Email newsletters are becoming increasingly important in creating a connection between a brand, the product or service it offers and its customers. There are a number of incentives for businesses to create and send email newsletters including curating blog content, updating customers with the latest news or offering insiders only promotions. To communicate effectively with your brand’s audience, the basics of effective email newsletter design can’t be ignored:
Remain consistent
Your newsletter should be a reflection of your brand, website, logo and products so an effective newsletter needs to remain consistent with these elements. Stylistic consistency such as the fonts and colours on your website will avoid subscriber confusion – you need your subscribers to recognise your brand immediately, otherwise they may unsubscribe by accident thinking it is a junk email. Let the colours of your logo guide you in your colour theme choice.
Be mobile friendly
The future of media consumption is in mobile devices and the reality is that the vast majority of your subscribers access their emails via their phone or tablet. If your newsletter is not formatted for mobile devices, it won’t display correctly. Take the time to preview on a mobile device to ensure everything looks clear and is formatted properly.
Include a header
The equivalent of a newspaper’s title, your email newsletter needs a header, which should sit at the very top of the email. In most cases this should be your brand’s logo that subscribers can instantly recognise.
Stick to standard fonts
The legibility of your email newsletter is very important if you want subscribers to read the content you’re sending directly to their inbox. A newsletter that is illegible will be trashed and the chances are that the recipient will also hit that dreaded ‘unsubscribe’ button.
Include images
A well-designed newsletter will have a good balance of both text and captivating images. As always, the first thing that a person notices about content is the images – our eyes are immediately drawn to them. Ensure that your images tell a story and that they’re there for a reason. They should compliment the text of the email.
Use subheadings
Create coherence in your email newsletter by formatting it with subheadings. Like images, subheadings also attract the reader’s eye and serve to break up a larger body of text. Your email newsletters shouldn’t be lengthy anyway, but break up your content into smaller sections by including subheadings.