You’re hampering your own church plant communications. That is, if you haven’t taken care to develop an email signature that gives people easy ways to interact with you.

Few things vex me more than having an important email conversation going that needs to turn in to a phone call, but the other party hasn’t ever given you their phone number and their email signature doesn’t include it. The worst email signatures include only just the sender’s first name. What if I want to friend you on FaceBook or follow you on Twitter easily? Why are you making it so hard?

Enter WiseStamp

WiseStamp is a browser plugin that automatically adds a rich-text signature to your emails. You can include logos and other pictures, and it has built-in social media icons that are easily set up to point to your various social media profiles:

Of course, the drawback here is that it only works if you’re using your browser to do your email.

The Other Extreme

The other thing I see done is having too much signature, in the form of using plain old MS Outlook or Apple Mail to add a picture to your email signature. DON’T DO IT! Those mail clients add your picture to each email as an attachment. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve wasted looking for an important contract or other attachment from friends who do this; it’s impossible to find because every email they send has an attachment. Talk about a needle in a haystack!

WiseStamp solves this by adding images and logos as hyperlinks that your mail client or browser downloads in the background for you to see. They don’t count as attachments. Ever wonder why sometimes you get an email with the pictures blocked, and you get a notification that says something like, “For you privacy, pictures are not shown. Click to show images.”? Your mail reader is not downloading images from suspicious senders. Hopefully you’re not one of those!

How many communication and branding opportunities have you missed because your email signature only says ‘Firstname’?