How to create a great Gmail signature with all your contact info

Does your email signature impress the people you email? Do you even have an email signature? You should and it is a great way to present essential information about you or your business.

Email signatures do not have to be boring and they can be more than your name in plain text. You could just sign your emails ‘Bob Smith’ or whatever your name is, but that is really dull and it will not have much effect on someone you are trying to make a good impression with.

Save time and effort

Create a custom email signature for Gmail and it is automatically inserted into every email you send. This saves you time and effort because you don’t need to recreate it every time you send an email message.

Include contact info

A custom email signature also gives you an opportunity to include additional contact information to the person you are emailing, such as your LinkedIn profile, Twitter and Facebook profile, Google+ and Pinterest.

The person you are emailing might want to follow you on social networks, connect with you and become a follower, or at least check out your profile. Your email signature can give them all this information.

Who are you?

With your social media profiles included in your email signature, people can quickly find out who you are and what you do.

It gives your emails authority, especially if you are emailing someone for the first time. It gives them the information they need to assess whether to take your emails seriously or send them to the bin or spam folder.

In order to create a custom email signature you first need to gather all the information you need. This includes the URLs to all your social networking accounts. Then you must create some social media icons.

Get your LinkedIn profile address

Go to LinkedIn, right click your name on the left and select Copy Link Address. That is the link that people need to go to your LinkedIn profile. Save the URL somewhere, such as in Notepad.

Get a custom LinkedIn address

You might find that your LinkedIn address is complicated with numbers and letters. However, there is a way to simplify it.

1. Go to LinkedIn and click Me, View profile.
2. Click Edit your public profile.
3. Click the pencil next to Edit public profile URL.

Make the URL simpler and easier to remember, such as your name or a nickname.

Get your Google+ profile address

Go to Google+, right click Profile in the sidebar and select Copy Link Address. The address is something like plus.google.com/u/0/110424448079106893940 and you strip out the /u/0 to give plus.google.com/110424448079106893940.

It doesn’t actually matter if you don’t strip out the /u/0 and the URL will still go to your profile.

Get a custom Google+ URL

That URL is impossible to remember. However, it doesn’t matter because it will only appear as a link. People will see the link text and not the URL.

However, you might want a more friendly URL like plus.google.com/+RolandWaddilove

You can have a custom URL providing you meet certain conditions, such as being a member for more than a month, having a profile photo, and 10 or more followers.

1. Click Profile in the Google+ sidebar.
2. If you are eligible for a custom URL you will see a banner below your name on your profile. Click it.
3. One or more custom URLs are displayed, but you might need to tweak it so that it is unique.
4. Click Change URL and then click Confirm.

Get your Facebook address

To get the URL to your Facebook profile, just right click your name at the top and copy the URL.

If you have a Facebook page, right click it in the sidebar and copy the URL, or go to your page and copy the URL in the browser’s address box.

Get a custom Facebook URL

Your Facebook profile or your page URL might contain numbers and letters that make it hard to remember.

However, you can get a custom URL for yourself or for your page and Facebook calls them vanity URLs. There are some rules and your page needs to have at least 25 likes.

Go to www.facebook.com/username and enter the username you want to use for your personal profile. It can be anything provided it is unique.

For a page, go to the page, click About, click Edit next to the username section.

Get your Twitter URL

This one is easy and you just go to Twitter, click your profile photo and select View profile. The URL is in the browser’s address box.

Get social media icons

Go to pixabay.com and search for ‘social media icons’. Here are some I found that are free to use in any way you want. Download them and save them to disk.

Use a photo editor like GIMP to crop each social media icon out of the image. Resize them to make the icons really small and then save them to disk as separate files.

Create your Gmail signature

Now that you have collected all the URLs you want to include in your Google email signature, it is time to create it.

Open Gmail in a browser, click the gear icon in the top right corner and select Settings on the menu.

Select the General tab and scroll down to the Signature section.

If you have more than one email account in Gmail, you can create different signatures for each one. This one is the general RAWinfopages email address. Type in the text you want to appear at the bottom of emails you send.

Create a blank line and click the image icon in the toolbar.

An image can be uploaded from the disk drive on the computer. Click and drag a social media icon that was created earlier. Repeat this and add all the social media icons.

Here there are icons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. Select an icon and click the link button in the toolbar. Click the Change link.

Now enter the URL for the social media service, which is Twitter in this case.

Repeat the process for each social media icon. Select it, click the link icon in the toolbar, then click the Change link to enter the URL.

Don’t forget to click the Save button at the bottom of the Settings page.

Create signatures in Google Docs

This is the best method to use if you want a really impressive email signature in Gmail. The signature above is, well, a bit boring, but it is hard to do any better using the features provided in the Gmail signature editor. What you need to do is to create the email signature elsewhere and then copy and paste it into the signature editor.

Go to Google Drive and create a new document called Email Signature (or anything you want).

Go to the Insert menu and insert a table. I used a 1 row x 2 columns table.

Insert images and text into the table and use the formatting commands to make it look great.

I created several alternatives so I could experiment and see which looked the best. The lower signature is still a table and if the cursor is inside a table cell, there is a Borders button in the toolbar to set the border width. I set the border to zero, so it is invisible.

When the cursor and mouse is in a cell, there is a little button to display a menu and I added a right border to the first cell with the picture in to act as a separator between the image and text. Go back to the Format, Table menu and you can set the background colour, padding, table size and other attributes.

Now all you need to do is select the signature in Google Docs, copy it to the clipboard, then switch to the Gmail signature editor and paste it in.

Finally, scroll down the Gmail settings to the bottom and click Save.

If you have multiple email addresses in Gmail you can use the same or a different signature for each one. Select the email account in the the list and then paste in the signature. Click Save at the bottom of the page, then return and do the next signature.