Social Media in Email Signatures: The Top 10 DOs & DON’Ts

Email as a familiar communications channel already has all the interaction most companies want out of social media. However, did you know that every email your company sends is an opportunity to increase your social reach?

Using social media in email signatures is a great way to boost your marketing initiatives and increase your brand awareness. Want to learn more? Read our Top 10 DOs & DON’Ts guide on using social media in email signatures below.

1. DO add social media icons to email signatures

If you’re not promoting your social media in email signatures, you are missing out on a great opportunity. Email signatures are the perfect avenue to introduce your customers to your Twitter feed, Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, and so on.

By including links to social media in email signatures, your stakeholders obtain another way to communicate with you. This increases their overall engagement with your brand.

2. DON’T include TOO many social media links

When it comes to using social media in email signatures, limit the number of links to a maximum of four. A signature should never appear too busy, so adding ten different social media buttons will be off-putting to recipients.

Also, remember that different stakeholders may use different social media channels. Your business partners may only be on LinkedIn, while consumers might prefer Facebook. Make sure social media icons in email signatures are tailored for various audiences.

3. DO use social media ‘icons’ rather than links

Including lots of links in an email signature simply looks messy. Use social media icons that users can click on to go straight to your company Twitter profile or Facebook page. This will often involve the use of HTML code to ensure they render correctly.

We also recommend hosting these images online rather than embedding them directly into the signature. This way, recipients don’t have to download the social media icons when they open your email.

4. DON’T add links to accounts that aren’t used

If you haven’t Tweeted for more than a year, don’t add a link to Twitter in your email signature. If you’ve previously included a link to Google Plus, remove it as the platform doesn’t exist anymore.

Recipients only ever want to read relevant and up-to-date content. Adding links to inactive social media profiles just wastes their time.

5. DO get free followers

Combine social media and email signatures to get loads of new fans for free. Links to social media in email signatures can easily boost your social traffic and increase your customers’ loyalty. This in turn widens the total audience interacting with your brand, providing additional marketing opportunities.

6. DO strengthen business relationships

If you only ever communicate over email, social media links create new opportunities for recipients to connect with your business. People are more likely to engage with your brand on social media if they have an existing relationship with you. This turns the social media links in your signature into new lead nurturing opportunities.

You could even use your email signature section to ask customers to share their experiences of dealing with your company socially. This works well on more informal social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

7. DON’T undervalue the power of social media and email signatures

Think about how many emails you send out daily and weekly. Every email you send is an opportunity to connect with a person in your social network and increase your social reach.

Social media in email signatures basically works as a free marketing tool. Each link can easily boost traffic to your social media pages, which could also increase traffic to your website.

8. DO pull social feeds into signatures

Keep your customers up-to-date with dynamic social media content such as a recent Tweet in your email signature. This is a great way to remind recipients of why they are associated with your company in the first place.

9. DON’T just take our word for it

Unilever added a simple LinkedIn ‘Follow’ link to its email signatures. It then went from 40,000 followers to 235,000 in less than 10 months.

In this case, subtly inviting suppliers and partners to become followers worked far better than using other marketing channels. Remember, Unilever is an organization that is unlikely to use email to contact shoppers directly. Instead, it uses social media to connect with suppliers, employees, and job candidates.

10. DO let Exclaimer help

With email signature software from Exclaimer, you can ensure you always use social media in email signature templates effectively. Whether you are on Office 365 (now Microsoft 365), G Suite (now Google Workspace) or Microsoft Exchange, you can easily add social media icons to email signatures with one click. From Facebook to Weibo, Exclaimer will help boost your social media activities with your corporate email signatures.

Since email signatures can be easily updated, you can include up-to-date news and invite recipients to interact with you. You can also automatically include your latest RSS post or Tweet in each email signature. This way, you can effectively utilize social media in email signatures in a high volume manner.