How to Create a Custom Email Signature in Gmail
Email signatures are a fantastic way to make yourself look official and professional. It’s a small, but great way to promote your business and grab people’s attention.
So, I am going to show you how to create your own Email Signature in Gmail for free. We’re going to be using our example business "Macho Crossfit", so you can see how everything fits together.
To get started, you’ll need access to the following (and free) items.
A JPEG or PNG of the logo you want to use
A Gmail Account
BeFunky (online tool for image resizing)
I’ll guide you through the basics of setting up your signature with these three tools.
Resizing Your Logo
We’ll be using a free online service called BeFunky. This is very easy to use, and allowed me to resize my graphic in under 15 seconds. Go to BeFunky here, and follow the steps below.
Open up your graphic in BeFunky. Go to the top center, and click “Open.”
Search for your image, and then click “Open.”
Now that your image is open, we’ll want to make sure that it’s a particular width. On the left hand side, go over to “Crop.” Make sure “Lock Aspect Ratio” is checked.
Make your logo 350 pixels wide. Then click the blue checkmark. This is a nice size for a email signature logo, and won’t be too overpowering.
Save it to your computer by going to the top menu, clicking “Save,” and then, “Computer.”
If you have social media icons, you can use these same steps to resize them down. Your social media icons should be pretty small, and all the same size. Go for 30 pixels by 30 pixels.
Time to Upload Them
Now that your logos are resized, we’re going to upload it to Google Photos. To get there, open google.com and sign in. Once you do, your grid menu will have Google Photos as an app option.
Google Photos acts as our “server” where we’ll upload the images (like social media icons and logos). Once you open Google Photos, go ahead and drag-and-drop your new photos into the browser window.
Click on one of the images from Google Photos. It’ll open it up into a dark window. From there, Right-Click the image, and click “Open In New Tab.” This will give us a URL we can use in Gmail.
Copy the URL from the new tab. Keep it, because we’ll be needing it soon!
Go to the Settings
When you open up Gmail, go to “Settings,” in the top right corner.
Scroll down the page, until you come to the “Signature,” section. Here’s where we’ll be working on the details.
First we’ll insert your logo image. Click the image icon.
Then hit “Select.” It will place the logo into your Signature box.
Next, you’ll want to type your name, title, and the other information that you’d like other people to see. Be sure to include the URL of your website as well. The Gmail signature box is a WYSIWYG editor (a.k.a. “What you see is what you get” editor) so it’s almost the equivalent of editing in Word.
Your signature might look something like this now.
Lastly, we’ll want to add social media icons, so people can connect with you. To do this, click the image link, and paste in the image URL from Google Photos for each icon.
Feel free to link your social URLS to the icons as well.
Completing It All
When you’re done, simply hit “Save” at the bottom of the settings page. When you open up a new message, the signature will show up on right at the bottom. Congratulations! You’ve established your official-looking email signature. To top it off, you used free tools!
Let me know if this was helpful to you! If you’d like more tips like this, don’t forget to subscribe. If you have any questions or comments, drop them below. I’d love to hear what you think.
