Rocketseed Signature Guide

Transcription

1 Rocketseed Signature Guide We have created this signature guide to ensure that your signature displays correctly across various mail clients. The points discussed below will help you make the right design choices to ensure that your signature displays as you have envisioned. Various mail clients render imagery and text differently, therefore following the below steps will help eliminate known rendering issues. The key aims of this guide are: 1. Ensuring your designs work both with and without images 2. Building signatures that support deliverability 3. Managing links and the challenges of different mail clients 4. Designing your signatures to adapt to different requirements in sender information 5. Helping you to avoid over-complex structures 6. Ensuring your signatures have compatible fonts Design - Size and weight guidelines We provide guidelines on the recommended width and height of banner designs. When using both banners and signature we recommend the widths are consistent. For signatures without banners, follow the 650 pixel guideline width to ensure full visibility when opening an . The file size of banners should not exceed 40kb. Additionally, the combined file sizes of images within the signature should also be less than 40kb, to ensure the weight of the is controlled. Images should be JPG or GIF format. Template Considerations: Removal of images in conversations During an conversation, Rocketseed gives you the chance to communicate different marketing messages, adding a new banner each time you reply to your recipient. We also provide the option for you to remove any Rocketseed images previously added in the to control the weight. Using this facility may have implications for your signature design, as images in a previously applied signature will also be removed. When creating a Our world is rocketseed.com 1

2 signature you need to consider how your design will look both with and without the images. See example below of how not to place your imagery in a signature as the images on the left hand side will be stripped out the mail. This then leaves a gap on the left and the text looks like it is floating in the middle of your mail. Below is the stripped version: See the better example below of how all text is left aligned on the mail; the imagery is either to the right of the text, or below. This then makes for a presentable signature as it does not look broken without the imagery. Below is the stripped version: Our world is rocketseed.com 2

3 Deliverability Considerations: Text vs Imagery When we create your signature template, the personalised sender information in the signature fields uses text. This is also important for deliverability as a balance of text and imagery lowers the spam scores. It is not best practice to use a full image as a signature. Text that needs to be personalised cannot have an image or gradient as a background, so this is an important consideration in ensuring that your design supports deliverability. If you do wish to have some colour around text, it is possible to choose one solid background colour if required for the entire cell as per the example below. Links - considerations for Mac Mail When creating your signatures we are able to link an image to a single specified url, or map multiple links from that same image, to different locations. Unlike other mail clients, Mac Mail is not able to read image maps. (This applies to all images with links, not just Rocketseed templates). This may need to be taken into consideration when designing your signature. We can offer a work-around solution to this, by building the design with image maps and placing a master link e.g. home page, enabling you to link through on Mac Mail to one url. If a recipient on any other mail client clicks on an image-mapped link, they will be taken to the designated page. If a Mac Mail user clicks, the master link will always take them to that one master url. If you are likely to a high proportion of people who use Mac Mail, our recommendation would be to keep the signature simple, with just one core link, and to do the same with your banners. If it is important to you that there are multiple links an alternative is to slice up the design into multiple cells and link each image individually. However we recommend against this because some clients (Gmail) add padding (spacing) around cells leading to altered signature layouts. Our world is rocketseed.com 3

4 Note: If a client receives an in rich text, every image cell will appear as an attachment; therefore this is another reason to avoid slicing. Links - considerations for iphone Whereas Mac Mail does not support image maps, links on images in s viewed on an iphone are only supported if they have image maps. This additional step to add an image map is important if your customers are likely to engage with your branding from an iphone. You should also include the master link to ensure that Mac Mail is not impacted. Stripping of signature fields Rocketseed s editor allows master templates to be built and to accommodate personalisation of required fields for different senders e.g. not every sender has a mobile number therefore we can omit the field automatically in your template. Our smart technology means that you do not need to have different template designs, and you can manage your signature templates more efficiently. Signature personalisation fields can only omit and resize the design, however if all content is in one cell only. Sender has all fields populated: Sender does not have mobile number and the signature adjusts accordingly: Our world is rocketseed.com 4

5 Using Piping in Signatures If you use the personalisation functionality, we recommend not using the pipe character between fields. This will look strange when data is omitted, as you will see in example below: Mobile: Tel: However if the telephone number is absent the data will display as below with double piping: Mobile: Fonts and sizes Best practice dictates that only web safe fonts should be used in signatures - these are listed below. This will ensure that the text within the business card will display correctly on all devices. If you use a font that the recipient does not have stored on their computer it may display inconsistently. Rocketseed uses specific font sizes and we build your signature to the nearest font size for your brand. Book Antiqua Arial Arial Black Georgia Comic Sans MS Courier New Times New Roman Helvetica Impact (Symbol) Tahoma Terminal (Webdings) Trebuchet MS Verdana (Wingdings) Our world is rocketseed.com 5