Search for email signature examples and you will find hundreds. Nearly all of them are built around an American template: first name, last name, a (555) phone number, a street address in Austin or Boston, and no statutory identifiers of any kind.
Copy one directly and you end up with a signature that is subtly wrong in five different ways. The phone number formatting looks off to Indian recipients. The address structure doesn't match how Indian addresses actually work. There's no place for your CIN. And the name field assumes a first-name/last-name structure that a large number of Indian names simply do not have.
This post gives you worked examples built for Indian companies, plus the reasoning behind each convention so you can adapt rather than copy.
The five conventions that differ
Before the examples, the rules that make a signature read as competently Indian rather than translated.
1. Phone number formatting
The Indian mobile numbering convention that reads most naturally is +91 98765 43210 — country code, space, then the ten digits split five and five.
Avoid these:
+91-98765-43210— hyphens make it harder to select and copy on mobile+919876543210— technically correct, visually unreadable(+91) 98765 43210— brackets around a country code is a Western convention that adds nothing098765 43210— the leading zero is for domestic dialling and breaks international calls
For landlines, keep the STD code separate: +91 124 456 7890 for Gurugram, +91 80 4567 8901 for Bengaluru. Note that STD codes vary in length — Delhi and Mumbai are two digits, most other cities three or four — so don't force a uniform split.
If you list both, label them. M: and T: (or Mobile: and Office:) prevents the ambiguity of two unlabelled numbers.
2. Address structure
Indian addresses are hierarchical in a way Western templates don't accommodate: building or unit, then floor, then plot or street, then sector or locality, then city, then state, then PIN.
The convention that works:
4th Floor, Tower B, Cyber Greens, DLF Phase 3
Sector 25, Gurugram, Haryana 122002
Two specifics worth getting right. The PIN follows the state name without a comma, mirroring how it's written on physical post. And use current official city names — Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai, Puducherry — rather than the older forms, unless your registered documents say otherwise.
Important: if you are including an address for Companies Act purposes, it must be your registered office address, which may not be where you actually sit. If your registered office is your CA's premises in Karol Bagh and your team works from a co-working space in Indiranagar, the statutory footer needs the former. You can list the operating address separately if useful.
3. Names that don't fit the template
A meaningful proportion of Indian names do not decompose into "first name" and "last name" the way Western software assumes.
- Mononyms. Many people from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and elsewhere have a single given name with an initial that expands to a father's name or village —
R. Karthik,M. Anjali. - Patronymic initials. These belong before the given name and are not a middle initial.
S. Venkateshis notVenkatesh S.and reordering it is an error, not a formatting choice. - Surname-first conventions, common in parts of Maharashtra and Karnataka.
- Names longer than a single line at 14px in a signature block.
The practical rule: ask people how they write their own name, and use that. Do not have a template that mechanically renders {first_name} {last_name}, because it will produce wrong output for a portion of your team, and being wrong about someone's name in every email they send is a genuinely bad look.
For international-facing roles, some people prefer adding a phonetic guide — Shreyas Iyengar (SHRAY-us). Offer it; don't mandate it.
4. Where the CIN and GSTIN go
Both belong in a footer, visually separated from the human details and set smaller.
The CIN is a 21-character string that looks like U72900HR2019PTC078451. It is not something a human reader will ever parse, and it should not compete with your name for attention. Set it at 10–11px in a muted grey.
Two things worth knowing:
- CIN is required. Section 12(3)(c) of the Companies Act, 2013 mandates company name, registered office address, and CIN on business letters and official publications, and external business email is generally treated as falling within that.
- GSTIN is not. There is no requirement to carry your GSTIN in email correspondence — GST law requires it on tax invoices and on the name board at your place of business. Include it if your B2B customers keep asking for it, and leave it out otherwise. If you hold registrations in multiple states, a single hard-coded GSTIN in a company-wide template will be wrong for some of your team.
5. Bilingual and Devanagari elements
If you operate in a market where a Hindi, Tamil, Bengali or other script version of your company name matters, it can go in the signature — but treat it carefully. Non-Latin scripts render inconsistently across email clients, and a missing font on the recipient's device produces boxes rather than text.
The safe approach: put the script version inside the logo image rather than as live text, and keep the text layer Latin. You get the visual identity without the rendering risk.
The examples
Six worked signatures for common Indian company situations. Each is shown as text; the formatting notes follow.
1. Early-stage startup founder
Ananya Deshpande
Co-founder & CEO
Meridian Labs Private Limited
+91 98200 12345 | ananya@meridianlabs.in
meridianlabs.in
CIN: U72900MH2023PTC401288
Regd. Office: 502, Sunbeam Chambers, Nariman Point, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400021
Clean and short. Founders are often the most-emailed person at an early-stage company, so the signature does double duty as a credibility signal to investors and customers. No headshot, no banner, no social icons — at this stage restraint reads as more serious than decoration.
2. Sales role at a growing SaaS company
Rohit Malhotra
Account Executive | Enterprise
Signal Analytics Private Limited
M: +91 99870 45612 | rohit@signalanalytics.com
Book a call: cal.com/rohit-signal
[Logo]
CIN: U62099KA2021PTC148903 | GSTIN: 29AABCS1429L1ZP
Regd. Office: 3rd Floor, Prestige Towers, 100 Feet Road, Indiranagar,
Bengaluru, Karnataka 560038
The booking link is the one addition worth making for sales roles — it removes a scheduling round-trip from every deal. GSTIN is included here because enterprise procurement teams ask for it constantly; it would be noise in an engineer's signature.
3. Design or creative agency
Nikhil Raghunathan
Creative Director
FORM & FIELD
Design studio • Bengaluru
+91 96320 78145
nikhil@formandfield.studio | formandfield.studio
Instagram · Behance · LinkedIn
Form & Field Design LLP
LLPIN: AAK-7712 | Regd. Office: 14, Cambridge Layout, Ulsoor,
Bengaluru, Karnataka 560008
Agencies get more latitude — the signature is itself a portfolio piece. Note the LLP structure here: Section 21 of the Limited Liability Partnership Act, 2008 requires an LLP's official correspondence to carry its name, registered office address, and registration number, along with a statement that it is registered with limited liability. Add that statement line if your counsel advises it.
Behance and Instagram earn their place for a creative studio in a way they wouldn't for a fintech.
4. Support or customer success
Priya Krishnan
Customer Success | Northbridge Technologies
support@northbridge.in | +91 80 4712 3300
Support hours: Mon–Fri, 9:30 AM – 6:30 PM IST
Help centre: help.northbridge.in
Northbridge Technologies Private Limited
CIN: U72200TN2020PTC137724
Regd. Office: Module 8, TIDEL Park, Taramani, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600113
Support signatures should set expectations. Published hours with the IST timezone stated explicitly prevents the most common support complaint, which is silence at 11 PM. Route people to the shared support address rather than the individual's — it survives that person's holiday.
5. Freelancer or independent consultant
Shreya Nambiar
Independent Brand Consultant
+91 98450 33127 | shreya@shreyanambiar.com
shreyanambiar.com | LinkedIn
Bengaluru, India
GSTIN: 29AXOPN4471Q1ZK
No CIN, because there is no company — a sole proprietorship has no equivalent statutory identifier requirement. GSTIN is included because freelancers invoicing businesses get asked for it in every onboarding form, so having it visible saves a round-trip. City only, not a full address; there's no obligation and no reason to publish a home address.
6. Multi-brand or agency-of-record setup
Aditya Menon
Group Account Director
CANOPY | a Vantage Group company
+91 97400 88214 | aditya@canopy.co.in
canopy.co.in
Vantage Marketing Services Private Limited
CIN: U74999DL2018PTC332158
Regd. Office: A-24, Second Floor, Green Park Main, New Delhi, Delhi 110016
Where the customer-facing brand differs from the registered entity, show both. The brand leads because that's what the recipient recognises; the legal entity appears in the footer where it satisfies the disclosure requirement. Do not omit the registered name simply because it isn't the brand — the statutory obligation attaches to the company, not the brand.
Formatting specifications that apply to all of these
Fonts. Use a websafe stack: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif. Custom brand fonts do not load in email clients and will silently fall back to something you didn't choose. If your brand font matters that much, put it in the logo image.
Sizes. Name at 14px, everything human-readable at 12px, the statutory footer at 10–11px. Below 10px becomes genuinely hard to read on some displays.
Colour. One brand colour for the name, a dark grey (#333333) for body text, a lighter grey (#888888) for the footer. Pure black reads heavier than it needs to on screen.
Width. Cap the whole block at around 500px. Wider signatures wrap unpredictably on mobile.
Logo. Maximum 180px wide, hosted on a stable HTTPS URL, with real alt text — alt="Meridian Labs", not alt="". When image loading is blocked, which happens routinely, alt text is the difference between your company name and a broken-image icon.
Structure. Build with HTML tables and inline CSS. Email clients do not reliably support flexbox or grid, and Outlook in particular renders modern CSS unpredictably.
Three mistakes we see constantly
The address that isn't the registered office. People put the address they work from. If the signature is doing statutory duty, it needs the registered office, and these differ more often than you'd think — particularly for startups incorporated at a CA's address.
Text baked into images. A designer produces a beautiful signature as a single PNG. It looks perfect until the recipient's client blocks images, at which point the entire signature — name, phone, everything — becomes one broken rectangle. Images should carry the logo and nothing load-bearing.
Templates that break on long names. A signature designed around "Priya Rao" at 500px wide will wrap awkwardly for "Venkataraghavan Balasubramanian." Test your template against your longest actual name, not a placeholder.
Keeping forty of these correct
Any one of these signatures takes ten minutes to build. The difficulty is the fortieth one, six months later.
A new hire copies a colleague's email and inherits a two-year-old logo. Your registered office changes and twenty-two signatures still carry the old address — which, for the CIN block, means twenty-two people sending non-compliant business correspondence every day. Someone reformats their signature after a laptop refresh and the statutory footer disappears because it looked like clutter.
None of this is anyone's fault. It's what happens when a company-wide standard is enforced by individual memory across forty machines.
Signforus deploys one template across your whole team, with the compliance footer locked so it can't be accidentally dropped — built for Indian teams of five to fifty, priced flat rather than per seat. We're in early access now.
Whatever you use: pick a format, write it down, and test it against your longest name and your smallest phone screen before you roll it out to anyone.
