Signatures and for that matter legal disclaimers lack creative rigor.
It is worth knowing that many email browsers cannot give attachments meaningful icons.
For this reason all emails with graphics in their signatures appear to be emails with attached files in them.
This is the bain of life for anybody who works in advertising because all your emails look the same. They all have little paper clips in them to indicate the presence of a graphics based signature. When new copy comes through the paper clip remains exactly the same despite the fact that the mail contains new copy. Removing the signature is time consuming, difficult or impossible because many email creators automatically add a branded signature regardless of the users intentions.
Sure file type might change but the icon for attachment never does. Signatures are always GIF or JPEG files but guess what? So are full page documents that are the advertising thrust and cut of the company you badly want to impress!
You have no way of knowing what the attachment is other than by fully opening the email and remembering that it needs to be saved some place more meaningful than inbox.
So all signature with graphics based signatures, legal disclaimers and unsubscribe links look the same when viewed in list format because they are frequently large ( and by that I mean a paragraph with many words in it rather than large in terms of file size) graphics files that cannot differentiate themselves when received.
Let's stamp them out and make them purely text based. It can be done really easily in most email creators and try to use a dash of imagination because there are many ways of saying, 'don't print this or else.' you can make it different your own unique identity.
It is worth knowing that many email browsers cannot give attachments meaningful icons.
For this reason all emails with graphics in their signatures appear to be emails with attached files in them.
This is the bain of life for anybody who works in advertising because all your emails look the same. They all have little paper clips in them to indicate the presence of a graphics based signature. When new copy comes through the paper clip remains exactly the same despite the fact that the mail contains new copy. Removing the signature is time consuming, difficult or impossible because many email creators automatically add a branded signature regardless of the users intentions.
Sure file type might change but the icon for attachment never does. Signatures are always GIF or JPEG files but guess what? So are full page documents that are the advertising thrust and cut of the company you badly want to impress!
You have no way of knowing what the attachment is other than by fully opening the email and remembering that it needs to be saved some place more meaningful than inbox.
So all signature with graphics based signatures, legal disclaimers and unsubscribe links look the same when viewed in list format because they are frequently large ( and by that I mean a paragraph with many words in it rather than large in terms of file size) graphics files that cannot differentiate themselves when received.
Let's stamp them out and make them purely text based. It can be done really easily in most email creators and try to use a dash of imagination because there are many ways of saying, 'don't print this or else.' you can make it different your own unique identity.
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