Designing Email Newsletters - 10 Things You Should Know!	Visited: 353 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Kabir Bedi March 04, 2010

E mail newsletters are a powerful internet marketing tool! In fact, its much more than simply being the marketing voice of the company. It is an effective communication tool through which you can make sure you remain fresh in your users' memory! It informs them about your business, your latest products and services, events and happenings at your end.

However, for your newsletter to be welcomed by your users and not dumped into the spam folder, you need to make sure that they deliver value. If you provide them with relevant and interesting information, they will be waiting for it every month!

Here are some design tips to make your email newsletters more appealing to your audiences:

Before designing your email newsletter, define its key goals and objectives. Do you want to announce new products and services from your company? Do you want it to be the voice box of your company or business?

When you have determined the chief purposes, start the design process. Here are some tips for the same:

Crisp & Compact Content

People are not particularly receptive towards email newsletter because they consider them as blatant advertisements. And when they do read it, they just scan through to see if it contains any information that might interest them. You have an extremely limited time to make an impact and and you need to make good use of it! Therefore, make sure your content is crisp and compact. Instead of long unending paragraphs, use bullet points to highlight your key points!

Add Images for Visual Appeal

Readers are naturally attracted to visually stimulating elements like images and graphics. Therefore, make sure you include lots of vibrant images and graphic elements in your newsletter to draw user attention to important messages.

Use Numbers & Symbols

Numbers work well to grab user attention. People usually tend to associate numbers and symbols like percentages and dollar values with prices and discounts. Sprinkles your newsletter with numbers and symbols to announce any discounts and special offers you might be running.

Create an Efficient Structure

How you present your content in your email newsletter is almost as important as what content you put in it. You can either design a single-column layout or a multi-column one or even a combination of the two. However, take care not to make them overtly lengthy and organize the elements well enough.

Create an Innovative Look

Creativity and innovation is your best bet while designing your newsletters. Think of new ideas and ways to present content on newsletters. Think of creating an exclusive cartoon strip or probably introduce a fictional character that can be part of all your editions.

Avoid Table of Contents

Often newsletters include a table of contents at the top of all the pages in order to help users scan through the items of interests quickly. However, majority of readers have the impression that the links in the table of contents take them to an external website and therefore they avoid clicking them altogether.