In the not too distant past, footers were seen as the dreary domain of permission based email marketing. Full of dull clauses, legal statements, obligatory copyright markers and contact information.

With a new breed of information-hungry designers emerging to the forefront of web design, the footer has begun to evolve into a hotbed of information. A prime example of this on the web is the recently redesigned BBC web portal.

The team behind the redesign, Bronwyn van der Merwe - Acting Creative Director, User Experience and Design, and BBC Future media and Technology Project Manager Anthony Heath, felt that the core issue with the site at the time was that it was an immense catalogue of information which spanned across literally hundreds of different topics.

To provide as many offshoots as possible for the end user to get to their destination quickly, they utilised the often dead space used in permission based email marketing footers, to provide further navigational options.

But why is this relevant to email marketing, and should these new theorems be considered in newsletter or advertising design? For the most part permission based email marketing communications do not have extensive navigational systems.

Getting to the bottom of your email woes

The vast majority of b2b email comes into the inbox and is dealt with in three ways:

• It is skim read and then reviewed again later in depth
• The recipient clicks the junk button without hesitation
• The reader scrolls through the message looking for the unsubscribe link that they know will be at the bottom

So we see, when it comes to permission based email marketing campaigns there are two possibilities in play for losing you reader.

Usually, more savvy users will look for the unsubscribe link before condemning your domain to the evil junk filters. As a result we can take the footer area as our fall-back position, providing our message one last attempt to capture our readers' attention. We dazzle our subscribers with something at the bottom of our permission-based email - marketing another product or service to them that they might like, to detract from that ill fated unsubscribe link.

How to hold the fort

In this way, a well-balanced footer can be the saving grace of a permission based email marketing newsletter or e-shot. It retains readers by using psychological design mechanics rather than traditional methods. We know our viewers' reading patterns so why not use them to our advantage?

Utilising the space to direct traffic to targeted site pages, or to up-sell select items your readers might be interested in gives you a greater chance of registering those all important click-throughs from your permission based email. Marketing experts have been using this trick for years. Think of the supermarket checkout. You are there because you've already picked up what you came in for. But how often do you reach for the chocolate or trash magazines at the counter you didn't realise you needed?

Great uses of footer space on the web:

bbc.co.uk
With such an encyclopedia of resources, a sidebar could not survive alone for the beeb.

blog.spoongraphics.co.uk
Highlighting the top rated and viewed content of the site in the footer gives spoongraphics another jump off point to keep viewers onboard at the end of an article or list.

theonion.com
Using the space to provide external links is a great way of building inter-site relationships, and could also be used to benefit from paid for link exchange schemes.

guardian.co.uk
The index page footer provides quick access to alternative viewing options such as mobile alerts, RSS and the newspaper archives. This allows the main navigation bar to be free of secondary or even tertiary links.