How to use your footer effectively
Are you using your footer effectively?
When designing and updating your ecommerce site, you’ll undoubtedly pay special attention to your header, product pages and checkout process. Are you missing something? Your footer may well be the last place your customer looks before leaving your ecommerce site. Make it count!
This area of your site can often be an afterthought, however it can be used to keep potential customers engaged, improve confidence, and even encourage them to come back.
For a visitor-friendly footer, follow our tips below:
Secure logos & payment methods
Featuring secure shopping logos in your footer will increase the confidence of your potential customers, reassuring them that making a purchase from your site will be safe. Payment method logos may speed up the purchase decision process, particularly if you offer a variety of payment options. Take a look at how our client, Better Bathrooms, makes this information clear in the footer on their site:
Contact details
It’s not uncommon for customers to want to make contact with a real person. In the event that a customer has a problem or a query, make your contact details easy to find by featuring them in your footer. This will also increase trust in your business. Our client, Taps.co.uk, have made a variety of contact options clear for their customers to see in their footer:
Social links
Promoting social links in your footer will encourage some visitors to click through to your various social channels. Sharing and interacting socially is a brilliant way to improve engagement with your customers, so adding these links to your footer could prove to be invaluable. Notonthehighstreet.com do this particularly well, highlighting a variety of social channels for their customers to visit:
Newsletter signup
Sign ups will help your business to build long-lasting relationships with your customers. Adding a newsletter sign up form in your footer is a great idea, particularly if you’re able to offer an incentive for signing up. And make sure your sign up form stands out! The white text and red ‘Sign up’ button really stand out against the black background on our client, Dawsons’ website:
Footer links
Most online shoppers are used to certain links appearing in the footer. These include the About Us page, FAQs and information regarding delivery and returns. This is also where you should include the boring stuff, such as T&Cs and your privacy policy. Our client, Charlotte Tilbury, have done this, alongside text links to best-selling products. This is also something that we’d recommend:
Top brands
Being a recognised stockist is important for any ecommerce business, and showing your best-known brands in your footer will help to reinforce this. Adding links to the brand’s own website or a brand category page could also help to increase sales and build trust. USC have gone some way to achieving this in their footer, where they promote a number of well-known brands such as Ugg, Diesel and Firetrap:
Final top tip
We’d recommend designing a simplified version of your footer to use in the checkout process. This decreases the risk of the customer becoming distracted while making a purchase. It would be ideal to remove unnecessary links from your footer, including only necessary information such as secure shopping logos. Notice the difference between Mothercare’s footer when on the homepage, and again during checkout. Everything is removed, apart from a number of security logos to increase trust.
On the homepage
During checkout
If you follow some of our tips, your footer will be fabulous. We promise!
We’re experts in web design and development for ecommerce. Whether you simply need advice or a complete site redesign, we can help. Get in touch and speak to us about your web design and development needs today.
