Creating a custom email signature
An email signature is a great way to advertise yourself and your business to your potential clients! From just a simple signature, people get a feel for how professional the sender is. They get an idea of your style and work, and they have an easy place to find your contact info when they want to reach out to you. Some people will include items like upcoming events or past work in their signature as a quick and easy advertisement.
In this article, I’ll walk you through how to create a custom email signature for your Gmail account that looks like an enterprise email account at the cost of a free Gmail account.
NOTE: this signature will work in Outlook or a different platform as well. However, this article is about creating it in Gmail.
To get started, we will be needing the following:
- A Gmail Account
- Microsoft Word
- A signature style you like
Here are some examples of email signatures
https://newoldstamp.com/email-signature-examples/
https://mysignature.io/email-signature-examples
We will first create the signature in Microsoft Word, and then we will move it to Gmail.
Create signature in Microsoft
Open up Microsoft Word, create a two column table (one row and two column or whatever your design needs). The first column will be used for the image or the logo you want to put while the second column will be used for your contact information.
On the right side of the table, add your contact information. You can list your name, job title, phone, email, and address. Style it using the typical Microsoft tools.
Changing the table settings
As you can see from the image above, the table that we had created has a border. If we don’t remove this, it will carry over into the Gmail signature when we copy and paste it. To remove the border, right click the table and select “table properties”
Find the Borders and Shading and click it.
In the Borders and Shading menu, set the settings to none.
Some people like to have a divider between the two columns (logo and contact information). If you want to add a divider, click the middle icon on the right side of the pop up screen. You can also adjust the style and width into your liking.
When you are done customizing your table, click “ok” to exit out of Borders and Shading pop up and click “ok” again to exit out table properties.
Now that all the information has been added and the borders are removed, you can now copy and paste this into your Gmail account.
Open Gmail Settings
In the upper right of your Gmail screen, click the gear icon and then click the “see all settings” in the quick settings panel.
Scroll down on the Settings menu and search for the section entitled signature.
Then look for the “Create New” button and click it.
Give your signature a name and hit create. You can now minimize your Gmail window, as we will be moving onto Microsoft word.
Moving the Signature from Microsoft to Gmail.
If you are done adding all of the information needed and adjusted the borders and styling into your liking, select the entire table then right click to select copy (or press ctrl + c).
Return back to the Gmail window that you minimized earlier. In the signature box, right click and select paste (ctrl + v). Now we are ready to an add image/logo on our signature.
In the Gmail Signature window, click in the left column in the table so that it shows your cursor there. Then click on the image icon button on the lower right of the window.
There are three options to add an image; by providing a web address URL, by uploading an image from the google drive and by uploading an image from a computer.
In this tutorial, we will be uploading an image from the computer.
To upload, you can drag a file to the pop up window or alternatively, you can locate the file from the computer.
You might need to click on the image and adjust the size. Below is a sample Gmail signature.
Hit save and you are done! Now all future emails will show your new professional signature [nice emoji here].
If you have more than one email on your Gmail account you can choose which account to associate the signature with, or you can create multiple signatures to use in different situations.
Any questions? Message us and we’ll try to assist you. Thanks for reading!