Hyperlinks for Email Signatures?

Factual Questions
1

Hi all, a client is wanting me to add multiple hyperlinks to their email signature. They want it in a JPEG form with a link to their website and also to the email address when clicked on. They’re also wanting it so you can click on the phone number and it will call them (but thats later down the track).
I’ve managed to add hyperlinks in Illustrator but how do I keep the hyperlinks there when converting the file to JPEG? Or how do I add a PDF with the hyperlinks as an email signature?

Help me please and thank you!

2

Why are you trying to put the links in the JPEG? JPEGs can’t have links in them, and that’s not where you want the links, anyway. And what do PDFs have to do with anything? You said it yourself: They want the links in the e-mail signature. So put the links in the e-mail signature.

3

Their email client has to support HTML signatures. Their recipients have to support HTML emails (most do).

Then just save your JPEG and add it to the HTML sig, either through the email client’s WYSIWYG editor or by hand-coding it:


<a href="whatever.com/link"><img src="blahblah"></a>

Do not include a PDF in the email signature. It is rude to the recipient (PDFs are typically too big to be comfortably included in every single email) – include a link to an online download location of the PDF, if you must, but not the actual PDF.

For the phone number, use the tel: protocol like so:


<a href="tel:+18001231234">Call us at 1-800-123-1234</a>

To add an hyperlink inside a PDF, use a program like Acrobat, PDFill, or many free online tools. Insert a link box around the text/image you want to link and give it a URL. You cannot actually hyperlink text, but you can color it blue, underline it, and then put an invisible link rectangle on top of it to make it look and act like a link.

4

Seriously ?
His emails are going to become best friends with a lot of spam filters.

5

n/m, misunderstood

6

If you really intend to fulfil this bizarre request (rather than what you should be doing, namely advising them it’s an entirely dumb idea because of usability, the difference in fulfilling what’s asked for between different mail clients, and spam filters), and you need several links in the same image-based signature, you are going to need to slice the JPG and write it in raw HTML (I think Illustrator can output the HTML but you will need to check it).

Hopefully you can just have:

<p>
<a href=“link1”><img src=“clientswebsite/image1.jpg”></a><br>
<a href=“link2”><img src=“clientswebsite.image2jpg”></a><br>
<a href=“link2”><img src=“clientswebsite.image3jpg”></a>
</p>

If the image is more complex than that and the different links don’t fit into a ‘horizontally striped’ format, you will need to slice it into the correct shape and then build it using tables. I know tables are old-hat but using them is the only way to guarantee they’ll be rendered correctly in all mail clients (looking at you, Outlook).