Relevant Products: Exclaimer Cloud - Signatures for Office 365 | Exclaimer Cloud - Signatures for G Suite
Scenario
When you start a new email conversation, you want your signature to be as complete as possible with all your branding imagery, contact details, social media links, legal disclaimer and perhaps even an advertising banner too.
Once your recipient has replied to you, any subsequent replies from you will start to appear cumbersome if you keep adding the full signature each time, so you want to add an abbreviated version of your signature to these replies.
Resolution
When Exclaimer Cloud receives an email for processing, it adds the first signature that is applicable. However, you can configure the system to scan the body of the message and avoid re-adding the same signature if it is already present. You can then force it to skip to the next applicable signature.
To do this, you need to create two versions of your signature: the full signature version and an abbreviated (reply) signature version. Then, you need to configure the full signature to only be applied once per message, while the abbreviated signature to be applied on each subsequent reply.
Implementation
To implement the resolution, you need to:
-
Create an abbreviated 'reply version' of your full signature.
-
Identify the unique string of characters in your full signature.
- Configure your full signature to only be applied once per message.
For example purposes, let's assume that you already have a single signature for all your users, similar to this one:
Creating an abbreviated 'reply version' of your full signature:
You need to evaluate your signature after the full signature is created - signatures are displayed on the screen in the order that they are evaluated (left to right), and you can change the evaluation order using the Re-order button
Identifying the unique string of characters in your full signature:
You need to identify a short, unique string of characters in your full signature that would not normally appear anywhere else in the email.
Some examples of a short, unique string of characters include the Company Registration Number, part of an office address or part of your legal disclaimer. Make sure the string is no more than 20 characters.
- If you have identified a short, unique string of characters, then proceed to the next step of configuring your signatures.
- If you cannot identify a short, unique string of characters in your full signature, then you can modify your signature to include it. See some tips below on what to insert as a unique string of characters.
Tips!
Some ideas to incorporate a unique string of characters into your email signature:
Signature versioning: In some departments, such as Marketing, there are periodic changes to email designs. In such cases, you can insert a small, subtle version number into the design as a unique string. So, every time the design changes, the version number is incremented. As the new version number will not be present in the previous replies - the new full signature (with the updated version number) will be added to the next reply.
In the example below, a date-based signature version number has been added to the Legal Disclaimer block:
Text embellishment: You can add a decorative horizontal line at the foot of the signature, which can be made up of a sequence of characters. This will improve the visual appearance as well as give you a unique string to insert.
In the example below, a repeating pair of characters have been added to a text field at the end of the signature design:
Configuring your full signature to only be applied once per message:
Follow these steps to configure the full signature to only ever be added to a message if it is not already there:
- Log into your Exclaimer Cloud subscription and access Signature Rules for your full signature.
- Enable Apply this signature option first, then enable the Don't add a signature if the message contains option.
- In the field directly below, enter the unique string you identified.
- Under In, select anywhere in the email trail (this will ensure that the email signature is not processed in the reply emails).
- Under If this signature isn't added option, select process the next signature (this will ensure that no subsequent signatures are processed).
