With the passing of time, email footer design has evolved to include multifunctional components. From housing basic contact information, email footers now incorporate branding elements, social media links, legal compliance information, Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons and more.
Question is: With access to these multifunctional components, how do you create clear, effective, and actionable email footers without overwhelming your audience?
Well, we’ve experimented with multiple email footer designs. And, after assessing analytics, we recommend sticking to simplicity. A simple and responsive email footer with minimal branding and interactive elements. That’s it!
Why simplicity matters in email footer?
Generally, email providers offer email builders with different levels of customization. Some platform-specific email builders even allow you to custom code email footers. So, to minimize spending much time on selecting an email provider based on email customization flexibility, we opt for simplicity.
It is optimal to select an email provider based on your business objectives and set budget despite getting limited customization options. The limitations are usually put in place to ensure compatibility and deliverability.
Here’s why a simple mindset is key to creating the best email footer, allowing you to focus on business objectives:
1. Optimizes target audience’s experience
A minimalist design reduces visual clutter, making it easier for your target audience to focus on the most critical information.
Presenting information in an organized and straightforward manner makes it easier for them to navigate the email footer. Whether it’s connecting on social media or contacting you, they get to quickly scan through the footer’s content and take action.
2. Boosts audience engagement
Besides improving focus on the most critical elements, a simple design reduces cognitive load, making it easier for the target audience to process information effortlessly. This encourages the target audience to fully absorb and interact with your message or take action, such as clicking links.
3. Powers brand consistency with a professional email footer
Focusing on minimalism means including only the most essential imagery or information. It is about having a simple footer that emphasizes core brand elements, including the fonts, colors, logos, and message, enhancing brand consistency. This improves brand recognition or awareness, reinforcing brand recall and makes it easier to track consistency using a contact details scraping tool.
4. Aids in achieving transparency and legal compliance
A simple and straightforward email footer layout makes room for the most critical information like unsubscribe links and legal policies. This ensures that you don’t overlook legal compliance, fostering trust.
Moreover, prominently displaying the most essential elements like contact information, address of the company, and standard legal disclaimers, makes it easier for the audience to verify your brand’s authenticity. They get to cross-check details and avoid spam or scam emails.
5. Fosters tracking and analytics
Having fewer and well placed links or call-to-action buttons eases the process of tracking and comparing performance of specific links or CTAs. By limiting clickable elements, you only focus on collecting the data accurately presenting user behavior or interest. This helps in optimizing email content to get the desired outcomes.
Now, let’s see how you go about focusing on simplicity to create an email footer and make these benefits a reality.
Steps to creating the best email signature footer in 2024
Yes, custom-coding an email footer grants you full control and flexibility. However, the level of email footer customization largely depends on the select email platform. Also, some platforms allowing users to create custom HTML-coded email footers still limit email footer design options.
To reduce the likelihood of hiccups as you follow this step-by-step process, we’ll focus on working with the default email builder provided by your select email provider. We’ve kept everything simple and straightforward, in a way that even the most limiting email builder should work.
The goal is to have a professional and polished email footer while ensuring we maintain flexibility and compatibility across email clients and user devices. Let’s go!
Plan your email signature content and layout
Before creating an email footer, you must have a clear objective. Do you want to reinforce brand identity or direct traffic to your website?
Perhaps you want to provide customer support on a specific issue faced by multiple users. Having a clear objective in mind helps with prioritizing the essential elements of an email footer.
For instance, if you aim to enhance brand identity, you’d prominently showcase the brand’s logo, color scheme, and tagline, strengthening brand recognition and recall. And, if you want to drive website traffic, you’d emphasize the CTA directing traffic to a specific web page.
Overall, planning your footer content is about settling on a specific objective to guide you on how to prioritize and layout the footer’s elements. Once you set a clear objective, sketch or design the layout.
Common layouts for a great email footer include:
- Single column: Involves arranging all footer elements vertically one after the other. This is a simple and mobile-friendly design approach.
- Two columns: Involves placing elements side-by-side. For example, having social media links on one side and the call-to-action button the other. This approach balances visuals with text, delivering a symmetrical finish.
- Row-based layout: Involves splitting the footer into horizontal blocks and adding each element to its respective block. This layout organizes multiple elements clearly, making it ideal for content-rich footers.
Of the three, the single column and row-based layout rank top when working with a minimalistic approach. Both layouts are mobile-friendly and highly readable, guiding the target audience from the top to bottom without distractions.
As of January 2024, almost 60% of global web page views were from mobile phones. Not forgetting, this percentage excludes tablets and is expected to increase. This is why we are focusing on having a neat and responsive email footer so that it looks good on mobile and desktop.
Remember, as you proceed, you have the liberty to adjust the size or priority of elements as per the set objective or chosen layout.
Use an email signature generator for customization
Launch your email editor and navigate to the email footer section. Some email providers may call this the “signature” section.
Nonetheless, the “footer” section serves the purpose of accommodating contact information, social media links, branding elements, legal compliance notices, and CTAs. These components work together within the limited space at the end of your email to add value, support communication, and supercharge brand identity.
Based on your selected email provider, the “footer” section should have pre-built elements, blocks, or templates to give you a preview of what to expect.
Most of these pre-built blocks or templates are structured in a single column or row-based layout. To maintain simplicity, select from one of these.
Add branding elements to your email footer
Once you’ve selected a suitable pre-built template based on the pre-designed layout, adjust the template to reflect your brand’s elements—that’s the logo, colors, and fonts.
Starting with the logo, find the logo or image block and upload your logo to the email footer area. Have the logo at the top of the footer, on either side.
Keep the size of the logo between 100-150 pixels to ensure it introduces the brand without obstructing other elements or dominating the available space.
Then, navigate to the design settings section of the editor and adjust the background, text, and button colors to reflect your brand’s palette. Have a balanced color distribution in place and adjust the font too. After this, you should have a footer that’s visually cohesive with your other marketing material.
Add social media links and contact information
Now, we start adding more details to achieve the set objectives. Find the socials block or icons and add it to the footer area. Ensure the icons are in a single row to give your footer’s layout a clean, organized appearance.
To improve efficacy, ensure the icon of the social media platform with the most engagement goes first. Then, the rest follow as per the engagement data. Once done, customize the brand icons to match your brand’s palette too.
Following this step, use the text block to add crucial contact information, including phone number, email address, and business address. Center align the text and add a bit of spacing in between them to improve readability.
Incorporate a CTA in your email footer design
Use the button block to incorporate a call-to-action. Then, adjust the button’s link, color, size, and text to stand out from the rest of the elements. This pulls the target audience’s attention to the button, increasing conversion rates.
Moreover, have the button in a central location, usually beneath the contact details. Doing so makes the button easily accessible while reducing the chances of it overpowering other footer elements.
To optimize future emails, consider integrating tracking links or adding UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters into the CTA button’s link. This allows you to analyze user interactions and fine-tune your strategy or objectives based on actual user data.
Don’t forget about the legal requirements for email footers
By default, several email providers require you to include the unsubscribe link as part of respecting the audience's privacy and choices. Therefore, they include a default “Unsubscribe” option for you to drag and drop into your email footer. The email provider automatically handles the link for you, ensuring it works seamlessly.
Find the “Unsubscribe” block or link and add it at the bottom of your email footer. Use a smaller font for the link and a muted color such as gray to avoid drawing too much attention to the link. The same applies to other links like the privacy policy link.
Always add a link to your brand’s privacy policy to comply with legal requirements and build trust. And, if available, include the multi-language feature to help translate your privacy policy into different languages, enhancing the recipient’s experience. Finally, test the email footer’s compatibility and responsiveness, and save as a template.
Conclusion
And, there you have it! Now you have a competitive edge over other brand’s wondering how to create the best email footers in 2024. Remember, keep it simple and straightforward and you should have a highly converting email footer.
