Design a Nonprofit Email Footer that Pushes Your Audience to Act

Learn to design an email footer for your next nonprofit email.

The best email designs use every pixel on the screen to promote a nonprofit organization’s cause and drive readers to action – nothing goes to waste.

Even the email footer below your call-to-action button can influence your audience and work to expand your reach.

Instead of using a generic footer design that your readers skip over, learn how to better use the bottom of your email to reinforce your brand and continue to expand your audience.

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Make a bigger impact with less text

Instead of a busy, crowded design that will make a reader’s eyes glaze over, a simple design is better at reinforcing the message of your email. Since the footer comes after scrolling through the entire email, stay away from presenting any new concepts that will seem out of place. Instead, present only the information readers need.

Use your website as leverage and limit the amount of text within your footer to keep it neat. Instead of outlining all of your specific contact information, a simple ‘Contact Us’ hyperlink that leads to your contact form page lets your audience find what they’re looking for quickly. Leave space between other information, like your mailing address, to prevent the text from crowding.

Reinforce your brand before they go

Once readers get to the bottom of your email, they should feel reinvigorated about your cause and engaged with your organization. Keeping the color scheme consistent from your brand’s website to your email and even the footer design will help customers connect with your brand. A line of text in the footer that reminds them why they signed up to your email list can also remind them of the cause.

Other content, like using an image from a recent successful fundraising event in the footer can engage your readers even more. Pairing the image with your mission statement or a quote from a happy volunteer can keep readers interested in signing up for the next event.

Tell readers what to do if they don’t click

If you’ve properly designed your email with a direct and clear call-to-action, readers should know where they’re heading if they click. If they don’t click though, you can still benefit from the opened email with your footer design. If they make it to your footer, give them another option to interact with your organization.

Social media buttons, or a link to your donation page below your call-to-action button should be separated with borders or dividers to keep them from overshadowing your primary call-to-action button. Even adding a forward button or read more hyperlink to your blog can boost engagement with your audience when they would normally just close the email and stop reading.

Design your email footer for multiple campaigns

You likely won’t have the time to redesign your email footer for every campaign, so it’s best to design it for multiple campaigns. Since your nonprofit organization’s overall cause is likely to be similar across many of your emails, your templates should be designed to work to promote multiple events.

Following a simpler design layout for your footer, with social media buttons and links to your donation page, will make sure that your design lasts across multiple campaigns. If you include pieces of content like photographs, you’ll likely need to update your footer every few weeks to keep it fresh.

Take advantage of your whole email design

The footer is often an undervalued piece of real estate within your email design, but it can still have an impact on customers that make it past your call-to-action button. Use every pixel on the screen to promote your nonprofit organization’s cause and drive readers to action.