Courtesy and signatures

All those intros and sign-offs that are a staple of professional business communications should also be used in your business e-mail communications. Not doing so could have your messages be misinterpreted as demanding or terse. Always include a salutation and sign off that includes your name with every e-mail. Here again – think business letterhead.

Courtesy also includes that you make the effort to communicate as an educated adult. Type in full sentences with proper sentence structure. Not all caps; not all small case. Proper capitalisation and punctuation are a must! You are an educated professional and need to communicate as such. All caps or all small case smacks of either lack of education, tech/business savvy — or laziness. None of which is positive for instilling confidence or encouraging others to want to do business with you.

Signatures

Limit your signature to your name, website link, company name, and slogan/offer or phone number. Include a link to your Website where the recipient can get all your contact information from A-Z – that is what your site is for. You can also include emoticon links to social media pages.

Do not forget to include the “https://” when including your Website address within e-mails and your signature file to ensure the URL is recognized as a clickable URL regardless of the user’s software or platform.

There are some great examples of creative and interactive signature blocks at Customer Thermometer, but be conscious you may be bound by a marketing policy or requirement for a standardised and “accepted” signature block.