When you send a newsletter or other communication from your business to your customers by email, you’re sending them something that should represent your company in every way. This means it should mirror your company culture and industry, and it should be a shining example of professionalism. It should also inspire your customers and subscribers to read and act on what you intend them to in your email. All of this is why design is so important and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Here are some tips you can use to better design your email newsletters.
Start with a Header
To see the importance of the header, walk past a magazine or newspaper stand and think about the first thing you noticed. Likely it was the name of each publication, which is essentially their header. That is why the header is so important. It identifies who you are and what readers might expect from your newsletters. It also dictates things like the color scheme and frames your whole email nicely below it, immediately creating a sense of structure.
The header should include your logo and the title of your newsletter if you have one – or the purpose of the email if it’s an alert or service interruption announcement.
Stick to a Color Scheme
Your business likely already has a color scheme, and likely these colors are dictated by your logo. When you design a newsletter, this is no different. When you create headings and titles, use the colors in your logo or header to inform the color choices throughout. This creates a sense of uniformity throughout the newsletter or email and keeps it on brand.
You should also try and stick to common or standard fonts so that the newsletter displays on every device correctly. The last thing you want to do is have a missing font destroy your email’s message or layout. This applies to legibility too. Choose fonts that are easy to read.
Divide Your Content into Sections
Don’t create your newsletter with a big wall of text right under your header. Make sure to break it up into easy to read and well titled sections, so that readers can choose what they want to read quickly. This is particularly important if your email is going to be long or text-heavy. Making use of photos and images is an effective way of breaking up text and borrowing design styles from newspapers will also help. By using font choices that are bold and clear and making extensive use of the best font for email, you can enable great design elements like color backgrounds and white text to make section headings pop out at you.
By designing your newsletters with these tips in mind, you’ll create great looking and easy to read newsletters that will call your customers to action. It’s not difficult to create great looking and comprehensive emails with the tools available online today, so you have no excuse not to fully leverage the marketing power of your email subscriber list to increase and retain business.
