Best regards, and other missed opportunities
Your email signature called. It's bored.
Most email signatures suffer from a nasty case of "while we're here, let's add one more thing."
Your name, your title, your phone number, your website, LinkedIn, Instagram, a logo, a headshot, three certifications, five awards and, for reasons nobody can quite explain, a quote from someone famous.
Sometimes a signature gets so optimised that it stops feeling like a signature and starts feeling like a small corporate brochure.
Lately I've been looking at it differently.
It's a touchpoint. A tiny moment at the end of an interaction when someone gets one last impression of you. And because it's so ordinary, we rarely think of it as an opportunity to do anything interesting.
So I wondered what would happen if I went in the opposite direction and made mine simpler.
I stripped it down to the essentials and added a cartoon of myself, along with a simple equation that shows what I do: words + pictures = visual storytelling.
It doesn’t explain everything or sell anything. It just gives the person on the other end a sense of who they’re dealing with, and turns a standard sign-off into a moment of joy.
That, really, is the idea I'm becoming a bit obsessed with: delight at every touchpoint.
Information gets skimmed. Personality gets remembered. And remembered is how you get the next call.
Business communications are full of these overlooked moments: the email signature, the confirmation page, the thank-you email, the 404 page, the invoice, even the boring bit at the end of the boring thing.
They could all use a serious injection of whimsy.
That's what I'm exploring at Oddly Obvious: finding the unexpected things businesses do to make themselves more human, more memorable and more fun.
What's one dreary bit of business communication you could sneak a little joy into?
Monojoy
Storyteller, Oddly Obvious
PS: P.T. Barnum, the master of delight whose life inspired The Greatest Showman, built an empire on making people happy, and it turned out to be brilliant business. Joe Vitale shows how to apply his eccentric genius to your own marketing in There's a Customer Born Every Minute: P.T. Barnum's Amazing 10 "Rings of Power" for Creating Fame, Fortune, and a Business Empire Today—Guaranteed!
The oldest marketing trick in the book: delight people. 🎪
Because good stories like good company:
