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Email Newsletter Design Best Practices

Email marketing design has never been more important than today.

In order to expand their reach to new audiences, and keep current users satisfied, businesses nowadays rely on email newsletters to promote their events and upcoming projects, share company info, 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 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.

Why is email template design so important?

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Image source: Florian Casanova

Bonus: 100 free fonts to help you create better designs

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.

Image source: Thrive Market

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

Click here to download 1000+ free icons to use in your websites or UI designs

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.

Tips for becoming a great email designer

Image source: Lonely Planet

As long as you have the idea of how your email is going to look, you can make it happen easily by rearranging snippets.

Give our tips some time, as they will for sure add value to your marketing campaigns.

How does a successful email template look like? Most of the time, it is uncluttered and easy to read, and shares just the right message your customers need to see. What emails like these do for you is to give our brand confidence and credibility, and save you the time invested in several campaigns at once.

Put the message in the focus: For best results, share a single message, and save the rest for other emails.
Keep attachments easy and tractable – the more snippets you add, the easier it will be for your customers to navigate and maneuver content.
Stay concise – Simplify as much as you can, especially in terms of length.
Remember to include interesting images in each paragraph or article snippet. Several smaller images per paragraph are also a good idea.
Make hierarchy visible – The most important information comes first, so that even people on the rush can read what you wanted to tell them.
Once again: simplicity means everything to email design!

As tempted as you feel to write long and novelist messages in your emails, remember that this is not what users expect you to do.

The strategy did well a decade ago, but people of today have no time to navigate through lengthy emails. Instead, make your point crispy clear, and include a link to a relevant post for those who wish to read more.

The best email design templates

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Image source: Walid Benoihi

Start with the basics.

Choose a simple template that resembles the layout you imagined, and work with the drag-and-drop editor to add your content, or change styles and colors.

Once done, save the template and apply it each time you send a similar email, and keep the editing option activated just in case.

The need to test your designs

Image source: Lingo

The reason why you’re reading this post now is that you weren’t really blown off your shoes with previous campaigns, and we bet this wouldn’t have happened if there was someone to warn you of your mistakes.

The way things are today, you can test all of the segments displayed on the email templates to ensure you get the best response marketing.

Again, there is no unified approach to determine what works and what doesn’t, so just check the template through a customer’s prism.

Labeling & Branding

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Image source: Andreea

Label your emails.

Ensure that customers know it was you who sent it, by adding the logo and the name of your company on top of it.

Attach links

Image source: Craft by Invision

Links may seem obtrusive while you’re adding them, but the truth is they are very practical.

Refer the email’s content to your website more than once, so that people can easily take action.

Do the same with images, as they are large and appealing, and customers will very likely click on them.

Use the right colors

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Image source: Martin Kalabek

Pick the palette in advance.

Ideally, use two colors, because the fewer shades there are the cleaner the email will look, and recipients won’t get distracted from reading your main message.

Obviously, those should be the colors recognizable for your brand. Next, clearly divide the header and the footer, and use color to separate them visually from the part of the email.

The 80/20 rule, and why you should follow it

The 80/20 rule is probably the most famous rule of thumb which also applies to email design.

In the case, it tells you should limit text to 80%, and imagery to 20%, or at least roughly estimate how to divide content in a smart way.

Use the right fonts

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Image source: Claudiu Cioba

Legibility is imperative, and the ideal measures are 14px body text size for longer emails, and 16px for shorter ones (a couple of sentences).

Then, use some basic marketing psychology to choose a font that corresponds to your message.

Serifs, for instance, unites small lines font with extended letter strokes, and looks more professional and sophisticated, unlike sans serif that may appear too casual for your needs. Mixing is allowed if you know how to do it, but use no more than three fonts per email.

Add short blocks of copy

Image source: Classy

Instead of dividing content in large and unreadable paragraphs, structure it in short ones with plenty of bullet points.

In case you have to use long content sections, highlight the words that are essential, so that the reader can scan quickly and decide whether he wants to take action or not.

Ending thoughts

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Image source: Pawel Kadysz

It doesn’t matter what you do – marketers, first-time creators, and even experienced designers find it difficult to design the right email. At least until they’ve learned what it takes to do so!

As basic as they are, newsletter design principles and rules do exist, and most of them come back to keeping things simple and motivating uses to undertake the desired action.

Ideally, your email design should be responsive on all devices, include some clean code, and allow users to maneuver content easily. We bet you’ve already received an email that looks like that! Do you remember how that story ended up?