5 Tips for designing the perfect newsletter email template

Last updated February 12, 2018

Have you ever sent a newsletter to thousands of people and had a very low opening or click through rate? Most of us have.

Many businesses rely on email newsletters to stay in touch with their followers, manage customer relationships and keep their companies top of mind with their audience.

A well executed newsletter is a powerful email tool with multiple benefits, which is why it’s crucial to ensure your newsletter design is visually appealing and works correctly in your readers’ email clients. If you satisfy this along with interesting content, they are more likely to open and click, and ultimately convert.

Creating an email newsletter isn’t just a case of typing a rough paragraph and attaching a link. It needs to be treated as a key cog in your marketing wheel. To make a great newsletter we should keep in mind the following advice.

1. An appealing email header

Your newsletter is the equivalent of a magazine, newspaper or website, so it needs an appealing header to sit at the top, entice and introduce the reader. Remember that your title or headline is the key to attracting your reader to open the email and converting them or not.

One of the biggest mistakes a newsletter can make is to stray too far from the brand voice of your business. Brand voice forms a strong impression in your readers’ minds and makes a meaningful statement about your company, so that doesn’t water down the impact of your brand by incorporating colors, images and other visual elements that veer off the standards you have set to communicate your business through your branding.

2. Keep typography consistent

Type family, font styles, and font color choices. All the previous points have more to say than just words, but in general we recommend identifying specific color choices and font styles for headings, subheadings, and body text.

In addition, you should be aware when designing your email that you should not put content in the images, it may be hidden because of the default privileges of certain email clients.

Take a look at Google web fonts for fonts you can use in email clients. Keep in mind web fonts aren’t supported in all clients and fallbacks are used instead. Therefore, recipients will be able to see the text of your email anyway.

3. Make your content scalable

Emails are only looked at for a few seconds. Therefore long emails are generally recommended to be avoided as at the reader will climpse at it and realize they don’t have time to read it.

Be concise, use headings and paragraphs to break up your content, use lists where appropriate and use enough content to entice the user and give them an option to read more with a call to action.

4. Choose appropriate images

When a recipient opens your email, images instantly grab their attention. By adding a few pictures, you pull in your reader and enhance the effectiveness of your message at the same time.

You’ll want to set both width and height attributes on your image tags. Without these specifications in order, some clients will distort the image content.
Avoid using floats to position your images.
Host image files on your own ESP, CDN or web server.
Remember to compress your image file sizes so they load faster.

As we mentioned previously, some email clients will not render images by default so ensure your content makes sense if images were turned off.

5. Care about call to action (CTA)

Design isn’t art. Everything we create is intended to elicit action on the part of the user. To this end, prominent calls to action are critical for every email you send and here for newsletters. Everything about your CTAs should make people want to click on them to do something.

Repeat CTAs at the end of your email and throughout, it can be super-effective at getting that click.

If you’re in charge of marketing or growth at your company then it’s your job to make sure your newsletter templates look good and perform well. Check out our newsletter template. Responsive and ready to integrate with ESPs like Mailchimp and Marketo.