Best Email Newsletter Design Practices

Email marketing design has never been more important than today.

In order to expand their reach to new customers, and keep current clients satisfied, businesses nowadays rely on email newsletters to promote their events and upcoming projects, share company information, or any additional news relevant to their followers.

Email newsletter design, however, is more technical than it is creative, which is why we could all use some extra tips and email campaigns best practices when working on our projects.

Email design best practices and examples of newsletters can help us cope with the current growing importance of branding in the corporate environment.

The core of this process is in fact very simple – the best newsletter design is the one that communicates a clear message potential customers can understand, it is placed in a strong and memorable framework, and attracts attention with striking appearance.

While it sounds impossible to combine the three into a single product, experts offer just the right tools and resources to help you professionalize in email blast design.

It is because recipients are by far more likely to open a beautiful message than the rest of them in their cluttered inbox.

When reaching out to new audiences, great newsletter ideas help you leave a positive first impression, and motivate viewers to become buyers and subscribers.

How does the perfect email design look?

Just as it is usually in the design world, there is no magical formula to apply and let the miracle happen. Nevertheless, there are few critical factors you should consider to distinguish solid newsletter examples from average ones:

  • Less is more, so keep things simple
  • Make sure you’ve included a direct call to action
  • Nothing but absolute responsiveness is accepted
  • Tons of baclinks to your website won’t help, and neither will decorative bells and whistles
  • Images play a huge role, and you must choose such that would render automatically when displayed on mobile devices
  • Make the correlation between the email’s design and your brand’s style visible
  • Keep important information over the scroll
  • The content should be up to point, ideally short and exciting
  • Format text in a single column, such as the one of websites
  • Test what you’ve produced on several devices to ensure it works well

Responsive email newsletter design is becoming more and more popular, and the reasons are pretty obvious: Almost 50% of all emails are opened using mobile devices, while for certain prominent brands the percentage goes up to 70%.

This makes it essential for an online business to look for responsiveness techniques that can make their subscribers’ experience easy and enjoyable, and secure in such way the engagement they need.

The first question you must answer is: What kind of emails are you about to design?

  • Are those personal messages?
  • Are those branded marketing emails?
  • Or are you going to focus solely on newsletters?

Defining the layout in advance will help you implement the best newsletters design:

For personal messages: Use plain layouts and simple colors, and keep branding minimal in order not to distract users from the content.

Branded marketing emails: Attach extra pieced of branded contents (images, videos, etc.). Make sure that the color scheme matches the branding style. Logos and other essential branding principles must be included, so that the content is credible and professional.

Newsletters: Generally, newsletters tolerate more content pieces than regular branded email, so feel free to add images, videos, or articles neatly placed in a sidebar from where users can access them. Keep in mind that it is exactly newsletters that convince users you care about them, so put them in the focus of your campaign.