With respect, the very people you are covering for a living probably find that signature obnoxious. Speaking for myself, I certainly would; I never thought I'd see an e-mail signature worse than a paragraph of unenforceable legal disclaimer, but alas, I have.
One thing you've probably overlooked is that a significant majority of mail agents (a) discard HTML, making your carefully-formatted signature render in ways that you have not anticipated or dropping it altogether, and/or (b) do not thread and hide quotes the same way yours does. In addition, you're now making me download and potentially display that signature every time you reply to me. On mobile, this can be a big deal in a deep thread where 70% of the data in a message could end up being your repeated signature.
I'm assuming that your workflow is top-posting and letting Gmail hide the repeated signature from you. That gets really unworkable, really quickly in any client that is not Gmail, particularly with a huge HTML signature that is repeated on every message. Since one of the primary topics of your publication is engineering types, you might find that this signature is doing you more harm than good with them. (Though I grant that you probably correspond more with PR and management people, who love Comic Sans signatures.) I don't think your A/B testing can account for that. There is a far better solution in Gmail's canned responses, which really should be promoted from a fucking Lab already:
The other thing you probably haven't accounted for is that I very quickly pick up on someone being annoyed that I've e-mailed them. Your signature basically says "you are an inconvenience to me," by demonstrating that you've put a lot of thought into lowering the questions that you answer. I feel the same way about "Before you e-mail me, please read this:" and the other things overworked e-mailers ask me to do as a method of transferring work. I generally end up in a "oh, you don't want me to e-mail you? Okay!" attitude when dealing with this sort of thing.
The signature lightly betrays that you do not generally value engaging with the people that e-mail you and turns me off to you, which might be hurting you with sources. We all hate e-mail, yet the best e-mail correspondents find ways to manage the workload without betraying that their conversational partner is an inconvenience to their life. Seeing as dealing with people via correspondence is probably half of your chosen profession, I'd hope that's not the message that you intend to convey.
The new canned responses take 2-3 clicks to get one answer in. That would add a lot of unnecessary time wasted each day. Perhaps there is a middle ground for Sarah that contains a link to an updated page with this info?
I imagine far fewer people would get the answers if a click was required. Pretty basic user tendencies.
Honestly, I don't get the irritation of the parent comment. I'm drowning in email....and I'm not a public figure. If I saw something like that FAQ, I would just assume the person was flooded with mail, and doing me a favour by answering any common questions.
One thing you've probably overlooked is that a significant majority of mail agents (a) discard HTML, making your carefully-formatted signature render in ways that you have not anticipated or dropping it altogether, and/or (b) do not thread and hide quotes the same way yours does. In addition, you're now making me download and potentially display that signature every time you reply to me. On mobile, this can be a big deal in a deep thread where 70% of the data in a message could end up being your repeated signature.
I'm assuming that your workflow is top-posting and letting Gmail hide the repeated signature from you. That gets really unworkable, really quickly in any client that is not Gmail, particularly with a huge HTML signature that is repeated on every message. Since one of the primary topics of your publication is engineering types, you might find that this signature is doing you more harm than good with them. (Though I grant that you probably correspond more with PR and management people, who love Comic Sans signatures.) I don't think your A/B testing can account for that. There is a far better solution in Gmail's canned responses, which really should be promoted from a fucking Lab already:
http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Canned-Responses-in-Gmail
The other thing you probably haven't accounted for is that I very quickly pick up on someone being annoyed that I've e-mailed them. Your signature basically says "you are an inconvenience to me," by demonstrating that you've put a lot of thought into lowering the questions that you answer. I feel the same way about "Before you e-mail me, please read this:" and the other things overworked e-mailers ask me to do as a method of transferring work. I generally end up in a "oh, you don't want me to e-mail you? Okay!" attitude when dealing with this sort of thing.
The signature lightly betrays that you do not generally value engaging with the people that e-mail you and turns me off to you, which might be hurting you with sources. We all hate e-mail, yet the best e-mail correspondents find ways to manage the workload without betraying that their conversational partner is an inconvenience to their life. Seeing as dealing with people via correspondence is probably half of your chosen profession, I'd hope that's not the message that you intend to convey.