Inc. recently reposted Kevin Zawacki's Slate article titled, "Stop Putting Your Email Address in Your Email Signature." Of all things that would be bothersome about email signatures, this one really does not deserve the rant.
In fact, I prefer the at-a-glance professional identity to be complete and to include the email signature. It simplifies a few of our daily tasks, for those in sales, customer service, business ownership, networking professionals...
For example, I will look to a saved email to for details to refer someone to another client, or to add to my prospect database (STEP 1). If the email address is missing in the signature, I need to scroll up and look to to the sender bar (STEP 2). In Gmail, senders appear as their full names - in the sender area the email address often is not displayed. So then I must hit reply or the more-info-arrow in order to grab the email address in order to include in my referral or to add to my own CRM database (STEP 3).
In Outlook (second most widely used email client), the email is displayed in the sender bar. However, when I try to copy the email address (ALTERNATIVE STEP 3), the system also copies the full name and the [] characters. So the next step, once pasted into my database, is to remove the full name and special characters from that field (STEP 4).
It would be so much easier to just see that email address in the email signature where the rest of the professional identity appears.
What do you think?
Comments