10 essential tips for designing an email newsletter with impact

Newsletters offer many businesses the most cost-effective marketing tools available. They enable you to create a connection with your visitors on a more personal level and can result in a lot of traffic on your site. On the other hand a poorly executed newsletter can often cost customers and that is why the approach must be carefully planned.

Here are 10 tips for creating an email newsletter with impact.

1. Create a certain structure

Start by using headlines, short summaries and a table of content so people can find and jump directly to the content they’re interested in. Once you have chosen a structure improve on it but don’t make too many changes so people can get familiar with the design.

2. Create good Subject Lines

Use a personal tone in your email messages and choose a title that reflects your organization and the newsletter’s content. Avoid using capital letters if you don’t want your newsletetter to end up in a spam filter.

3. Consider Hiring Professionals

The newsletter’s writing and design should never appear amateurish. If you can write well and if you have experience with design, then consider doing it all yourself. But sometimes hiring a professional designer is a good choice that can be the difference between an effective newsletter and a disastrous one. Internet users are getting more and more email every day, and a good design will help you stand out from the crowd.

4. Ask for Volunteers

You should give the people the option to subscribe to your newsletter, if you don’t want to become a spammer. Place the offer for a subscription on your site’s homepage or offer it when a client purchases something from your site. This way it might take longer to build a list of subscribers, but at least you will be sending the newsletter to interested parties. Tell subscribers how to unsubscribe.

5. Personalize your Emails

Always address your subscribers by name to give the newsletter a personal feel. If you are using newsletter software, use a program that personalizes the emails for you. To retain or improve readership and loyalty, your audience needs to feel a personal connection to you and your business.

6. Test your Newsletter

Before you send out a newsletter to all of your subscribers, test it out by mailing it to yourself first. Then try using different browsers. Some designs might work with Firefox but not with other browsers. It is very important to make sure that everything is executed properly before sending your newsletter to any subscriber. Graphics, flash animations and videos can often create problems for people with slow internet connections.

7. Establish a Regular Schedule

Your newsletters should be sent with regularity and on a certain day of the week. Don’t send out too many or people will begin to regard them as a nuisance. Also, you don’t want to put together a newsletter just so you can get one out to people “on time.” If you don’t have anything interesting to say, wait until you do.

8. Keep it simple

Like everything else that is published online, newsletters should be simple and to-the-point. Think about how many emails or text the user is likely to read in one day or one session, and remember that they are going to want content without havig to read lots of text. Also remember that the attention span is not very high with online readers.

9. Use links extensively

Provide to shorter summaries of your articles but also link to more complete versions. Place the links in context, like they would be used in a typical web page, rather than placing a list at the beginning or end of the newsletter.

10. Try to build up trust from the beginning

People who will subscribe to your newsletter need a certain amount of trust in your site. Try to build up that trust by assuring people before they subscribe that all data given will be handled confidentially and email adresses and other information will not be lend to other companies.
Introduce and profile the people that are responsable for the the newsletter to create personal interest.

New marketing techniques seem to coming and going, but the email newsletters appear to be here to stay. Their popularity is growing increasingly, because they are effective and can both create and retain customers. And another great advantage is that they are not very expensive to create.

If you follow the tips above, you should be able to design and create an email newsletter with impact that reaches a wide audience.