Adding Skype to Your Email Signature

Is Skype a key part of your business communications? Do you want to make it easier for your customers and contacts to be able to call you or send you messages via Skype? If so you’ll want to add your Skype profile to your email signature.

This sounds simple, unfortunately, it’s not. Due to the way some, well Gmail, removes invalid URL’s from email signatures it’s a lot more complicated than it needs to be. For example, let’s take the HTML below:-

<a href="skype:YOUR_SKYPE_ID?call">Call Me!</a>

If this was in your HTML email signature Gmail would automatically change it to:-

<a>Call Me!</a>

Leaving your customers and contacts completely confused as to how they could call you as the link now no longer works.

The simplest way we’ve found around this is to change the URI (that’s the skype:YOUR_SKYPE_ID?call command) to a URL with a URL shortener service. We found that http://is.gd/ works well, other URL shorteners don’t allow URI links. Simply take your desired Skype command such as call, chat or add (to contacts), along with your Skype ID and convert it from a URI to a URL.

If you’re not familiar with the Skype commands that will open the user’s Skype app and perform an action, here they are-

skype:YOUR_SKYPE_ID?call – Calls your Skype ID directly from their web interface or device.
skype:YOUR_SKYPE_ID?chat – Allows your customer to send a message directly to your Skype ID.
skype:YOUR_SKYPE_ID?add – Let’s your customer add your Skype profile to their Skype contacts.

Note: Be sure to check your privacy settings allow people outside your contact list to call or chat with you.