Email Newsletter Templates: 3 Solid Design Tips

Email newsletter templates are fast becoming an important tool for online marketers. There are distinct advantages for choosing this mode of marketing over traditional media. The first and most obvious advantage lies in the ease of technology integration where an email address that is acquired from one source can be used as the base for a marketing campaign. The other interesting advantage is that the newsletter can finally start talking directly to the user instead of a regular newsletter that could be quite undiscerning. Whatever the use, email newsletter templates have made the job of creating a newsletter much easier. While there are many choices that are available on the internet, it is best to indulge yourself a bit and attempt to create your own. This is useful from the perspective of your own unique branding. The flipside is that you need to spend time understanding designs.

The three important design considerations you need to address when designing a newsletter template is: understanding the reader, optimizing the use of text, and a logical flow of content. Understanding your reader ensures that what you create is not cumbersome to read, able to quickly send the user information that they require, and that the information brings the user back to the base website. Therefore, when you design your email newsletter templates, you must use attractive and eye catching headlines. Depending on your objectives for sending out a newsletter, you could include all the information you want in one email or embed a link back to home website. This latter is the smarter option so that you don’t clutter the newsletter and have more control over content that you want your users to see. Remember that your reader’s first reaction might just be to delete email that is not relevant to his or her need at that moment. Therefore, keep it crisp, brief and pertinent.

When you are designing or choosing email newsletter templates, the first conflict lies in the proportion of text against images. There is no gold standard in deciding this aspect and to ascertain the correct proportions, you must again return to your users. Ask yourself, what are my user demographics? When do they access their mails? What kind of information are the users looking for from my site? If you are trying to sell a product, then an equal distribution of text and imagery is optimal. You might want to include flash movies in your newsletter as well that provide a complete view of the product. If the objective of sending out newsletters is, on the other hand purely informational, like a news and information website would be, then images should serve as an anchor to the headline and drive the user back to your website.

Most email newsletter templates fail to create good newsletters because of an illogical chunking of content. There are some unconscious patterns that most readers expect. This is the same reason why the sports section of most newspapers and the funnies are on the last page. Therefore, always bear in mind the amount of information you want to show when creating content areas or blocks.

Beyond these guidelines of choosing or designing an email newsletter template, you should also follow human logic. Always show information from a left to right orientation; however, this changes when you deal with languages that start from the right. Keep the most important information first and never use a subject line that will send your newsletter into the Junk or Spam folders.