Email newsletters are a critical part of email marketing. They help you reach your subscribers with personalized content you know they will love. But no matter how good the content in your newsletters is, its design remains one of the most significant determinants of its success. A newsletter’s design does much more than present the content beautifully as it also helps with brand awareness and credibility. Even if you are not a designer, there are some key things you should keep in mind to ensure your newsletters lead to the best results.

Take Your Reader on a Journey Using Design Elements

While colors, branding, and fonts are important, you also need to remember that most people scan their emails. Because of this, some of the elements you add to your email are invisible, but the important content is not.

Take advantage of this by using hierarchies to highlight important information. For example, you can use different typographies to highlight the key points in your email, so they catch a reader’s attention as they read the email. Font size, color, and weight are the most used variations used to catch readers’ attention.

Second, have a visual hierarchy that takes one reader from one important point to the next.  You can use contrasting background colors to make important sections hard to pass by, use text alignment to break paragraphs, and borders to separate different elements.

Keep The Basics In mind

There are some things you can overlook, but they are the basics that each email newsletter should have. All emails should be about 660px in width. This is a good width that can scale up and down depending on the user’s device.

Next, ensure your email is responsive. Even though we are in the era of huge smartphones, there are still people who use phones with smaller screen sizes, and you need to cater to these people too.

Also, keep whitespace in mind when designing your email. White space allows the different elements you add in your email to “breathe”, gives people’s eyes some rest when going through your email, and makes it easier to follow the email’s flow.

Even if you use different typography variants, remember to limit your font selection to one or two. People can tolerate the different variants, but they will not want to deal with multiple fonts in their emails.

Have a Call-to-action Hierarchy

A huge difference between an email newsletter and a promotional email is the number of calls to action each has. A promotional email should have one call to action, while a newsletter can have multiple CTAs.

Remember that email newsletters are about information and enticing people to visit a website to continue reading this information. This means each section needs a CTA. However, you should have your main CTA “above the fold” and then additional CTAs in other sections of the newsletter.

Ensure each class of CTAs is different so the newsletter has a focal point people can focus on.

Creating an email newsletter design can be easy or rocket science depending on who you ask. It does not have to be the latter if you follow proper design guidelines. Remember, good design speaks for itself, and a busy design is not necessarily a good one.