The average person receives 121 emails a day.
With all this competition, it’s crucial to stand out. To do so, the subject line, as you know, is by far the most critical factor in standing out in the inbox and getting the recipient to open your email. Once your email is opened, the design plays a decisive role.
The purpose of design is to:
Clicks and conversions will increase if your newsletter has a proper design and a clean layout. It’s all about readers liking what they see.
It’s understandable if you this early find it overwhelming to know where to start in designing your emails. Should you write the text and then design the email, or develop a template and then write the newsletter?
A common approach is to get started and write a newsletter, then think about how to design it. But this can easily be a time-consuming process, and you may not get the results you want to achieve.
If you put a little extra thought into developing a smart newsletter template, you'll make your job considerably easier.
A successful email marketing design creates instant recognition. The recipient can immediately tell who sent the email and link it to your brand. It should be minimalist and contain clear elements that attract the eye and make it easy to read the email.
To achieve this combination, it’s not a good idea to do a new design every time you send an email. Instead, you should think ahead and develop a well-thought-out template that goes in line with your goals, needs, and message.
What do you think about taking the following steps?
Go back to your strategy. What do you know about your readers’ needs, interests, and goals? What are your goals with the emails, what do you want to achieve?
Once you know that, you’ll be able to list the different types of content you might want to include in your emails in the future. Once you know what content you want to include, you can decide what sections and design elements your template needs to have and in what order they should be in your template.
Of course, you should put the most important things first. Remember – people are just scanning through the content for anything of interest.
Down below you will find a list of different content and design elements you can use for inspiration. What do you need in your newsletter?
Designing new emails every time is time-consuming and your emails risk giving a scattered impression. That’s where pre-made email templates come in.
All you have to do is rearrange the content based on what you find is most important in your emails. Then you add your own logo, fonts, colors, and images. Convenient is just the name of the game.
The main advantage of a pre-designed template is that you don’t need to bring in a designer or tech-savvy person to produce a convert-friendly and stylish newsletter template. Someone else has done the work for you, and you get to do the finishing touches.
Explore our responsive email newsletter templates to save time and get started quickly with your email campaign!
The average attention span today is 8 seconds.
Count to 8 seconds!
The vast majority of people skim through the content of an email to see if they find anything of interest. You need to keep this in mind when designing your newsletters. To keep your reader’s attention, follow these tips:
A Call-To-Action (CTA) is a short phrase in your newsletter that should prompt and motivate the reader to take action. To do that thing you want them to do, such as clicking on a button, link, or image.
The text plays a crucial role in an effective call-to-action, but don’t forget that the design does half the job of your CTA’s.
Some things to consider when designing CTA’s:
Images are necessary as they help to reinforce the emotions and messages you want to convey with your emails. They should be carefully selected and of high quality.
When it comes to images, there are a few things to keep in mind:
GIFs are valuable when it comes to standing out. Movement instantly attracts attention and creates life, the feeling of something happening. They work in the vast majority of email applications, unlike video.
However, in some email applications, only the first of the images in the GIF will appear as a still image. So when creating or selecting a GIF, make sure that the first image in your GIF looks good.
Why is it not possible to use video in email?
It’s not possible to use video in the majority of email applications because the programs do not support this functionality. Therefore, we recommend not including a video as a file in your email. However, you can insert an image to link to your video. Do this:
(1) Take a still image from the video clip
(2) Add a play icon in any image editing program – to encourage the reader to click on the image.
(3) Encourage the reader to click on the image to enjoy a video.
Of course, you want your email design to adapt nicely to whatever device, email application, and screen resolution the email is being read on.
Here you need to be aware of the limitations of the email world. Designing a newsletter is not the same as a webpage, even though both are written with the same code (HTML and CSS). An email has a few more limitations than the web and email programs lack a common standard for how the code should be interpreted.
Therefore, web pages can look relatively the same no matter what device or browser you use to visit, while emails can differ a lot.
There is always a risk that your email may look different in some email programs, which you should be aware of when designing your emails. This is another reason why it can be wise to use pre-made email templates, as these templates are responsive to most email programs and devices.
75% of all emails are opened on mobile
So, make sure your emails are optimized and responsive for mobile screens.
In Get a Newsletter, all email newsletter templates are responsive, which means they adapt to the screen you are reading the email on.
An example of a design element that changes on mobile is columns. It may be worth to keep in mind if your template contains multiple columns, the columns will overlap on mobile devices. Always preview your email on both desktop and mobile – to make sure it looks the way you want.
In Get a Newsletter you can see how the email will generally look on desktop and mobile. It might be a good idea to do more testing to see how the emails look on different devices and applications. Some email applications display emails differently. If you use a pre-made template, you shouldn’t need to test it as carefully.
Common email services:
Apple iPhone
Gmail
Apple Mail
Outlook
Yahoo! Mail
Samsung Mail
Google Android
Apple iPad
Outlook.com
Windows Live Mail
We hope you’ve picked up a lot of great tips to get you started with your newsletter design, as we all want to see you succeed. Ask us any questions you have about newsletter templates and email design at support@getanewsletter.com.
Need some design inspiration? Find everything you need here.
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