Your email signature is a traffic source you never got round to setting up

Open your sent folder and count backwards over the last month. Most people who make things for a living send somewhere between two hundred and a thousand emails in that time: replies to buyers, questions to suppliers, thank-yous, invoices, scheduling back-and-forth, that long thread with the person who wanted a discount. Every one of them ended with something. For most people it ended with their name and a job title nobody asked for.

Why nobody bothers with this

Partly because it feels too small to matter. One line at the bottom of an email, seen by one person, is not the kind of number that shows up in a strategy. But it compounds quietly, it reaches people who already replied to you at least once, and it never gets throttled by a feed. It is also the rare marketing effort you can check honestly afterwards, because your analytics separate visits by source.

The honest difficulty is that it is close to unmeasurable if you set it up carelessly. Different mail clients handle links differently, some strip formatting entirely, and a click from a desktop mail app often arrives with no referrer at all — so it lands in the direct bucket next to people who typed your address in. You can end up doing something that works and never knowing.

The other difficulty is restraint. Signatures grow. Once you have a link in there, it is very tempting to add the podcast, the newsletter, the four social accounts and a pronoun line, at which point the whole block turns into visual noise that readers have trained themselves to skip.

A footer versus a placement

The test for every line is whether a stranger reading your email would gain anything from it. Your job title usually fails. A sentence about what you make, and one link, usually passes.

Writing the two lines

Aim for something you would not be embarrassed to have at the bottom of a message to an accountant. Quiet, specific, no sales language.

1. 1Line one: your name, and what you make in five or six words. "Hand-thrown stoneware and beginner pottery classes" tells a stranger more than "Founder, Studio Ceramics".
2. 2Line two: one link, written out as store.fan/yourname rather than hidden behind the word "here". People trust a link they can read.
3. 3Add a four-word reason to click, immediately after the link. "Free glaze guide inside" or "classes and current stock" is enough.
4. 4Delete everything else unless it is legally required. Phone number stays if you use the phone; the rest usually goes.
5. 5Set it in your mail client as the default for new messages and replies, not just new messages — replies are the majority of what you send.
6. 6Check it on a phone. Signatures that look tidy on a laptop often wrap into four ragged lines on mobile.
7. 7Diary a reminder for a fortnight later to open your analytics and look at traffic sources before you decide whether it worked.

What a fortnight might look like

Run the arithmetic with your own volume rather than a borrowed benchmark. If you send twenty emails on a working day, that is roughly two hundred emails in a fortnight, going to perhaps eighty distinct people, many of whom read every line because they are waiting on your reply. Click rates on a quiet signature line are low — a small single-digit percentage is realistic — which might be a handful of visits.

A handful of visits from people who are already corresponding with you is not nothing, and it costs you one evening, once. It also has a second effect that never appears in analytics: people who have your link at the bottom of every email know where to send someone else when they are asked for a recommendation. That is the forward you never see, and it is worth more than the click you can count.

The mistake most people make

They add an image. A banner, a logo lockup, a picture of the product — and half the recipients see a grey box with a broken-image icon, because a large share of mail clients block remote images by default. Worse, image-only signatures say nothing at all when the image fails. Keep it as text. The second mistake is pointing the signature at a social profile, which asks the reader to do the work of finding your actual offer once they arrive. Point it at the page where the offer already is, and let the storefront do the explaining.

This is the least glamorous item on any marketing list, which is exactly why it stays undone for years. It takes about ten minutes. Write the two lines, set them as the default on replies, and put a note in the calendar for a fortnight's time to look at where your visits came from. If you have not got a link to point at yet, the free plan gives you one permanently.