Setting up email signatures in Contact by Zaweba
Each mailbox in Contact by Zaweba can hold several named signatures, formatted or plain, imported from Outlook or pasted as HTML, and swapped while you write.
A signature does more work than it looks. It tells a customer who they are dealing with, how to ring you, and which of your businesses the email comes from. In Contact by Zaweba signatures belong to mailboxes, and each mailbox can have several, so the right one turns up on the right email without you thinking about it.
Several named signatures per mailbox
Every mailbox can hold more than one signature, each with a name of your choosing. You might keep a full one with your logo, phone number and address, a short one with just your name and number, and perhaps a seasonal one that mentions holiday opening hours. Naming them makes it obvious which is which when you come to pick.
Signatures can be formatted or plain text. Formatted ones carry fonts, colours and pictures; plain ones are just text, which some people prefer for replies because they stay tidy in long chains.
Getting a signature in
If you already have a signature you like in Outlook, Import from Outlook brings it across, so you don't have to rebuild it. For formatted signatures made elsewhere, perhaps by a designer or a signature generator website, Paste HTML lets you drop the code in directly.
Plain text signatures you simply type.
New emails versus replies
You choose which signature new emails start with and which one replies and forwards start with. These are separate settings, and keeping them separate is one of the most useful things here.
A new email to a prospective customer is a first impression, so a full signature with your details and logo makes sense. A reply in a running conversation usually doesn't need the whole thing again. The customer already knows who you are, and a long signature repeated on every reply makes the chain harder to read. Many people set the full signature for new emails and the short one for replies and forwards.
Swapping while you write
While composing, Signature in compose swaps the signature for another one. It changes only the signature and leaves what you wrote alone, so you can switch from the short version to the full one halfway through a reply without retyping a word. That helps when a reply turns into something more formal, such as a quote, and the full details belong at the bottom.
Signatures and several brands
Signatures being per mailbox matters most if you run more than one business or brand. Contact can collect mail from many accounts, each with its own name, colour, address and signature, and replies start from the mailbox and address the email was sent to. Put together, a customer who wrote to your garden shop gets a reply signed off as the garden shop, and a customer of your other brand gets that brand's signature. You don't have to remember to switch.
Tips for signatures that work
Keep the reply signature short. Name, role and phone number is usually enough.
Check a formatted signature by sending a test email to yourself and opening it on a phone. Pasted HTML that looks fine on a big screen can wrap oddly on a small one, and pictures may be blocked by the reader's email program until they choose to show them.
Update seasonal signatures promptly. A note about Christmas opening hours that is still there in February looks careless.
Give every mailbox at least one signature, even a plain one. An email with no sign-off from a business can look unfinished.
Templates and signatures work together. A template supplies the body, with placeholders such as the contact's first name and an order number, and the signature supplies the ending. Set both up once and a well-presented reply takes seconds.
