It’s good to expose people to your brand as often as possible. I get that. But I don’t get why people think it’s OK to attach their logo to every email they send. How is this practice helpful? I think it’s annoying.

True, you can send an HTML email and just reference the logo’s URL so that it isn’t attached, but my overall point is that I don’t need to see your logo in every message you send. It’s probably fine to get crafty with an email message if you’re sending a note to your scrapbooking club, but this is the business world. A concise, text-only message is all I need.

I know how the decision gets made: I’ve heard plenty of conversations about how email is a form of communication and it should be rich and interactive and branded and yada yada. Some people are even including multiple images in their email signature, with links to Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’m sure the intention is good, but this is a practice that needs to stop.

Why? Email doesn’t need to be “jazzed up” in the business setting. I don’t need to see your logo every time you email me and I don’t need to see the Facebook icon in your email signature when a plain-text link would do just fine.

Worse still, in most cases images included in an email signature show up as attachments to the email message. This means I either think you’ve sent me an attachment that I need to review, only to find out it’s just your logo again, or that I have to search through the Facebook, Twitter, and company logos from your signature in order to find the one legitimate attachment that I’m supposed to look at.

Either way, I’m annoyed. And that’s probably not the brand interaction you’re hoping to have. Let’s get rid of the email signature logos.