Long Standing Tradition

E-mail signatures are are a tradition that dates back to the beginning of the Internet, when the Internet was called the ARPANET. People who espouse a "cause" use e-mail signatures to advertise that cause. Other people use their signatures to give memorable quotations from books or poems. Many people use their signatures to advertise their personal web pages or their businesses. Because signatures are such a well-established custom, some e-mail programs allow you to create several signatures and then choose from them for your e-mail.

Advertising Through Signatures

Can signatures be an effective marketing medium for your web page? Yes! E-mail is becoming an accepted form of communication, and signatures piggy-back on your e-mail onto the screens of those with whom you correspond. Don't expect, however, that signatures will bring in a high percentage of the people who visit your site; they are a small part of your marketing strategy for your web site.

Signature Format

It is customary to place a signature at the end of the e-mail and to use a line of dashes to separate it from the body of the e-mail. For example, a signature containing a quotation might be the following.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
---- Robert Frost

Limitations On Signatures

In general, signatures should be short, two or three lines at the most. If the signatures are to be used in e-mail sent to discussion groups and e-mail lists, caution should be used, because some groups have policies about signatures.

The HTML Writers Guild (HWG) has a policy about signatures that persons must observe if they post to HWG e-mail discussion lists. My suggestion for signatures used on e-mail to HWG lists is to limit the signatures to one line, and to limit the wording to the name of the product or name of the company rather than to a "sales pitch".

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