Use Your Email Signature to Speed Sales

by Elizabeth Frederick

We pick a monthly theme for our blog entries, and in March we’ll be focused on quick techniques you can implement to make selling easier.  I wanted to start by sharing a tip I saw online a while ago that uses email signatures to speed sales.

If you’ve been in the same job for a while, you’ve probably noticed that you send the same few emails over and over again.  If you’re in recruiting, you have the interview request, the response to an unsolicited résumé, and the rejection letter.  If you’re a salesperson, there’s the networking event follow-up, the cold introduction, and the meeting thank-you.

Many people have standard email templates, either in their personal documents or as a shared resource for the entire team.  It can be a hassle, though, finding the right file and copying the text into your message.  Here’s an easy way to bypass that process: take the 3 – 5 messages you send most often, develop a general template, and add the entire messages as email signatures.

Think about it – a signature doesn’t have to just consist of your name and contact information.  As we all know from our interactions with lawyers and accountants, signatures can include multiple paragraphs of text.

The specific process will vary depending on your email system, but in Outlook, all you have to do is open a new message and pick the appropriate custom signature.  Then just add “Dear X” at the beginning and click Send!