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Controlling Your Corporate Email Signature

2012-04-17 18:10:00

There are regulations around what must be in your email as well as asthetic reasons to control how it looks. So how do you prevent end users ruining your corporate image with poor email etiquette.

The most public face of your company is your email.

Each office employee sends an average 200 business related emails every week. This mounts up to a staggering 1 million emails per annum in a business with 100 employees.

Considering how much a company spends on managing their corporate brand and imaging
these small electronic windows into a company are very important visually as well as being an opportunity to convey a marketing message where appropriate. This needs to be controlled at a company level and not left to the individual.

In the average company, each end user still has the ability to alter how their email signature appears to recipients. They can add their own facebook link, their personal twitter account and other social network logos to their email signature block. Emails from their mobile phones appear with “Sent from my (insert name of phone here)�

• According to an April 2011 study sponsored by Google showed that 82% of smartphone users check and send email with their device.

There are also legal requirements as to what must appear on a company email and the choice as to whether these details appear or not should not lie with each end user. That responsibility must lie with the company, who will be the one who has to pay the fines for non-compliance after all.

In the EU these rules generally cover
• Your company’s registered name (e.g. XYZ Ltd)
• Your company registration number;
• Your place of registration (e.g. Scotland or England & Wales); and
• Your registered office address
The legislation that implemented the EU directive on this (EU First Company Law Amendment ) is different in each country but for the UK it is covered by The Companies (Trading Disclosures) regulations 2008. These rules are implemented by Trading Standards and failure to comply can result in fines of up to £1000.
So considering all of the above, controlling a users signature, ensuring your companies messages render correctly on smartphones and regulations around what information needs to be included in all business messages, what is the solution?

Company wide signature management, this can be done either at the server level or as a hosted solution like www.brandandsign.com. However, it is important that the email leaves the end users desktop without a signature that they can affect. The Company controlled signature is then placed on the email after the email has left their desktop.

 

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