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How to create email signatures with images to promote your vacation rental home or business

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John Posted: 11-05-2008 10:16 AM
Creating Outlook Signatures  
Saturday, 01 January 2005
One way to personalize your email or promote your vacation rental home or business is with email signatures. Often I find people don't know how to create or edit these signatures in Outlook. This is unfortunate as the Signature area is a useful feature that can be used for many scenarios. 

Uses for Email Signatures

  • Promoting brand identity
  • Providing photo of your property
  • Alerting readers to various awards or memberships
  • Displaying company logo
  • Discplaying favorite sayings or quotes
  • Providing Testimonials

Here is an example of a signature with image from a member of VRWD.com:

Hoda Noufal
Tropical Masterpiece
Fort Lauderdale, Florida

www.TropicalMasterpiece.com

However, you can place any image in your signature by saving a graphic file (.bmp, .jpg or .gif) of your property, company or any else. 

To create a signature in Outlook follow the steps below:

1. From the Tools menu, select Options. The Options dialog will appear.

2. Click the Mail Format tab

3. Click the Signatures button at the bottom on the dialog.

4. In the Create Signature dialog, click the New button.

5. Type a name for your new signature.

6. Click the Next > button.

7. Right-click in the Signature text box.

8. Select Insert Image from the pop-up menu.

9. In the Picture dialog, click the Browse button.

10. In the Picture files dialog, navigate to the image file you would like to use.

11. Highlight the image file and click Open.

12. In the Picture dialog, click the OK button. Your image will appear.

13. Add any other text as needed.

14. Click the Finish button.

15. Click the OK button.

Your signature is created and you should be back at the Options dialog. If you look in the signatures section, you'll see Outlook has assigned your new signature to new messages. This means each time you create an email, this signature will appear at the bottom of the email.

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No doubt, John - branding is key and I had religiously used glamorous signature tags with hyperlinks through the years.  The one caveat to doing this though is that you must use HTML format - which subsequently increases your chances in getting snagged by your prospect's spam filter when replying to vacation inquiries.  I eventually began sending the inquirer two email responses, one in HTML and one in plain text.  Well, over time this started becoming a pain even though I use templates or canned replies.  I have since dumped the idea and gone to plain text only so that I create an optimum chance of successfully arriving in their inbox.  This, of course, is assuming that a phone number has not been provided.  You should never rely on email when responding to prospects - if they have provided a phone number consider that as an invitation and most definitely take advantage of it WHILE emailing them at the same time so that they have script on you.

Any ideas on how to strip the tags and reduce spam flagging properties, John?

 

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Jason, you bring up a very valid point in regards to the possibility of having your email rejected when you insert html and images.  I should also point out that some ISPs also have filters that can reject emails that include excessive URLs, or terms that most spammers use such as 'free', 'best', etc...

Regarding the removal of tags, try the following code:

$code = "This<HTML>should<head>be<foo>HTML<bar>free</b>";
$code = preg_replace("/<.+?>/","",$code);
print $code;

To avoid spam flagging properties, I suggest you don't send emails from email addresses that include numbers (such as tom2008@hotmail.com) or certain terms in the subject line/body text such as 'free', 'money', 'guarantee' and other terms often used by spammers.

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