Email Signature Critique: Julianne Franke

February 21st, 2011

Julianne is a student in my new Certified LinkedIn Career Strategist program (which I hear is awesome, by the way :p).  In our last session we talked about email signatures and I asked if I could share a critique of her signature with you – she agreed  Here is her old signature, with my thoughts:

I think it’s funny when people have an email signature with their name, but they put their name again.  It just looks a little funny.  I’ve had to get used to having my signature and not putting my name twice on each email.This is alphabet soup for job seekers, really. When I was in a job search I didn’t know what any of those certifications meant, and they weren’t significant to me.  I have a bias, though… in IT, a few years back, IT certifications were somewhat meaningless.  I think it immediately distracts from what your marketing/branding message is by adding stuff that doesn’t make sense to your target audience (perhaps put this down lower?).The two lines under her name are good – they give me information about her and what she does.  Too often this is jargon, and people might not understand what it really means. I’ve started to tell job seekers they should try and say “I help people/companies _____ by ______.” with NO jargon or cliche.I don’t know what a NOW WHAT facilitator is or does — even putting “connecting you with your purpose” doesn’t help me get it.  Can you say this in simple English, so I can immediately get it?Telephone, skype, email, websites, LI and FB profiles are all good and perhaps appropriate.  My only concern is that this is a very long email signature, and I think the longer it is, the less likely it will be read in it’s entirety… which means people might miss your branding message.Fax?  If you take anything off, I’d take this off, since it probably is important to less than .5% of the people you email. And if it is important you can simply email it to them, without cluttering up your branding message.This was a gotcha…!  Many people would put @juliannefranke, but you didn’t. I would suggest people who ARE on Twitter would be fine with an @, and not to put Twitter: ____.  People who ARE NOT on Twitter will likely not know what to do with this handle.  It also isn’t a hyperlink – either put @____ or put the entire URL (so it becomes a hyperlink).

Overall I think it is a good email signature, but go back to these points and you can see some opportunity to really tighten it up

Posted in Already Employed, How To..., Job Search Strategies, Job Seeker Advocates, Joe Job Seeker, Personal Branding, Social Networking | Permalink | TrackBack |

JibberJobber is a powerful tool that lets you manage your career, from job search to relationship management to target company management (and much more). Free for life with an optional upgrade.

Sign Up Now! »

View the original article here