7 Email Footer Best Practices, Examples & Tips
Try Publicate For Free Today
Start Now
Email newsletters and emails have a lot of extra real estate that can go unnoticed easily. By adding an email footer message to your beautifully designed email newsletter, you can include extra valuable information, and even, call-to-actions.
We’re going to share email footer best practices worth knowing and the best tools and templates to create them.
Wondering what an email footer is? Take a look at the very bottom of most email newsletters and you’ll see what we’re talking about. It’s the last block of content within an email marketing template.
While it’s up to your discretion as to what to include within your email footer design, it is common to contain information that otherwise wouldn’t fit into the main body of the email.
For example, the email footer may have:
Rather than overlooking your email footer as a place to input legal information or only email footer disclaimer text, see it as another opportunity to communicate with your readers and add value to your emails.
Email footers are not the same as email signatures, although it may feel easy to confuse the two because they are what tend to culminate in email newsletters.
Email signatures are blocks of text that appear at the end of your email. Email signatures contain information like the sender’s name, company logo, contact information, and title. These tend to be used for internal communications.
If you use an email signature builder, you can simply customize your email signature and even add company branding to it.
By creating a professional email signature template, you can use an email signature builder to export your signature for use in any email you send (even if you wish to send using Gmail, Outlook, or other popular email providers).
Alternatively, an email footer is an entire section of content that is geared towards marketing content and broader company information.
When you’re using an email builder tool to create and customize your email newsletter templates, you’ll see there are pre-built blocks of content available to edit and make your own.
At the bottom of the email newsletter, you can use drag-and-drop functionality to design your very own email footer message that follows email footer best practices.
The reasons why you’d want to do so are plenty. Email footers are a great place to input all valuable company information that you’d want clients to know, such as contact information, company values, or a marketing message.
Additionally, email footers play a role in aiding against emails falling into SPAM. SPAM filters search for key phrases within an email’s body, and email footers tend to have the keywords to protect against them being misplaced.
During your email design process, the use of an email builder will ease all your concerns and remove any guesswork.
Email builder tools offer an hundreds of templates to choose from and are easy to edit with the click of a button, without any need for coders or designers. The best email builders also allow you to export your HTML email and send your creations with your preferred email service provider.
With email builders as part of your process, you can save time and create more engaging newsletters simply.
Along with the easy drag-and-drop functionality to customize your content, email builders also provide you with a content library, image editor, and perhaps most importantly, analytics to assess how your campaigns are performing. With the data available, you can optimize your emails to maximize engagement.
At the bottom of your email newsletter design, it’s time to focus on your email footer and implement email footer best practices, such as these:
With the bulk of emails being read on mobile devices these days, it only makes sense to make sure that your email footer is mobile-friendly. This means that your email footer size will render properly across different screen sizes.
In the same way that you can leverage an email builder with responsive templates, you can use an email builder to ensure that your email footer appears the way you’d intend.
There’s a delicate balance between overloading a reader and missing the chance to share the information that they will likely be seeking. Just like you want to strike that balance in designing your email newsletter itself, the same can be said of email footers.
Email footers should be simple to skim so that readers can find what they need at-a-glance. You can input a lot of necessary information in a small space with smart design practices, which is our next point.
Make use of the best design practices to balance your copy and graphics together. For example, in the case of email footers, the use of columns can be incredibly helpful. So can line dividers to differentiate between different types of information.
For example, you can have a column with company and contact information, a column with social media links, and another column with policies such as shipping, returns, and exchanges.
An important addition to any email footer is the option for subscribers to unsubscribe. It’s a critical element that shouldn’t be overlooked because it’s a legal requirement.
In order to mass market, subscribers must have opted-in to receive your communications. At the same time, subscribers have to have a clear option to change their mind and opt-out.
While an unsubscribe link is a legal requirement, it’s not a desirable outcome from a marketing, sales, and business perspective.
To sway readers away from focusing on the unsubscribe link, use some of the surrounding space to give your audience the option to share your email newsletter content via social sharing links or a “forward to a friend” option.
An email footer is another great place to offer referral opportunities.
To piggyback on the above email footer best practices, especially the design-focused considerations, keep your email footer design lowkey.
While your email design itself should grab attention with strong and catchy copy mixed with clean design, your email footer shouldn’t steal all the attention.
It should just complement and add to your overall message. To achieve this, consider using muted email footer colors that work well with the color palette of the rest of your communications.
An email footer is the last piece of an email newsletter that your audience will see. If your digital communications were taking place in real life, you could consider an email footer to be your final goodbye (and chance to convert a prospect into a client).
For this reason, it’s a great place to add a final call-to-action or call out something impressive or different about your company. To exemplify, if you offer free shipping and free returns, now is a great place to shout that out and remind browsers of this kind of perk.
For every business and perhaps every different type of communication, the email footer’s contents is likely to vary. That being said, there are some recurring elements involved, like:
Add your company logo to your email footer as a place to link to your company website, but also as a chance to build brand awareness and cohesiveness.
As mentioned, your reader’s last stop is a wonderful place to add a final call-to-action to help drive the outcome you desire.
Legal disclaimers are especially useful in certain industries. Since they can be copy heavy and intensive to read, an email footer is the perfect place to have them stated so as to not distract from the email’s body.
When you design your email newsletter with an email builder, you get to save time and remove the worry of having to start from a blank slate. As you make your email creation process smoother, your email footer design also becomes second nature.
To make the most of your email footer, remember these pivotal email footer design examples:
To keep your email footer simple and easy to read, leverage white space. Empty space is like fresh air for reader’s as they take in a lot of important information. Email builders have already taken white space into consideration, which is why email templates are built with adequate white space.
Your footer shouldn’t feel like a different email or disconnected from your brand. In fact, it’s one of the places that contains the most company branding with the inclusion of your company logo, typography, and color palette. Be sure that it reflects your brand image.
Email footers may seem like an add-on, but they are actually like legs for your email’s body. They offer a way to take your audience further in their customer journey and offer key information that they’d often be seeking out.
With the aforementioned email footer best practices in mind, you can enhance your email newsletter design and boost engagement. As you design both your emails and your email footers, consider using a handy email builder that makes the design process seamless and already have complete with the aid of templates.
Ready to create your newsletter and footer from start-to-finish quickly and hassle-free? Learn more at Publicate.
