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You’ve crafted the perfect cold email: an eye-catching subject line, an engaging introduction, a compelling pitch, and a persuasive call to action (CTA).
Sadly, you’ve forgotten one key element: your cold email signature.
Without a high-quality signature, you’re not going to generate the clicks, replies, and sales your cold outreach campaigns deserve. That’s why we’ve written this article to share our top tips for creating effective signatures for cold emails.
Let’s get into it…
What Is a Cold Email Signature?
A cold email signature is a short section of copy (plus, optionally, links and images) at the end of an outreach message that incorporates elements like:
Your full name
Your job title
A headshot
Your professional contact details
Links to social proof (like awards, accreditations, and/or social media profiles)
A calendar link (or some other sort of CTA)
Many cold emailers think their signature is nothing more than a signoff, but it’s actually a lot more important than that. By clearly explaining who you are, who you work for, and what role you perform, it’s more like a brief (but information-packed) introduction that demonstrates your expertise.
When most people open an email, they’ll automatically glance at the signature to understand who sent it. If your signature is smart and professional, you’ll be one step closer to getting a response.
Benefits of Creating Professional Signatures for Cold Email
Let’s make one thing clear:
A high-quality signature isn’t going to single-handedly transform a poor-performing cold email campaign.
But an email signature is part of the fundamentals of cold outreach, and getting it right can make a real difference to the results you generate. (Plus, once you’ve created an engaging cold email signature, you won’t have to do it again — it’s a real quick win).
Let’s look at three key benefits of designing an impactful cold email signature:
Improved Cold Email Response Rate
Simply put, prospects are more likely to take action after reading your cold email if it contains an effective signature. In fact, one study found that, on average, B2B outreach campaigns incorporating attractive signatures generated:
22% more clicks
32% more email replies
10% growth in social media reach
15% more leads
One-third more replies, just from leveling up your email signature? Surely that’s too good to be true?
Actually, it kind of stands to reason. Would you respond to a cold email that didn’t include a signature? Probably not, right? And you’d probably be even more likely to reply if the signature effectively demonstrated the writer’s credentials.
Improved Credibility
An astonishing 94% of organizations say they’ve fallen victim to phishing attacks, of which 79% began with a phishing email. So it’s hardly surprising that many of your prospects will feel a little suspicious when you first reach out to them.
Your email signature can help to put prospects’ minds at risk by making it clear that you’re a legit person, not a scammer trying to steal their information.
Plus all those trust factors you include in your signature — like award wins and industry accreditations — can differentiate you from all those other cold emailers by making you look like a bona fide expert.
Improved Brand Awareness
Last but not least, your cold email signature can help boost brand recognition — especially if you add your company logo alongside the name. That way, even if the prospect isn’t ready to buy (or reply) right now, they’re more likely to sit up and take notice next time they spot one of your brand’s social media ads or stumble across your website on a search engine results page.
8 Best Practices for Creating Effective Cold Email Signatures
So we’re agreed: the stronger your cold email signature, the more credible you look, increasing your chances of turning email opens into clicks, replies, leads, and sales.
That just leaves us with one key question: what does it take to craft a winning cold email signature?
Easy — just follow these best practices!
Keep It Simple and Professional
Don’t try to be too smart when creating your cold email signature.
You don’t need to add a gif rather than a static headshot. And you don’t need to share your favorite quote or movie or Dutch Golden Age painter (shout out to all my Vermeer heads). If it doesn’t explain who you are, what you do, and why the recipient should trust you, it’s just wasted noise.
The very best signatures are clean, clear, and concise. Just like this example:
No wasted words; no flashy graphics; no unnecessary links; no distracting fonts or color schemes. It doesn’t take up too much space, but it still makes room for all the most important information.
Simple, right?
Use a Simple Color Palette
The “S” word again.
Simplicity is your best friend when choosing a color scheme for your cold email signature. Sure, adding a neon green CTA button and bright red text will definitely help it stand out — but that’s not actually an email signature’s main purpose.
Thing is, people already know where to find your signature: right there at the bottom of the email. If they want to know who you are (which they almost certainly do), they’ll be drawn to it anyway. So it’s far better to keep your signature more low-key so it doesn’t distract from the most important elements of your cold email, namely the:
Pitch
Call to action
For that reason, we recommend choosing muted tones that echo your brand’s color scheme. That way, if people click through from your signature to your website or social media profiles, they’ll see a consistent design aesthetic.
Add Useful Links
Not everyone will feel comfortable clicking links in your cold email signature — remember, there’s a whole lot of scammers out there.
Still, links are a helpful way to share key information that might not fit into your cold email copy, making it easier for prospects to understand if your product or service is a good fit for their needs. If they decide it is, there’s a good chance they’ll reply.
There’s tons of stuff you can link to in your cold email signature, including your:
LinkedIn profile
Corporate social media accounts
Company and/or personal website
Latest lead magnet or blog post
Specific product or service pages
Reviews on a third-party platform (e.g. G2 or Trustpilot)
However, we’ve got one word of caution: before you cram your signature full of links, bear in mind that adding too many could harm your email deliverability by triggering spam filters. Three to five should be fine, but be as selective as possible.
Humanize Your Email Signature With a Professional Headshot
As the old adage goes: “People buy from people.”
If you can add a little personality in your cold emails, you’re more likely to break the ice and build a connection with your prospects. And one of the simplest (and most effective) ways to demonstrate your personality is by adding a professional headshot to your signature.
Letting email readers put a face to the name makes you feel more human, which helps your prospects feel more engaged with your words. And it also creates a more memorable experience, simply because not everyone includes a headshot in their signature.
All that being said, it might not be worth adding a headshot, because many email providers (including Gmail and Outlook) already allow you to include a profile picture in your contact details. So this one’s kind of a judgment call.
Incorporate Social Proof
“Social proof” is a fancy-sounding psychological phenomenon that basically means: “We like doing the same thing as lots of other people.”
It’s the reason we’re more inclined to like social posts that already have lots of other likes.
Use this to your advantage by adding social proof indicators to your email signature. That might include:
Links to case studies
References to industry awards and accreditations won by you or your company
Links to social media profiles (ideally with lots of followers)
Review scores from platforms like G2
All of that stuff helps prospects feel confident that you’re worth listening to. Which, in turn, makes them more likely to reply to your cold emails.
Include a Call To Action
No one sends cold emails for the sake of it. You do it to drive some sort of action, like encouraging prospects to book a meeting or request a price quote. Yet far too many cold emails fail because they don’t make it clear what the reader should do next.
Fact is, most people who open your emails will only spend a couple seconds skimming through to pick out the key information and understand what you’re asking them. So don’t expect to get many (or any) responses with a vague or confusing CTA.
You should already be adding clear calls to action to the end of your cold email copy. But it’s worth reinforcing your message by including a CTA button in your email signature, too, just like in this example:
It doesn’t necessarily need to be a dedicated button — a few actionable, hyperlinked words can work just as well.
Struggling to write impactful calls to action? Get inspired by checking out our roundup of 100+ cold email CTAs.
Share Your Physical Address
There are two main reasons to add your physical business address to your email signature:
Letting prospects know that they could come knock on your office door if they need to builds trust in your brand.
Adding a street address to emails is a legal requirement of the US CAN-SPAM Act (and various other national email laws and regulations).
So unless you fancy falling foul of the FTC — which you definitely don’t — it’s well worth including a physical address in your signature. This could be the actual street location of your business, a PO box, a virtual mailbox, or even the address of a business partner.
You can also make your signature look even more legit by linking your address to a platform like Google Maps, making it easier for prospects to verify that you’re the real deal.
Add Your Company Logo
We’ve already mentioned that increasing your brand awareness is one of the biggest benefits of creating an effective signature for cold emails.
And if brand recognition is your goal, it makes sense to add your corporate logo to your signature. Just like in this example:
This isn’t just about making your business look more credible.
If you’re running omnichannel outreach campaigns, prospects won’t just encounter your company in their email inboxes. If they receive a direct mailer or see a LinkedIn ad carrying your logo, there’s a good chance they’ll associate it with the cold emails you’ve sent them.
All of which helps to make your messaging more memorable.
Get More Cold Email Replies With QuickMail
There’s a good chance that you’re reading an article about writing an engaging cold email signature because you want to improve your outreach response rate.
In which case we’d definitely recommend checking out QuickMail. It comes with bulk actions to create and edit personalized signatures for each sending inbox. And it does much more than that…
We built QuickMail with a single goal in mind: helping our users get more cold emails delivered. And the more of your emails hit the main inbox, the more opens, replies, and sales you’ll earn. That’s why we offer:
Free email auto warmup with every plan
Multiple inboxes per campaign so you can scale email sends without sacrificing deliverability
Expert customer support to help hone your approach and hit more inboxes
But don’t take our word for it.
