, at the top;
• job title, as it appears in the company directory;
• company name, with the logo;
• one or two ways to get in touch: a direct or mobile number, and the website address;
• any details specific to your legal entity, if they are expected in your correspondence.

For those details (legal form, registered office, registration number, confidentiality notice), rules vary by country and by type of company. Have your legal team approve the list entity by entity rather than copying someone else's signature.

A simple test: if a piece of information does not help identify the person, reach them, or meet an obligation of the company, it probably does not belong in the signature.

Remember too that the sender's email address already appears in the message header. Repeating it in the signature only helps when a message is printed or forwarded as plain text.

Logo and photo: how to include them without bloat

The logo anchors the signature in the company's identity. It should be sharp, modest in size, and saved at a resolution high enough to stay clean on high-density screens. Avoid pasting it from an old document: you quickly end up with a blurry, stretched or outdated logo.

A photo is optional. It humanizes the exchange, especially in sales and customer-facing roles, but it only makes sense if the whole team can follow the same rule. Photos in very different styles (framing, background, lighting) undermine the consistency of the whole. If you use them, pick one format for everyone, such as a square or round headshot, and get each person's agreement.

A signature is not meant to replace a business card. If you need to share more (address, social profiles, booking link), a digital business card reached through a single link does better than ten extra lines under every message.

Links and social profiles: few, but useful

Every link is an entry point: it should lead somewhere useful and stay valid for a long time. A few principles:

1. A link to the company website, always.
2. A professional profile (LinkedIn, for example) only if the employee actually keeps it up.
3. An action link (book a meeting, request a demo) for teams that have a use for it.
4. No dormant networks: an icon pointing to an abandoned account hurts the brand.

Write full https:// addresses and test them. For icons, four or five at most, all the same size and spaced far enough apart to be tapped with a finger. If you track clicks, agree on a shared convention for campaign addresses from the start, so results stay comparable.

The banner: useful, if you use it sparingly

A banner turns the signature into a small communication space: an event, a webinar, a recent publication. It can be very effective, but it has three limits worth knowing.

• It is an image. Some email clients block images by default, so the essential information should never live in the banner alone. Give it clear alt text.
• It takes up room. In a thread with many replies, a banner repeated in every message clutters the conversation. A shorter version of the signature for replies is often better.
• It expires. A banner promoting a past event looks neglected. Every campaign needs a start date and an end date.

One banner at a time, with one message and one call to action, remains the safest rule.

Mobile and readability: design for the small screen

A large share of business email is read on a phone, between meetings. A signature that looks perfect on a big screen can become unreadable on a small one.

A few settings make the difference:

• A single column where possible. Multi-column layouts break more easily on mobile.
• A reasonable width, around 500 to 600 pixels, to avoid horizontal scrolling.
• Body text of at least 12 to 13 px, in a standard font (Arial, Verdana or similar) available everywhere.
• Strong contrast between text and background, checked in dark mode too: a logo with a dark, transparent background can vanish on black.
• Well-spaced tap targets, so a thumb does not hit the wrong link.
• A tappable phone number, which starts a call in one gesture.

Always test with real messages, sent to several email clients and opened on both a phone and a computer. Also look at how the signature appears when images are blocked: the name, job title and contact details should remain readable as text.

What to avoid in an email signature

• Quotes and fashionable slogans. They date quickly and give the recipient nothing.
• Decorative fonts. If they are not installed on the recipient's device, they are silently replaced.
• Important text inside an image, such as a phone number baked into a picture: it cannot be copied, tapped, or read by screen readers.
• Heavy images, which slow down display and can push a message toward the spam folder.
• Endless disclaimers. A useful legal notice is short; if it takes more space than the message, review it with your legal team.
• Colors and styles that differ from person to person. Inconsistency, more than any single detail, is what looks makeshift.
• Outdated information: old job title, old number, old address. These are hard to spot because everyone manages their own signature.

That last point is the costliest over time. Once the content is defined, the safest approach is to generate it from the directory rather than leave it to each person. Our guide on how to standardize email signatures across your company covers the method in detail.

In short

A professional signature fits in a few lines: name, job title, company and logo, one or two ways to get in touch, and the details required for your entity. Everything else (photo, social links, banner) is optional and should stay simple, readable on mobile and identical across the team. Brandesk generates these signatures from your directory and installs them in Gmail and Outlook, which prevents drift from person to person; see the company email signature page.