How to Add Your Digital Business Card to an Email Signature

Put a plain text link to your digital business card in your signature, and add a small QR code image under it only if you want to. The link is the part that always works: it survives plain-text replies, phone screens and mail apps that hide images until the reader allows them. The QR code is a bonus for someone reading on a laptop who would rather save you to their phone.

This covers getting both out of AtlasLinq, then adding them in Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail, including the one that will not take an image at all.

Step 1: Get your card's link

In the app, open the card you want people to have and open its share options. Copy the link. If you are on a team, use your company card link rather than a personal one, so the card that opens carries your company's branding and stays under your company's control if you move on.

Do not paste the bare address as it is. Give it a label people understand, such as Save my contact or My digital card, and make that text the link. A long web address in a signature reads as clutter, and a label tells the reader what happens when they click.

Step 2: Save your QR code as an image, if you want one

From the same share options, share your QR code and save the image to your photos or files. By default your AtlasLinq QR code carries your contact details inside it, so someone who scans it off their monitor with their phone camera saves you straight into their contacts, with no page to open.

Keep it small, about the height of three lines of text, so it does not dominate the email or push the rest of the signature off a phone screen.

Step 3: Add it in your mail app

Menus move, but these were the paths when this was written.

• Gmail, on a computer. Open Settings, then See all settings, and find the Signature section on the General tab. Type your signature, select the label text and use the link button to attach your card's address, insert the QR image if you want it, then press Save Changes at the bottom of the page. Gmail caps a signature at 10,000 characters and counts images toward that, which is one more reason to keep the QR small.
• Outlook on the web and the new Outlook. Open Settings, then Mail, then Compose and reply, and add a new email signature. The editor has buttons for both a link and an image. If you also use the older Outlook desktop app, it keeps its own signatures, so set it up there as well.
• Apple Mail on a Mac. Choose Mail, then Settings, then Signatures, pick the account and add a signature. You can drag the QR image into it.
• Mail on iPhone. The signature in Settings under Mail is plain text, so this is where the text link earns its place. Paste the full address on its own line, where it stays tappable, and leave the QR code out.

Step 4: Send yourself a test

Send an email to an address you can open on your phone, and check three things. The link opens your card. The QR code, if you added one, scans from your laptop screen and offers to save the contact. And the signature still looks right when you reply, because some apps shrink or strip images in a reply chain.

What not to put there

A signature is read in half a second, at the bottom of an email about something else. The card is where the detail lives, which is the point of linking to it: your full links, your other numbers and your booking page belong on the card, where you can change them without asking anyone to update anything. Two or three lines plus the link is plenty. The same discipline applies to the card itself, and what to put on a digital business card covers it.

Every person who opens your card from a signature is counted as a view, and anyone who presses Save Contact as a save, so after a few weeks you can see whether the link is being used. Tracking your card's views explains what those numbers can and cannot tell you.