Email signature examples and templates

You've probably received a signature with a stray vertical bar floating between nothing and nothing, or a phone icon sitting next to empty space, or a divider line with no content beneath it.

That happens because most templates are built as fixed layouts with separators hard-coded between the fields. Leave out the office phone and the separator that was supposed to sit beside it stays exactly where it was.

Every template here collapses instead. Skip a field and the row disappears, along with its icon, its separator, and its spacing. Fill in two fields or twelve and the result is clean either way.

Four things do almost all the work:

Your name. Not your email address rendered as a name, not a nickname. The name someone would use to find you.

What you do. A job title, or a plain description of your role if your title is internal jargon nobody outside the company would recognise.

Where you work. Company name, and a department only if your organisation is large enough that it narrows things usefully.

One way to reach you that isn't email. They already have your email. They're reading it. A phone number, a booking link, or a website gives them a second option.

That's a complete signature. Everything after this point is optional and each addition costs a little attention.

Worth adding if it applies to you:

A photo, if you meet people through email who'll later meet you in person. A recruiter, a real estate agent, or a consultant benefits; an internal engineer usually doesn't.

Credentials, where they're the reason someone trusts you: medical, legal, accounting, anything licensed.

A license or registration number, where your profession requires you to display one. Real estate and financial services usually do.

Pronouns, if you want them there.

A legal disclaimer, if your organisation requires one. Nobody reads them, but that isn't your decision to make.

Leave out:

Your email address. They have it. Inspirational quotes. "Sent from my iPhone" (you can turn that off). Every social platform you've ever joined. One or two that you actually use. An environmental footer asking people not to print emails. Your full postal address, unless people genuinely send you post.

Three to five lines. Six if you have credentials or a required disclaimer.

The reason is arithmetic rather than taste. Most email is read on a phone, where a signature that runs eight lines occupies most of the screen before anyone reaches your actual message. And on a reply chain, your signature repeats every single time. A long one turns a three-message exchange into a wall.

That's also the argument for a shorter signature on replies than on new emails. Most clients let you set two. The first message can carry the full version; the follow-ups only need your name and a phone number.

If you're at five lines and everything feels essential, the usual culprit is a separate line for each contact method. Phone and website on one line, separated by a divider, reads fine and saves two.

One that's already installed on the recipient's device, which in practice means a short list.

Email doesn't support web fonts the way websites do. If you specify a font the recipient doesn't have, their client substitutes something else, and your careful choice becomes whatever their default happens to be. Specifying an unusual font mostly means giving up control of how your signature looks.

The fonts that render essentially everywhere: Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana, Tahoma, and Trebuchet MS.

Arial and Helvetica are the safe defaults. Georgia if you want something with more character and a slightly traditional feel. Verdana and Tahoma hold up better at small sizes, which matters more than it sounds when your signature renders at 12px on a phone.

Whatever you pick, use one font throughout. A signature mixing two typefaces reads as a design exercise rather than contact details.

On size: 12 to 14 pixels for your details, and no smaller than 10 for a legal footer. Below that it stops being readable on a phone, which defeats the purpose of including it.

Around 100 to 150 pixels on the longest edge, and under 50KB.

Signature images render small: a headshot displays at roughly the height of two or three lines of text. Uploading something 2000 pixels wide doesn't make it sharper; it makes every email you send heavier, and some clients downscale it badly on the way.

Export at twice the display size for sharpness on high-resolution screens, then stop. A 150px logo displaying at 75px is the right amount of headroom.

Two things worth knowing before you rely on an image at all. Many corporate mail servers block external images by default, so a recipient may see a placeholder where your logo should be. And an image can't carry information that isn't also written in text. If your logo is the only place your company name appears, it's invisible to anyone whose client blocks it.

Directly after your name, or on the line below it. Both are common and neither looks unusual.

Jordan Lee (she/her) Brand Manager

Or:

Jordan Lee she/her Brand Manager

The short form (she/her, he/him, they/them) is standard. There's no need for the longer she/her/hers construction unless you prefer it.

Placement matters more than format: pronouns belong with your name, because that's what they refer to. Tucked at the bottom beside a phone number they read as an afterthought.

Whether to include them is your call, and some organisations have a policy either way. The field is there if you want it.