Creating a Killer Real Estate Email Signature

For today’s professional the email signature is the new business card - especially in real estate where first impressions are often made online through various lead generation sources. 

And while it may seem pretty straightforward, there’s more to creating a great email signature than you think. When creating a high-quality real estate email signature there are a few basic steps with a lot of hidden details to consider.

At a minimum, you’ll want to include the following elements in your email signature:

• Basic professional details and contact information
• A headshot or professional photo to reflect your brand
• Call To Action - This could be anything from scheduling a meeting to viewing your active listings.
  

Now, Let’s break down each signature element and make sure you take into consideration each important factor.

Basic professional details - In an email signature these include Your Name, Title, Email Address, Phone Number and Website. This one’s pretty straightforward, however, keep in mind the width of your signature plays a factor in how it looks on different devices. In general, you don’t want a signature that’s wider than 600px or more than 72 characters in one line.

Photos - Images are great when used sparingly, however, there’s a fine line between making your signature pop and over doing it. If your signature is busy or too large, it becomes very distracting to the recipient. It can even end up overshadowing the actual email message itself. Remember that you’re sending an email for a reason, and you don’t want your signature to distract from the message. 

Call to Action - As a general rule of thumb, having a call to action in your signature can help boost business, but just like a webpage, too many calls to action can muddy the main message. It’s best to stick with one (maximum two) CTA’s. 

Here are some common calls to action for real estate:

• View My Listings
• Schedule a Meeting
• Social Follow Requests

Technical best practices for aspects of an email signature:

Factors that impact email signature performance are two fold. How it looks on the outside and what’s under the hood. How your signature performs is heavily dependent on things you can’t see. Hidden performance factors include: deliverability, render-ability and load times.

Deliverability Tips:

Keep your imagery as small as possible. Most experts will recommend your signature size be below 50kb, but expert deliverability tests indicate messages under 100kb should keep you out of most spam filters. 

The largest factor impacting the size of your email signature is the size of your images. Here are some tips for reducing your image size:

1. Host your images: Hosing your image takes the image size out of the equation. Hosting is essentially uploading your image to another server which stores it and then generates code you can grab to reference the image in your signature. That said, hosted images can sometimes get blocked by the recipient’s email client.That is why it is essential to use a reputable commercial host for any images you include such as Google Photos, Amazon S3 or your own server.
2. Compress your images if you prefer not to host your images you can also make them smaller. Depending on the program you are using to create your images some steps you can take are to use .jpg or .png format. If options for compressing the image are presented to you, try compressing to 50 - 75%.
   

Render-ability Tips: 

There’s nothing worse than having your perfect signature turn into a jumbled mess because someone has an iphone from 2015.One way to cut down on the variability of how your signature looks in different devices is to stay within recommended dimensions. For desktops, the recommended maximum email signature size is 700px (width) x 300px (height). For mobile devices the recommended maximum is 320px (width) x 600px (height).

Loading Tips: 

Waiting for a page or message to load is one of life’s great annoyances. So much so, that developers and designers have created images to entertain you while their content loads. Unfortunately, you can’t create a dancing cat to entertain clients while your signature loads. The first and best step to optimize your loading time is to follow the previously mentioned image tips in the deliverability section. 

In addition to image hosting and compression, another step you can take is to have a simplified signature for replies. Your simple signature should NOT have any images. Remember, each time you reply with your full signature it increases the message size. Name & basic contact info will suffice for replies.  

Now that you have an MBA in email signature creation, here’s some visual inspiration for how you might design a great signature.

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Real Estate Email Signature Examples

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