A Beginner’s Guide to Designing an Email Newsletter - Appy Pie

A Beginner’s Guide to Designing an Email Newsletter [Tips, Ideas, and Examples]


Abhinav Girdhar
By Abhinav Girdhar | Last Updated on December 6th, 2023 1:17 pm | 8-min read


Email newsletter is an online way of sending tips, news, updates related to your business or its products. To get these regular updates you need to get users’ email addresses and have them join your email list. These people after joining your email list can be referred to as leads, contacts, or subscribers.What to keep in mind while creating an email newsletter - Appy PieYou can send out email newsletters for-
  • eCommerce Websites
  • Small Businesses
  • Educational Purposes
  • Non-Profits
  • Blogs and Articles
  • News Websites
Many businesses use email newsletters to stay in touch with their clients by sending them product information, company updates, discount offers, new arrivals, and much more. You can also use email newsletters to drive more traffic to your website, blog, or your social media business account. In this post, we will discuss the benefits of writing and sending an email newsletter to your subscribers. Additionally, we will take you through the things to keep in mind while writing an email newsletter with email newsletter ideas, tips, and examples.

Benefits of Sending Email Newsletters

Creating excellent email newsletters help businesses boost their email marketing strategy. Here are a few email marketing benefits that you should keep in mind while you create email newsletters for your business.
  1. Low Marketing Costs
  2. Higher Conversion Rates
  3. Easy to Analyze and Measure
  4. Improved Audience Engagement
  5. Reaches Global Audience
  6. Deliver Targeted Messages
  7. Drive Sales and Revenue
  8. Easy to Get Started
  9. Incomparable Return on Investment
  10. Easy to Share
  11. Instant Impact
The immediacy of emails can get you the results in minutes after sending an email. An email newsletter sent out with the sale or discount information can be an excellent marketing ploy. With this email, you can create a sense of urgency and convince the receivers to take immediate action.

Things to Keep in Mind When Creating an Email Newsletter

Here are a few things that you need to know before you start creating an email newsletter to help your business grow.

  1. Email Newsletter Goal

    Try to set up your goal of sending out email newsletters before you even write a single word of content. Decide if you are sending these emails to generate leads, drive traffic to your website, or to get more contacts. Check the email’s open rate to track the email performance but that should not be the only number to check. Here is the list of parameters that you should consider.
    • List Growth Rate
    • Conversion Rate
    • Open Rate
    • Email Forwarding Rate
    • Bounce Rate
    • Overall ROI
    • Clickthrough Rate
    • Unsubscribe Rate
    Keep in mind these email marketing metrics to get the best out of your email marketing campaign.

  2. Email Contact List

    An email list is a list of all the subscribers and leads who have shared their email addresses with you. You can take this email list as a contact book for your business that has the list of people who have opted-in to receive your email newsletters. The question here arises is how you will collect all these email addresses from your different marketing channels. What if some of the users have shared their email addresses on your social media business page, some have shared their feedback using their email account, and some have simply filled up a sign-in form for you? Seems difficult, right? Well, you do not have to create this list manually, when you have Appy Pie Connect. Appy Pie Connect is an emerging automation platform introduced by Appy Pie. The software helps you connect your email marketing apps such as Mailjet, MailerLite, Mailchimp, and Zoho Campaigns including hundreds of other third-party apps available in the market. For example, you own an eCommerce business platform and you have integrated your email marketing tool Mailchimp with PayPal, all your email addresses of customers using PayPal to make payments on your eCommerce website will be added automatically to Mailchimp email contact list and all the further emails will be sent to this updated list.

  3. Newsletter Content

    After you have established your goal and you have the list of people you are going to send these emails to, try to create content for it. Create a plan first. You can’t just start typing the content for an email newsletter. You need to perform research to understand the trend and to find out what ties closely to your business goal. As per a regular email marketing strategy, you should send out one email newsletter every month. To get this done right, try to find content in your social media business account, your company’s blog, internal newsletters, lead-generation content, etc. There are many types of email marketing campaigns that can send out newsletters for. The content of these emails will be as per the nature of the campaign. Go through this post to learn various email marketing campaigns with examples - 11 Effective Examples of Email Marketing Campaigns.

  4. Create a Catchy Subject Line

    Your subject line should be something catchy enough that motivates users to open up the email. It should be easily recognizable to the users so that they understand why they are receiving this email. Try to create a click-worthy subject line with an immediately clickable value proposition. If you have a gaming audience, you can increase your open rate by including he information on prize just like Solitaire Bliss did. Even if the subject line thing doesn’t work for you, this one should work. As per a recent study, it has been found that emails sent from a real person have been clicked and opened more. Try sending an email newsletter with a sender’s name and check if this works for you.

  5. Newsletter Design and Template

    Always design a template before you start writing an email newsletter. Make sure the template that you design is not too flashy and has minimal text and simple color formatting. By creating a template, you will know how much space you need to assign to the text and how much to promote it. If you are sending out the newsletter for the first time, try to go through some pre-made newsletters examples online. Here are a few more things to keep in mind while designing an email template.

    • Size of the Newsletter
    • This is also one of the important things that you need to keep in mind. Set your email newsletter size to 600px width. Different subscribers open your emails on different devices with different screen sizes and different screen resolutions. You need to double-check the size of the email newsletter because some of the email marketing tools available online make the default newsletter size as 30 px wide which doesn’t survive the screen adjustments sometimes.

    • Words and Pictures
    • Designing an email template also includes filling the newsletter with words and pictures. Keep your email newsletter short and simple with a few redirected links to make it easy for the users to reach you. Make sure you add some relevant images to make it more effective.

    • Footer
    • Email template also includes the bottom part of the email – the footer. Make sure your email footer has your email address and a link where users can click to opt-out of the email service if they don’t want to receive your emails anymore.

  6. Alt and Plain Text in the Newsletter

    Sometimes users have bad network connectivity or an incompatible email provider when they will not be able to open the email. There should be something in the email that loads for the users to look at in that case. This text helps users understand why they are receiving this email. Make sure you add alt text in your email to survive such a situation. And, sometimes even the text doesn’t load in the HTML format. In that case, the plain text helps. Make sure your email newsletter text looks good and links are easy to click in the plain text. The purpose of the email should still be clear to the users.

  7. Testing and Sending

    There are different email providers in the market, and they all read the email codes differently. So, before you send your email newsletter, test it in popular email providers and browsers. If it is all good, you can send the email.

Those were the important points to keep in mind when creating an effective email newsletter. Your job is not done just after sending the email newsletter. Wait for a few days and then analyze its performance. Check if it worked well for your email newsletter goals. This way, you will get to know about the areas of improvement in your next email newsletter and you will be able to make a better piece the next time. To check out the steps for how to make a newsletter and how you can enhance your mailing list, go through this post - How to create an email newsletter?Now, before you start creating one, let us go through some email newsletter ideas, designs, and examples.

Email Newsletter Ideas

You can send out email newsletters for your product offers, a weekly round-up for a blog post, upcoming company events, case studies based on your products and services, scheduled webinars, and much more. Here are a few regular company newsletter ideas and inspirations that you can go for when planning to send out an email newsletter.
  • New Product Launches or Case Studies
  • Motivational Business Success Quotes
  • New Best Practices, ideas, or tips
  • News or Recent Survey Results related to your Industry
  • Membership Deals, Discount Offers, or Promotions
  • New job openings at your company
  • Stories or Images Customers have Shared
  • New Training Opportunities
  • Round-up of a Recent or Popular Blog Posts or Videos
  • Upcoming Events or Webinars, or Past Events Recordings
  • FAQs based on Your Products
Create a schedule for your email newsletters. You can use these email newsletter ideas to send out email newsletters to your subscribers on a weekly or a monthly basis. Let us go through some design practices that can help you in designing your email template.

Email Newsletter Design

Your email newsletter should truly represent your brand. For example, if your business website has a simple design and plain colors, you should not add too gaudy colors to your email newsletter. Here are a few great email newsletters design best practices to help you create an efficient email newsletter.
  • Add company Logo and Icons
  • Load the content with Clean and Crisp Images
  • Try filters, images, videos, or memes
  • Create a hierarchy with CTA early-on
  • Make it Mobile-responsive
  • Focus on the length of the newsletter
The design of your newsletter depends upon your brand and the message you intend to deliver. Check out a few pre-made email newsletter templates and design examples to get an idea of how you want to create it. If you are still not sure, let us go through some major examples.

Email Newsletter Examples

Here are a few email newsletters examples to help you create a perfect piece for your business. Go through the examples, observe the differences and specialties in each of them, and pick things that are relevant to your product.

  1. Appy Pie
  2. Appy Pie creates these excellent newsletters with their product information or updates on the top followed by media coverage where they tell their subscribers about their recognitions. The company includes almost all the recent updates including the recent blog post and media coverages related to their products. Also, they add links to every part of the newsletter where you can click and get more details. In the bottom part of the email newsletter, they add links to their tutorials and other videos on YouTube or links to their courses on Appy Pie Academy.Appy Pie

  3. In Vision
  4. This is a weekly newsletter that focuses majorly on the company’s best blog content, new opportunities to win free t-shirts, and a roundup of InVision’s favorite design links. The newsletter is full of relevant content, images, GIFs, and videos. The best part about this newsletter is that it maintains a great balance between the text and images making it mobile-friendly. Check out various call-to-action buttons in the email newsletter. In Vision -Appy Pie

  5. Jins
  6. Jins send out classy eCommerce newsletters. They mostly focus on their products and highlight them to encourage users to come down to their retail stores. They show this hierarchical fashion in their newsletters to help emphasize their main goal with some secondary action items. This helps them increase conversions.Jins -Appy Pie

  7. REI
  8. REI is a sports outfits distributor. It creates email newsletters with good content and quality images to promote its products. The company includes several kinds of material in its newsletters that educate the subscribers about their products. REI - Appy Pie

  9. Vox Sentences
  10. Vox Sentences covers from day’s top news part to the fun stories of the city. They balance their internal content very easily with the external sources and always go with the high-quality stories. The best part is they also add the links for the stories they have covered so that you could click on the link and learn more about it if you want.Vox Sentences - Appy Pie

  11. Community.is
  12. Community.is creates handcrafted newsletters with a unique concept of putting people at the center of the work. The concept and the creativity of the newsletters help the brand attract various readers, agencies executives, marketers, etc. The company follows a three-tier format to create newsletters – long, mid, and short. This way, the newsletters are easy to read for the people both who are looking at the short stuff or the one who is going deep in-depth. Community.is - Appy Pie

  13. National Wildlife Federation
  14. National Wildlife Federation educates the subscribers with their email newsletters. They mostly cover the causes that tie to their major goal of wildlife preservation. In the middle of the newsletter, they talk about the contest they are running. This helps them boost readers’ engagement.National Wildlife Federation - Appy Pie

Conclusion

Finally, we are putting this to an end. One important thing before we leave is you give your best in designing your email newsletter and it will work for sure. Do not just send and sit back. Analyze your newsletters’ performance and keep on improving them. Even if you try your best, there is always some scope of improvement. And, if it helps, go through our Appy Pie Academy and learn from the courses available on that portal. They are not specifically about the email newsletters however; they will help you polish your skills in almost every context. Visit Appy Pie Academy today!

Citations

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Abhinav Girdhar

Founder and CEO of Appy Pie