Why Use Social Media Icons in Email Signatures
Most traditional email signatures contain more or less the same information: first and last name, job title and department, email address and telephone number, and sometimes even a physical address.
That's quite a lot of text already considering that one of the most frequently echoed best practices for creating great-looking mail sigs is to keep things simple. After all, you don’t want your sig to take up so much vertical screen space that even short messages suddenly won’t display fully without scrolling.
Social media icons for email signatures elegantly solve this problem because you can turn them into clickable buttons to take your recipients directly to your social media profiles, and they don’t need to be more than a few dozen pixels large.
How to Add Social Media Icons to Email Signatures
It doesn’t take much time or effort to create an email signature with social media icons, and it certainly doesn’t take any special skills. You just need to follow the step-by-step instructions below.
Step 1: Find Suitable Social Media Icons
Your first goal is to find suitable social media icons. The good news is that there are many websites offering thousands and thousands of icons for free, including the following ones:
You need to download an individual icon for each social media service you want to link to. Some websites let you choose between multiple sizes, while others don’t.
If only one size is available, then you need to continue to the next step. If the option to download a specific size is available, then pick the size that’s closest to how large or small you want your icons to appear in your mail sig and skip the next step.
Step 2: Prepare Your Social Media Icons
Assuming your social media icons aren’t exactly the right size for your mail sig, your job now is to resize them.
Don’t worry: you don’t need to buy an expensive graphics editor like Adobe Photoshop because you can use a free online editor like Photopea:
- Go to: https://www.photopea.com/.
- Click Open From Computer and select the first icon.
- Open the Image menu and click Image Size.
- Enter the desired size and click OK.
- Open the File menu and click Save.
Repeat the steps above for each social media icon you want to add.
Step 3: Add Social Media Icons to Your Mail Sig
Now that your social media icons are ready, you can add them to your mail sig in Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, AOL, or any other email service and client you use.
To keep the length of this article reasonable, we will focus only on Gmail, but the basic steps you need to follow are more or less the same across the board:
- Log in to Gmail.
- Click the Settings gear icon and select the See all settings option.
- Scroll down until you find the Signature section in the General tab.
- If you already have an existing mail sig, then you can simply select it. If not, now is the right time to create one.
- To add social media icons to the email signature, place the mouse cursor where you want to add the first icon and click the Insert image button.
- Upload all social media icons one by one. You can add spaces between them to visually separate them.
- To ensure the icons function as social media links in your email signature, you need to select one and click the Link button.
- Leave the Text to display the field empty and only add your social media profile address. Click OK to confirm.
- Repeat for each social media icon.
- Save your new email signature with social media icons that function as buttons.
Get Your Inbox Organized
With an eye-catching mail sig featuring social media icons, you’re more likely to receive replies to your messages. As a result, you may discover your inbox filling up faster than usual. To keep it organized, you should use an inbox cleaner like Clean Email.
Clean Email is designed to securely group your messages into easy-to-review bundles that you can organize with a few simple clicks.
Any inbox management action you apply with Clean Email can be automated just by selecting a single checkbox. That way, you can, for example, automatically label emails from certain senders, delete messages that are more than a year old, or mark unimportant notifications as read the moment they arrive.
Unwanted subscription messages can be easily dealt with using Clean Email’s Unsubscriber feature, which works even when the sender doesn’t include an unsubscribe link. The Block feature can be used in a similar fashion to prevent emails from any annoying sender from reaching your inbox.
Worries about your privacy? Don’t be! Clean Email’s Privacy Guard feature can regularly check your email against known data breaches and security incidents and alert you before cybercriminals can take advantage of your personal information.
To get started with Clean Email:
- Go to: https://clean.email/.
- Click the Try for Free button.
- Connect your mailbox and explore what Clean Email has to offer.
FAQ
Why it’s not possible for me to add social media icons?
Unfortunately, not all mail clients let you add images to your signature, and those that do don’t always support all commonly used image file formats. If you can’t add your icons as JPG or PNG files, then we recommend you try a different client.
What is the simplest way to create a mail sig with social buttons?
You can create great-looking mail sigs with buttons that link to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other accounts using online generators like WiseStamp or MySignature.
How can I optimize my mail sig for improved deliverability?
Make sure your mail sig doesn't include too many large images. A few graphical buttons, a small logo, and perhaps your headshot are fine, but the image files should be compressed beforehand.
