How to Add a Hyperlink to Your Email Signature

Are you tired of sending emails with a plain, unassuming signature? Adding a hyperlink to your email signature is a quick and easy way to make your messages stand out and give your recipients more information about you and your work.

Whether you want to promote your website, highlight your social media profiles, or just make it easier for people to get in touch with you, adding a hyperlink to your email signature is a smart move.

But, before we get started, it’s important to know exactly what a hyperlink is and how it should be used.

What is a hyperlink?

A hyperlink (also referred to as a “link”) is text or an image in an HTML document or email signature (which uses HTML) that becomes clickable and takes you to another resource, either on the internet or locally on your computer.

There are hyperlinks all over the internet linking to other resources. It would be extremely difficult to find a website or email signature that doesn’t have a hyperlink on it.

Since email signatures are coded in a very similar way to websites (HTML), hyperlinks work the same in both instances.

Just to be clear on what a hyperlink is, this is a hyperlink to Gimmio, our email free signature generator.

When should hyperlinks be used in email signatures?

Hyperlinks can be useful in an email signature in a variety of ways. Below are a few common scenarios where hyperlinks can be used.

Website

A hyperlink to your personal or professional website can give recipients more information about you and your business.

The link doesn’t have to go directly to your homepage, you could link to a product page, or maybe an “About Us” type of page.

When linking to your website in your email signature, it’s important to ensure that your website is up to scratch in terms of quality. There is no point in having a great-looking email signature but a terrible mess of a website – it’s not a good look.

Email Address

Hyperlinking an email address is very common, and it allows your recipients to click (or tap) on your email address which automatically opens up a new message window for them to send you an email.

This is a great method to open up communication with your customers and to show them that you’re always available.

Communication Apps (eg. Skype, Facebook Messenger)

These are much less known types of hyperlinks, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful. In fact, they are very useful if implemented correctly.

Most popular communication/chat applications such as Skype, Facebook Messenger, and many more, have the ability to automatically open a chat session with a person or business when a link is clicked.

This can open huge opportunities for your business since your customers can instantly chat with sales staff to ask any questions about your products.

Telephone Numbers

When you have a click-to-call link on a telephone number in your email signature, your recipients can simply tap the number and it will automatically open their phone’s dialer making it easy for them to contact you.

It’s much easier than your recipient copying your phone number, manually opening their phone dialler, and then pasting your number in and tapping the call button.

Address

Hyperlinking an address to Google Maps can be a convenient way to provide your location information to recipients very quickly. With the tap of a button, your recipient can navigate their way to your business.

An alternative is to link the address to your website’s “Contact Us” page.

Social Icons

If you have social icons in your email signature, it’s essential to hyperlink those icons to your social media profiles. That’s the whole point of having social icons, right?

Social links make it easier for recipients to connect with you on those platforms, and that allows them to enquire about your products, or ask for support.

Banners

The type of banner you use in your email signature will determine the type of link you would have in it.

For banners advertising specials, discounts, or sales, you would generally link directly to the relevant product page on your website. This helps drive traffic to your website, and in turn, more sales.

Some banners are purely made for collecting reviews from customers in order to boost future conversions. These hyperlinks will likely go to a dedicated reviews website where your reviews are collected and aggregated.

Why use hyperlinks in email signatures?

Hyperlinks are a convenient way to redirect your email recipients to other resources such as your website, social channels, and much more.

Without hyperlinks, it would be much harder to advertise your products and services in your email signature, because your recipients might not know where to go for more information.

In addition, email signatures would likely have really long web addresses in place of the hyperlinks, which your recipients would need to manually copy and paste into their browsers. This would be very cumbersome and not very convenient.

What are hyperlink protocols?

A hyperlink protocol is the first part of a hyperlink that tells the device what application to use when opening the link.

You can use many types of hyperlinks in the same way as a regular website hyperlink. All you have to do is change the protocol section of the link.

For example, take a look at these 4 different types of links:

Standard website link:

<a href="https://www.yourwebsite.com">My Website</a>

Phone number (click-to-call) link:

<a href="tel:+1 (555) 1821 7716">My Phone Number</a>

Email link:

<a href="mailto:name@company.com">My Email</a>

Skype link:

<a href="skype:my_username">My Skype</a>

Notice the only difference is that we’re using different protocols at the beginning of the href value? Eg. https, tel, mailto, skype.

For an “https” hyperlink, the web browser would be used to open it. Likewise, for a “tel” link, it would open the phone’s dialler to call the number in the link. The “mailto” link would open a new email message, and so on.

How to Add a Hyperlink to Your Email Signature

To add a hyperlink to your email signature, you can either use an email signature maker (the easiest option) or use the hyperlink function in your email client. Another option is to manually edit the signature HTML code to insert the hyperlink.

Add a Hyperlink with Gimmio (recommended)

This is by far the easiest option when adding a hyperlink – only takes about 2 minutes.

Step 1

Navigate to Gimmio and log in.

Step 2

If you have an existing signature:

Expand your group, click on your signature, and skip to Step 5.

If you don’t have a signature:

Click on New User, fill in the required information, and then click Create User.

Step 3

Select and apply one of the email signature templates.

Step 4

Fill in your information such as name, position, and phone numbers by clicking on the fields.

Step 5

Click on any field that you want to add a hyperlink to, such as your website, email address, or any image (banners, social icons, etc).

You should see a “Field Hyperlink” option where you can simply type in your hyperlink for that field. When someone clicks on that field, it will take them to the location you put in as the hyperlink.

When adding your hyperlink, remember to add the hyperlink protocol at the beginning (eg. https://, tel:, etc). This will ensure your hyperlink works as intended.

Step 6

Once you’re happy with your hyperlink, click to install your email signature.

Add a Hyperlink Directly in Your Email Program

Adding a hyperlink to your signature can easily be done within your email application. You can add hyperlinks to text or images (such as banners or social icons). However, it’s important to note that some email applications allow you to add hyperlinks, while others (such as mobile email apps) don’t.

Select your email program below for instructions on how to add a hyperlink.

Add a Hyperlink Manually in Your Signature HTML Code

Editing HTML code can be intimidating for those who are new to it, but with some basic knowledge and a little bit of practice, it can become fairly straightforward.

If you get stuck, our article about creating email signatures has a lot of good technical information about modifying HTML code in email signatures.

For this section, you will need to have the HTML file with your email signature in it.

Step 1

Open your email signature HTML file in a web browser like Chrome.

You will need to figure out which text or image in your email signature you want to add a hyperlink to.

Since the website field has the text “gimm.io”, this is the text we will hyperlink to our website.

Step 2

Open the email signature HTML file in a text editor such as Sublime, which makes it much easier to look at HTML code.

Do a search (Ctrl + F) for the text from the first step. In our instance, we will search for “gimm.io” (replace this with your own website or text that you’re trying to add a link to).

You will likely find code that looks something like this:

<span style="font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;font-size:14.0px;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;font-weight:normal;color:#535353; display:inline;">gimm.io</span>

Notice it has the text “gimm.io” in between the <span> tags? This is the text displayed in the email signature.

Step 3

Next, you will need the hyperlink code below and modify it to your needs.

<a href="https://gimm.io">gimm.io</a>

The value in the href attribute is where you want the “gimm.io” text to link to when it is clicked. You can substitute the above code depending on which hyperlink protocol you’re using.

The “gimm.io” in between the opening and closing <a> tag, is the text that will be visible in your email signature.

Note: <a> is the opening tag, and </a> is the closing tag.

Step 4

The next step is to remove the existing text that says “gimm.io” in the <span> tags and paste the copied <a> tags inside the <span> tags.

Your code should now look like this:

<span style="font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;font-size:14.0px;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;font-weight:normal;color:#535353; display:inline;"><a href="https://gimm.io">gimm.io<a></span>

Step 5

Save your HTML file, open it in Chrome to check if it’s working as a hyperlink, and click on it to make sure it goes to the right website.

Once you’ve confirmed the signature looks fine, install your email signature in your email client.