How to make the perfect academic email signature
Tips, examples and professional templates you can apply to give yourself an impressive professor email signature in under 5 minutes.
Short answer
What should an academic email signature include?
- First and last name
- Academic or administrative title and department
- The name of your educational institution
- Your workplace address
- Direct phone number
- Website
- Linkedin link (and other job relevant social media links)
- Some call to action (a banner, a button or a link)
- A high quality image of you and/or a logo of your workplace
5 Elements of a perfect academic email signature
A good looking academic email signature can put you before your peers and score you some points with your email recipients. There is only one opportunity to make a first impression, so make sure that your signature creates the right impression with these 5 essential rules.
1
Professional information should be clear, relevant and actionable
Include all of the relevant professional information for your academic email signature. Be sure to use your full name (including middle initial). Be sure to give your real and current job title and the proper name of the educational institution you work in.
When it comes to contact information, use an address and phone number where you actually intend people to contact you. In case you prefer to avoid giving out your direct phone number, make it clear to your readers that the number you gave is your office number, the university central desk, or some other extension.
2
Create a deeper connection with your contacts with links to your social media
If you have a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, or a Youtube channel that details your professional academic activity, consider including links to your social media accounts in your signature.
If you don’t own any of these digital media assets but your college or university does, consider adding those instead.
Let your email recipients know about all of the different locations online that they can find you, learn more about what you do, and continue their engagement with you.
If you can encourage your email recipients to extend their communication with you to a social platform, you are well on your way to creating a deeper connection with your contacts.
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Get personal and encourage engagement with social media icons or a Youtube video
3
Your university logo and brand colors will lend you their credibility and professionalism
Having your college or university logo included in your signature provides instant trust for viewers outside your institution, and makes you look more professional for viewers within your institution.
Using your brand colors correctly in your email signature will further amplify this effect because colors are easily recognizable and intuitively associated with your workplace (especially if it’s a known brand).
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A signature using MIT’s brand color
Note:
An important detail to keep in mind when adding your logo is that you don’t want it to show up as an email attachment, because the email will then take up extra space in your recipient’s inbox and may deter them from opening the email.
But when you use an email signature builder tool like WiseStamp, the image is added as part of the signature HTML code and not as an attachment.
4
A respectable photograph will make a respectable professor signature
To streamline the creation of signatures across your school or university, allow your staff to add their personal info by themselves. They may also want to slightly tweak their signature to fit their personal taste and needs at no cost to the organization. They may well see this gesture as a bonus and service to them.
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A professional looking professor email signature
5
Add a call to action to promote your work or publications
As an academic, whether you’re an educator, a teacher, a professor, or a researcher, you most likely have something that you do that you want people to know about.
Adding a call to action will greatly improve your chances to get people on board with whatever it is you want them to take part in.
If you offer a paid-for article, a private tutorship, online lectures, or even organizing some event or fundraiser. Whatever it is, consider adding a banner, a button or a link to offer it to your readers. This type of call to action is eye-catching and easy for readers to act on with a click.
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Academic Email signature with a Call to Action clickable banner
Conclusion
These were the basic elements that we recommend adding to your email signature though you may want additional information as well.
As a professor or an academic educator, you may also want to include mentions of upcoming events at your university or school, fundraisers, or a new blog post.
Just don’t go overboard because an overly-long signature becomes cumbersome and may take away from the main goals for which you made it in the first place.
Looking for the perfect email signature for academics? – try WiseStamp.
Academic email signature templates you can use
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Unify your academic faculty email signatures (for educational institutions)
An email signature not only provides your recipients with easy-to-find contact details but it’s also a great way to share valuable information about your institution, such as special recognitions or upcoming events.
By optimizing your staff’s email signatures you can transform each email into a marketing opportunity for your organization. With WiseStamp email signature manager, it’s easy to create a professional-looking email signature with standardized settings for all of your faculty, using one of our many email signature templates.
WiseStamp email signature manager for academic institutions
The basic idea behind an email signature is to make it easy for your recipients to quickly identify your institution and get the essential information about your staff members like their name, title and department. The signature acts as a go-to location at the bottom of your emails where your organization and team’s contact details can be easily found.
Like a storefront, the way you display your information is just as important as the information itself. This is why making a professional-looking signature will reflect positively on your staff’s and your organization’s professionalism.