Quick win: Switch to a plain text signature today. Strip out the logo, the banner, the social icons, and the inspirational quote. What's left should be four to five lines: your name, job title, company name, and a physical address. That's the whole formula.
Folderly — an email deliverability platform that has run extensive testing on format performance — puts it plainly: "For cold outreach or personalized connections with customers, plain text emails will always be a better choice since you want to act like a human rather than a commercial brand." Their comparison of HTML vs. plain text finds that plain text emails have better deliverability and are less prone to spam filters, while HTML emails trigger more filtering and feel like bulk marketing.
The Puzzle Inbox Blog (a cold email infrastructure vendor) reinforces this with a clear breakdown of what belongs in a cold email signature:
Required (Compliance)
- Real name — should match your display name and email pattern
- Title and company — establishes legitimacy without screaming "sales blast"
- Physical address — CAN-SPAM requires a valid postal address
Optional (Useful)
- Phone number — if you actually take inbound calls
- LinkedIn profile URL — lets recipients verify you're a real person
- Website URL — skip in the first email; fine to add in follow-ups
Always Skip
- Logos and images — spam filter trigger, and many clients block images by default
- Social media icons — visual clutter that signals marketing email
- Banner images — a heavy spam trigger
- Promotional taglines — "Award-winning B2B sales platform" feels like an ad
- Calendly links — skip in the first email; acceptable in a second response
- Multiple URLs — reduce link count to protect deliverability
- Confidentiality notices — irrelevant for cold email and signals a corporate template
Long play: Think of your signature as a micro-commitment to being human in a channel full of noise. If you're running cold email from multiple inboxes or personas, Puzzle Inbox also notes that each persona should have a unique signature — different titles, addresses, and LinkedIn URLs — because identical signatures across 30 inboxes can trigger pattern detection and signal automation.
If your sending platform forces HTML, use minimal HTML: no images, no styled buttons, no colored fonts. Just plain text wrapped in HTML tags.
Keep it tight. Keep it real. Your deliverability will hold, and your emails will land looking like they came from a person — because they did.