How to design the perfect email newsletter

We now take a look at how to design your newsletter to ensure you get the right results.  You may also find our best practice newsletter guidelines article useful.  A recent study by Marketing Sherpa indicated that even the tiniest design improvements raised clicks by a whopping 28%!  So here are our top tips on designing the perfect newsletter…

The benefits to HTML templates: Colours and graphics add impact and are eye-catching.  Words can turn into links to create more interactive newsletters and of course you can increase brand awareness by having consistent corporate design across your newsletters and your website.  But most importantly the results of your emails are trackable.

Don’t forget text emails: However not everyone can view HTML emails (or they might be viewing the email on a mobile device) so you need to ensure your emails are always supported with a text version too.  eCircle’s eC-messenger makes it easy for you by allowing you to send multi-part emails from one place.   

Graphics vs. Text: Graphics and images can really add to the look and feel of your email and provide invaluable branding opportunities; however the images need to be relevant to the content.  Some email clients could block images automatically, so ensure that your newsletter also makes sense without images.

Simple layouts work the best: Keep the design of your email nice and simple and avoid too many tables, images, rows, columns and fragmented sections if you want your email to translate across all different email applications.  

Logo and call to action in a predominant place: You should never forgo calls to action in your client communication.  Always provide your recipients with several contact possibilities and position your logo in a predominant place at the top of your newsletter.

Consider the characteristics of different email clients: Depending on the specific email client, your recipients won’t always see your email in its entirety, but could initially view them in smaller preview panes, so take this into account and optimise your email design in regard to these properties. With our new deliverability solution there is no more need to set up various test accounts.

Designing emails around spam filters: There are a number of tactics you should adopt when designing your email to avoid your newsletter being considered as spam. Some tips include: don’t use bright fonts colours (particularly red or pink) and always use common fonts; avoid using spammy words; don’t use too many exclamation marks; don’t over use capital letters; Make sure your HTML code is always correct.

Test test test!: Take the opportunity to learn more about your clients’ preferences and test your campaigns prior to the main send-out. Via eC-messenger’s “split testing” capability you are able to test two different templates against each other with the aid of test groups and the template with the better performance results will be automatically sent.

This article is a summary of eCircle’s newsletter "Inside Digital Marketing". If this article was forwarded to you as a recommendation and you wish to receive further news from the email marketing sector yourself you can subscribe here.