Designing a Newsletter
Email newsletters and email marketing are still prominent, even will a vast amount of other communication platforms available. With vast amounts of spam nowadays, it is hard to get people to view your newsletters. The majority of people check their emails at least once a day, and if they subscribe to your email list that means that they would have some interest in the emails you are sending.
Due to a large amount of spam, most people, even the ones with a genuine interest in your article will read the content so you have to stand out and grab the user’s attention.
1. Choose an Appealing Colour Scheme.
The aim here is to establish brand recognition and also present aesthetically pleasing content. Either match your colour scheme too that of your logo/corporate identity or choose a colour scheme to stick to constantly with your email marketing. The colour scheme is of vital importance as this will help the viewer recognises your brand when scrolling through their emails.
2. Have a Compelling Header
This is one of the most important parts of a newsletter as it will hook in the viewer. You should include the company logo, company name and newsletter title. This should focus on the industry, rather than your business name. The suggestion here would be to create a template to reuse and just change the title of the newsletter, this will make it easy to recognise as well.
3. Keep Design Simple
With Newsletters, you have to hold the viewer’s attention and the best way to do this is by using clean typefaces and sticking to a simple layout. It is advised to cut down on the amount of text and break it up into smaller pieces with visible divisions between article summaries etc.
4. Use a good amount of Images.
Don’t fill the email with multiple irrelevant images but rather keep it simple by adding images that are relevant to the content. This not only makes the design more interesting for the viewer but also breaks up the text and make is easier to read.
5. Make Sure the content is relevant and interesting
You should spend some time looking at the database of emails you have and segment it on specific interests this will lead to a higher click-through rate. The best way to get a higher click-through rate is to include some sort of benefit to the target audience the most obvious one would be free information, with possible links to articles and ebooks.
6. Use an email marketing platform
If you want to make life a lot earlier and create a visually appealing newsletter, there are various email marketing platforms for you to choose from. MailChimp is a good choice, so people choose to hand code their newsletters but that requires more knowledge of coding and is very time-consuming.
Platforms like Mailchimp will cover all of the above design aspects for you. They will help you to create campaigns in a strategic manner, step by step. You’ll be able to choose from various templates that help you lay things out in an appropriate style; you’ll have drag-and-drop options to place your dividers, content blocks and images, and you can even add buttons that encourage people to click through to web pages.
