How to add an email signature

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This video is brought to you by WiseStamp, more about them a little later in the video.

Hmm, got to admit, that email signature is pretty bland. Nothing special to see here.

Now what about this one? Image, social links, easier to read, and invitation to do something. Yeah, this email signature might just make a difference. So in this video,

I'm going to show you three different ways in which you can create a custom email signature right here within Gmail. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity,

helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And let's get started with finding out where we go to edit our custom email signature. So first off within Gmail, we want to come up to the gear icon and then select See all settings. And on the very first tab, the General tab, we're going to scroll down almost all the way to the bottom where you will find the signature area here. Now, keep in mind, when it comes to signatures within Gmail, you can manage as many as you like and you may want to have multiple email signatures depending on the different purposes, or if you want a different signature just for your replies or when you are forwarding a message.

Create a basic signature in Gmail

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So let's get started with creating our first signature right here within Gmail. So to get started, we need to select the Create new button and give this new signature a name or a label. Now you're going to want to name it something descriptive so that you can remember it, and especially if you're using multiple email signatures. So I'm going to say, this is my sales signature here. So maybe I'm going to add something specific or an invitation to my sales page, or some other thing related to sales. So I'm going to say Create at this stage, and then on the right-hand side, we have a blank canvas ready for us to go. Now, of course we can add any type of text that we like,

but keep in mind, we can also add links and images as well. So if you want to jazz up your signature and have those links installed, let me show you how to do so. First of all, I'm going to start with just some basic information, maybe my full name, maybe my title, maybe I'm a sales manager, for example, in this case.] And of course for every single thing we can choose to do things like italics here. And maybe I want my name in bold for it to stand out here. And maybe I'm going to add my phone number,

my default fake phone number here, and perhaps my email address as well. Let's say Scott@email.com in this case. Now when it comes to something like your email address, you probably want to create a link so that someone can click on this immediately if they need to. So what I'm going to do is going to highlight this and I'm going to come down here to link. And you can see it's immediately made it a link.

It knows it's an email address, so that's fine. We can leave it as is but we can do this for other things as well. So let's say this is the name of my website, right? Something like that. This is maybe the business name or maybe I want it something nice and clean, right? So I'm going to say something like simple.com even though there might be further details and I'm going to lead them to a specific page. So I can say link here, but if I wanted to go to a specific page, but still show simple.com, I can say Change and I can say /sales/signup or something like that. And I can hit OK. So they are only going to see the simple.com link, but if they were to click on it it's going to take them to that specific page. And if you need to double check, all you need to do is just click on those links here and it's going to show you exactly where it's going to send that individual, but we want to spruce this up just a little more. And for that, we're going to go and find an image so I'm going to come in here and I'm going to say insert an image. Now you may want to select something that is already uploaded to your Drive account, but in my case I'm going to go and find something

that is on my computer. So I'm going to go over here. I'm going to go search for my logo and this is the logo that I want to add to my email signature. Now, the first thing you're going to notice is that, whoa, it's huge. That is far too large for us to include in an email, but no problem, we can make a few adjustments. First things first, we want to click on it and you can see just like when you're inserting an image directly with an email message, we can choose if we either want to keep the original size or change it. So I'm going to go through here and I'm going to select small. I'm going to say that's maybe a little too small. Medium looks almost perfect in this particular case.

So I've got my information up top here. I've got a few links and now I've got my logo down below. Now, keep in mind, just like adding links to any piece of text, we can make any image clickable as well. This is especially helpful if you're adding social media icons, for example, to your signature. All you need to do is highlight that particular image.\ You can see that here, but I'm not going to change the sides.

I'm going to select link and so what I'm going to do here is I can select, again, any link that I want, I'm going to select my website here, for example. And I'm going to say, okay, so now what's going to happen? You see, now when I click on this image, not only does it still give me the options, if I want to adjust the sizing, but it's also telling me that it's going to go to this link. This is especially helpful if you're going to create something like a banner image, right? Something that is inviting people to make a sale or participate in a discount or sign up to your newsletter, something along those lines. So now we have an email signature which is much more presentable, much more helpful to our users. However, if you want to do even more,

Create a professional signature with WiseStamp

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let's go to method number two. Here we are within my WiseStamp account. And in order to create or manage a new signature, I just need to select that new signature button. And I'm going to say that this is again a sales signature in this particular case

and I'm going to select create signature. Now, one of the great things about WiseStamp is that you only have to enter in your details once and then you can repurpose them as many times as you like. So whether you're needing to change or swap things out or if you want to make sure that other members of your team never change, for example, the website address or the banner image or the logo or even the style and fonts of the signature, you can do so right here within WiseStamp.

So even though I've decided to create a new signature, you can see that it's already brought in all of this information so I don't have to waste time recreating the wheel.

Instead, I can focus on creating a much more engaging and effective signature. So for example, if I want to change or add these social media icons here at the bottom of my signature, I only have to enter in that information once but then I can use those same links across multiple signatures, or maybe I want to assign them, so that everyone within my business has access or includes these links as a part of their signature. But we can also get very creative with the different templates. I can test out different configurations to see if I want something perhaps a little more compact

and you can see you can change the theme as well. Maybe I want to add a social media strip at the bottom as well. In fact, there's an awful lot of things that you can experiment with here, right within the WiseStamp templates. And of course every design element is customizable as well. I know there's often a big debate in terms of should you be labeling these things in terms of what they are,] a website versus an email address versus a phone number. Well, you can experiment with what works for you. Do I want a full description there such as this? Do I want just the initial in front, or maybe I want a cool icon to separate that out? In fact, in my case, I kind of like this one the best, this little cell phone, globe, and an envelope to indicate the differences between those two, but perhaps the most impressive area of WiseStamp is all the additional apps] in which you can add to your signature. For example, maybe I'd like to add a stylized sign off such as my name, and now I can have my signature here.

Maybe something just a little more meaningful. In addition, you can add a variety

of call to action buttons. So for example, if I want to encourage people to book a meeting, I could add that down below or a variety of pre-designed banners, or you can upload your own. And again, add your own links and any other details that you'd like. Last but not least, if you want to make sure that your brand and your signature

looks consistent across your entire team, you can manage everyone right here within WiseStamp and allow them to edit certain fields or information perhaps such as their name or their phone number. But if you want to go and make an update or make a change, especially when it comes to things like that custom banner, you can have it displayed across all of those signatures and manage them right here in one place.

If you'd like to learn more and start creating and managing your email signatures within WiseStamp, be sure to check out the link in the description below.

Create a signature with Drive

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Now for method number three, we're going to get started in Google Drive where we will create our email signature and then copy it into our Gmail account. So all we need to do is select a new Google Docs. We want a blank document to get started with here. Now you can title this anything that you want, of course, something signature related would be great, so you can come back and find this because in the future you may want to make some edits. This is where you're going to make some of those changes and then be able to bring it back into Gmail. So I'm just going to call this signature test here. Now in this blank document, before you start inserting any information, your very first step is going to be to insert a table. So under Insert, I'm going to come over here to Tables and I'm going to select a two by two table in this particular case. Now in your needs, you can of course change this. You can maybe expand this to two by four or three by two, depending on your needs, but let me show you why we're starting with the table and how that's going to give us a few more options here with our signature. One of the things that you may have noticed in the first signature we created is that it was very linear. It was top to bottom because within the Gmail signature editor, we can't actually push things into columns or into specific areas, but that's exactly what we're going to do in this setup here. So for example, I'm going to add an image, a profile image of myself here in the top left-hand corner, and then to the right is where I'm going to add my text details

including my name and my phone number. And then down below, we are going to add a banner which is going to span across, but evenly down below. So let me show you how to do so So to insert an image where you want, all you need to do is place the cursor in that particular cell. And then I'm going to come up here and select insert image. Now, in this case, I'm going to say upload from my computer. I'm going to go down and select this image here, and perfect, I've got my image here. However, you'll notice that it's probably not the right sizing that I want. We're going to adjust some of that sizing a little later as well. In fact, I would encourage you to do a little bit of trial and error, but keep in mind what you're seeing here is going to be very close to what you and your users will experience. So I'm going to drag this to something like that,

I think that's probably a little more appropriate when it comes to an email signature.

As a result, what I'm also going to do is take my cursor and drag my vertical line here

so that my text on the right hand side will show up closer to this image as we see here. Now, when it comes to the right-hand side of the table, of course we can add or type in anything that we want. In my case, I'm actually just going to pace the information that we had in our previous signature. You can see that this link came over but for some reason, this one did not. That's fine. We can always come in here and make that adjustment. I got to right click here and I'm going to say insert link.

And there we go, it's made it a link once again. Now, one of the additional advantages of creating your signature within Google Drive first is that you have a few more options when it comes to things such as spacing. So here you can see things are pretty tight together here, right? They may be a bit tighter than I would like them to be but if I highlight over them and I say, you know,\ let's go with maybe 1.5, that's maybe a bit too much. Let's do something custom here. I think somewhere right in the middle, maybe like a 1.25, for example and I'm going to say Apply. There we go.

It just spaces it out a little bit more, a bit easier to read.] Then I can always go back to my image here and drag it so it's maybe more in line with the bottom of that link, right? So everything is sort of nice and centered, easier on the eyes. And remember, you can always drag and adjust these table divisions here. So if I need to drag something up or down, I think I've got a space in there. There we go. I've got a cursor in there. That's why it wasn't allowing me to drag that up, but that's probably almost perfect. Maybe I'll even give it just a little more space there before we add the image down below. Lastly, if I'm going to add a banner image or maybe some social media links down below, and I wanted to span across both below my image above, and also my information here, I'm going to have to merge these cells, so I'm going to select these, I'm going to right click and say merge cells. So now I'm just dealing with one open space here down below. Now, in my case, what I'm going to do is keep things nice and simple. I'm going to say insert an image, and I'm going to go back and grab. I'm going to grab that logo that I did in my previous example. Now, of course, for you, you may want to grab something completely different, right? Something custom that's inviting people to maybe book an appointment with you or to take advantage of a discount. And just like before, this is probably too big. So let me maybe drag this to something that's a little more appropriate. When you're dealing with a banner image, in many cases, you'll have it much longer, than what I have right here but this will suit us just perfectly, for this example. Now, while we're almost ready to copy

and paste this into Gmail, you may notice that we still have these table lines

and that certainly does not make this look like an effective signature. So all we need to do is select our table, come up to formatting and then select table. And in this case, what we're going to do is select table properties. And over on the right-hand side you can see that we can adjust the color of the table. So I'm going to click on this expansion arrow and here you can see the table border is yes, in black. We want to select this and make it white in this case. Now keep in mind, the table is technically still there but it's just not visible. Now this looks more like an email signature. Keep in mind that table is there for you to edit in the future. So if you want to make adjustments, if you want to add perhaps an additional row or switch out this banner,

you can always come back in here and do so. What we're going to do at this stage is again, select our entire table. We can either hit Control + C on our keyboard or I'm going to select copy here and jump back into Gmail. Now we haven't created a new signature yet for this. So I'm going to say that this is our drive test signature, in this particular example, I'm going to say, create new. You can see that we've got nothing over here and all I need to do is select paste. And immediately, that signature, everything that we've created over in Drive is going to come over and the layout is going to be perfect just the way that we laid it out in our Drive file. And if you enjoyed this tutorial video, you'll like the other content right here on this Simpletivity channel.

Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.