Your newsletter should be designed to meet your subscribers’ interests and demands, entertain them, make them want to purchase your product or service, and turn them into customers.

Thankfully, nowadays, mailing apps offer amazing email newsletter templates to make our lives easier, so there’s no excuse you can’t design an appealing newsletter. Here are some great tips and tricks to create the perfect newsletter.

Key Email Newsletter Design Tips to Turn Subscribers Into Customers

When designing your email campaign, you have to think about what matters most to your subscribers.

Objectively speaking, if you don’t want to open your own campaign, no one else will. Let’s take a look at key tips you should be taking into account when building your email newsletter templates.

How to Write Eye-catching Subject Lines

The first challenge you will face is getting subscribers to open your email. The subject line of the email you send out plays the most important role here: it is what will determine if the subscriber opens the email or not.

It must be clear, concise, and creative. Most importantly, it should be related to the content in the body of the email, because if it’s not, subscribers will likely lose trust in your business and not open any further campaigns.

For example, you send out an email with a subject line along the lines of, “Customer Loyalty Promotion – 25% Off Entire Catalogue.” However, in the body of the email, you talk about a store opening. This will create a massive disconnect between the expectation and the resulting content.

This is a simple idea; although, it’s incredibly important to adhere to in order to build the trust of your brand and, as we all know, building trust among your subscribers is what will turn them into customers.

In order to make your subject line titles more appealing, avoid using symbols, unneeded punctuation marks, and excessive capital letters. Title case can be used in email subject lines, as it can catch the attention of subscribers more easily than regular case; however, do not capitalize every letter in a word. This will come off as too aggressive and can really deter people from opening your newsletter.

Also avoid the so-called spam words: “free,” “discount,” “save,” or “make money.” All of these unoriginal expressions do not work and can cheapen your brand.

If you’re going to send out a discount email, opt to use the words, “sale,” “promotion,” and “exclusive offer,” as they have more of a positive sentiment relation in customers’ minds.

Use Attractive Email Newsletter Templates

Template Style

When your subscribers open your emails, they have to flatter their eye from the very beginning. You can do this by using an attractive email newsletter template with ample negative space.

Make it easy for your subscribers to read through your newsletter with big, bold titles outlining what the post and its sections are about.

Newsletters should always follow the same style and be uniform, so subscribers can identify your email from the hundreds of others in their inbox. If you use the same format to distinguish your newsletters, you’ll create a consistent brand image, which will automatically build trust.

Now you’re thinking, “which template should I chose?”

As a small business, you’re not looking to spend all your time on one endeavor, so make it easy for yourself and select a single column template no bigger than 600 pixels wide. This will make it easy for you to post content in a uniform, simple way and giving your newsletter enough negative space to draw attention to your most important content.

Again, consistency is key. If you have a newsletter format, don’t switch it up constantly. If you want expand your newsletter format style, begin to use specific templates with specific types of emails. For example, you may have three types of newsletters such as educational, promotional, and third party curation. Each type of newsletter can have its own corresponding template, so subscribers understand what to expect from each one.

Web Safe Fonts

Use web safe fonts. This will help your efforts around building brand consistency.

Some browsers don’t support all fonts. This means, if you chose a font a browser does not support, it will default to a similar font based on whichever kind is closest to it in its library.

Using multiple fonts is not ideal for a company, as it wants to solidify its brand image in the minds of its customers and become instantly recognizable. Multiple fonts break consistency and, as a result, decrease trust.

By using web safe fonts, your company will never have a multiple fonts problem, as web safe fonts are universal across all browsers.

Use Bright Colours

Use colors that are bright and not too aggressive in your newsletters. Humans have a positive psychological association to bright colours. By using them in your branding, you’re evoking positive emotions at a subconscious level. Remember that bright and garish are two different things.

Instead of hard colours, use colours that are warm, so they invite the subscriber to read your newsletter more easily.

Once you’ve found your brand colours (two to three colours) use them consistently in your newsletters to help your subscribers immediately identify your brand upon opening your emails.

One exception to using brand colours in your emails is during the holidays. If you’re sending out a holiday themed promotion email, it’s best practice to infuse colours associated to the holiday to evoke a particular mood. For example, if you’re sending a Christmas sales promotion email, it can really help to incorporate red and green into boarders, titles, and background images.

Images: Show Don’t Tell

It is also important to include images in your email newsletters. Some companies can get away with sending plaint text emails; however, if your business is selling products, images are a great way to remind your subscribers without telling them.

Show don’t tell is a golden rule in storytelling. Images can take that concept to a whole new level. Images convey so much more than words. That’s why your newsletter should focus on visuals as key fixtures rather than text.

Two thirds of your newsletters should contain images; otherwise, your subscribers are likely to get bored, especially if the content is promotional in nature.

Mobile Responsive

Lastly, you must not forget the importance of a responsive design, so your campaign is readable on every device.

With the rise of mobile device usage and apps, it’s no surprise more and more people are checking their emails on their phones. Depending on your customer audience, consider designing your newsletters for mobile-first interaction.

Mailing apps generally make every campaign responsive on multiple devices, so you don’t have to worry about this too much. However, you should be constantly checking how your newsletter looks across different devices.

Make Content Your Subscribers Want

Great design, alone, will get you nowhere if you’re not making content your subscribers want. Quality always comes first. In order to create quality content, search for information that awakens curiosity from your readers.

To find ideas for what kind of content your audience is looking to consume, simply ask your subscribers what they are interested in.

Once you receive enough feedback, filter the data and see which topics, niches, and publications are repeated most frequently. You can, then, test your newsletter content according to your research and find which kinds of content work best.

You’ll, primarily, be examining if there are is an increase in open and click-through rates. If you find one topic or niche works well, test again and see if you can replicate the results. If the results are similar, you’ve found an avenue for your newsletter to potentially pursue.

Also, decide the focus of your newsletter. You can test the receptivity of different newsletters and see which ones yield the best results. Perhaps your how-to, educational content emails fare better than your product update emails. After learning which focuses work to best engage your audience, you can structure the best performing newsletters more frequently, while judging which of the poorest performing ones can be dropped.

If you have no idea where to begin, experts recommend including 20 per cent promotional content and 80 per cent educational, curated, and non-promotional content.

How to Create Effective Calls to Action

If you really want to boost your conversion rates, calls to action are indispensable tools in your mailing campaigns.

Calls to action can used as links, buttons or images that lead subscribers directly to a landing page.

Buttons like “Read More” or “Shop Now” are some very common ones, but we urge you to get more specific. More specific CTAs are more effective. Include them in your email newsletter templates where they best fit. You will have to use your judgement here, but a good rule of thumb is to include a CTA button or image in the header and footer of your newsletter and CTA text links where they’re relevant. Try to have three different calls to action in your newsletter.

It is also best practice to include your social media buttons in your newsletters. Integrating social share buttons give engaged customers the ability to share your content directly from your newsletter. These buttons can also be tracked with UTMs and can help you understand which platform your user base is most engaged.

Both calls to action and social media buttons are useful tools to include in your newsletters to achieve increased web traffic and facilitate future conversions.

Take Away

Now, you understand the key tips that help to make effective email newsletters. Use these tips to help turn your subscribers into customers, but, remember, the most important thing, in any business, is believing in what you do; this is always the best way to sell and to convey the essence of your company.