Build an email signature that survives being pasted

An email signature is the most reproduced piece of design a business owns. It goes out hundreds of times a week per person, to customers, suppliers and everyone in between, and it is almost always assembled by whoever happened to be asked, then copied around the team in a state of steady decay.

Email is a hostile environment for layout, and the reasons are historical rather than sensible. Outlook on Windows renders HTML using Word, which ignores a great deal of modern CSS. Gmail strips styles it does not like. Dark mode inverts things unpredictably. This is why signature layouts still use tables, which looks archaic and is simply what survives.

The commonest failure is the logo. A signature that references an image on your website means every recipient's client fetches that image, and most block remote images by default, so a good proportion of your audience sees a broken placeholder where your brand was. Embedding avoids that but adds weight to every message and can trip spam scoring. Neither answer is free, which is why plenty of well run organisations use a text only signature and are none the worse for it.

Then there is the content, where restraint pays. Name, role, one phone number, the website. Every extra line reduces the chance any of it is read, and a signature longer than the email it is attached to is a familiar irritation. Social icons in particular add remote images and rarely earn their place in ordinary correspondence.

One legal point specific to the UK: a limited company must show its registered name, registered number, place of registration and registered office address in its business emails, not only on its website. It is a requirement people meet in the footer of their signature or not at all, and it costs nothing to get right at the point the signature is designed.

If a signature is being rolled out to a team, consistency matters more than any individual choice, and the durable way to get it is a template people fill in rather than a file they copy and adjust. Copying is how five variants appear, three of them with the old address.