Your email newsletter design matters more than you think: Here’s why

Email is an essential component of any effective marketing campaign, and for a good reason! In a survey carried out by the Litmus group, marketers ranked email as their most effective channel over paid search, SEO, and social media.

This powerful channel, in which you have all the control, lets you have a direct line of communication with the subscribers on your email list, and doesn’t depend on any search or social algorithms.

All of this sounds good, but how to make the most of it?

That’s when the email newsletter enters the game! Newsletters give you a solid chance to stay connected with your most engaged audience members and build stronger relationships.

But success doesn’t come alone. Diverse factors can impact how many readers you can engage with your newsletters, from subject lines to email content and down to the design.

Keep reading to learn how to use email newsletter design to create the best experiences for your audience. They will be looking forward to hearing from you in their inboxes!

Take notes – here’s what we’ll cover:

What Is an Email Newsletter?

Benefits of a Strong Email Newsletter

Email Newsletter Ideas

Tips for Designing an Email Newsletter

7 Examples of Great Email Newsletter Design

Building Your Own Newsletter

Tracking Engagement on Your Newsletters

Final Thoughts: The Importance of Strong Email Newsletter Design + Examples

What is an email newsletter?

First thing first! An email newsletter is a marketing communication tool you regularly send subscribers to keep them updated on your news, brand, and products. This consistent source of information is usually scheduled, on a weekly or monthly basis, and it’s unbeatable to stay in direct contact with consumers and leads.

According to the Litmus State of Email Marketing Report, 81% of marketers use newsletters in their email strategy, making them the most popular format, followed by welcome emails and product emails.

Benefits of a strong email newsletter

Your email newsletter is a chance to stay on top of mind with customers and continue building a fruitful relationship with them without the pressure of pushing for a sale every time.

Let’s have a closer look at the top benefits of including a newsletter in your email marketing strategy:

Stronger customer relationship

Newsletters help you build brand awareness with your loyal subscribers by offering them information about your brand and providing value through content!

Increased sales activity and revenue

Repeated sales are a weighty source of revenue for any business, right? Email newsletters can help the relationship with your customers stay fresh, so you can incorporate fantastic promotions or introduce new products to an audience that trusts you already.

Better marketing analytics

Good news – there are more benefits to using email newsletters! With them, you can track the engagement and several conversion metrics, such as open rate, number of views, or total clicks, to help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

Email newsletter ideas

One of the main benefits of newsletters is their flexibility! In other words, they’re fully adaptable, so you can change the content to make it fit your marketing objectives.

Don’t know where to start? We’ve got you covered! Here are some examples of email campaigns you can send your subscribers to:

  • Industry or news roundups
  • Case studies
  • Customer review features
  • Surveys
  • Sales deals and promotional codes
  • New product or feature announcements
  • Career opportunities
  • Company announcements and news

What’s best is that you aren’t limited to one type of email for each newsletter! For example, you can send one that features a new product announcement along with a promotional code, creating endless opportunities.

Tips for designing an email newsletter

The art of the email newsletter isn’t an exact science. It takes trial and error, A/B testing, and time to figure out what resonates with your target audience.

However, you can start off on the right foot with these top tips to turn a good email into a great one:

Do your homework

Let’s do a quick exercise: can you see yourself trying to write a personal email to someone you don’t know? Well, that’s what businesses do all the time! They send out marketing emails without proper research and only hope for the best to happen.

If you want your emails to be the ones readers look forward to each week or month, then you should put your heart and soul into it and do your homework. Get to know the people on the other side of your emails, and learn their preferences, wants, and needs so you can craft emails that deliver.

Make it clear and simple

When in doubt, remember that less is more, always. It’s better to opt for short and sweet text than long and overbearing! Your newsletter should provide valuable information or entertainment to readers as clearly as possible.

Simple email newsletter

Writing clearly and concisely is essential, but your email design can also be helpful with comprehension! Feel free to leverage graphics to get your reader’s attention and communicate complex ideas. For example, add quality images, include icons, and other graphic design assets to improve your email design and increase engagement. There’s no need to mention the importance of the call-to-action (CTA) buttons, which should be visually distinctive and guide the user to the next step.

Be consistent

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and relationships aren’t either. You have to be consistent if you want your newsletter strategy to be truly successful! It’s directed to your most loyal customers, so let’s make the most of it to exceed their expectations.

A survey from Litmus found that 58% of email marketers spend two or more weeks crafting a single email. So, maybe you can consider starting with a monthly schedule first! Remember that quality and consistency should always be more important than quantity, so fit them into a plan you can realistically carry out.

Think of the User Experience

Build a strong relationship with your customers through effective communication, but be careful – using pushy language or spam practices can lead them to unsubscribe. Instead of it, think about creating a pleasant email user experience with practices like personalization!

According to Validity’s State of Email Benchmark Report, 72% of top-performing email marketers use personalization. It’s an excellent way to make each email seem like you sent it to one person instead of your entire subscriber list.

If you choose to personalize, make sure to double-check your content with test emails and ensure that you have the correct information in your CRM!

7 Examples of great email newsletter design

Now you’ve seen all these top-tips, let’s discover seven excellent examples of email newsletter design to help you along the way.

1. Better Mortgage

Better Mortgage email newsletter

Better Mortgage is a tech company that aims to redefine homeownership by providing individuals with fast and transparent mortgages.

From this company’s email newsletter, we can highlight the use of an eye-catching visual statistic at the top to draw the reader in and then leverage an infographic format to deliver valuable information to a targeted audience – in this case, female homebuyers.

They use several design elements to reinforce their identity, including brand colors and the use of people and homes in their data visualization.

2. Allset

Allset app email newsletter featuring the app on a smartphone

Allset helps users add more efficiency to their daily lives through an app that sets up seamless online ordering and pickup for coffee and food.

In this email newsletter example, they do a nice job putting the product front and center while also using a gradient color scheme that draws the eye down where readers can see screenshots of new features.

The email also includes a clear CTA button at the top, making the next action crystal clear!

3. Fleur & Bee

Fleur & Bee email newsletter

Fleur & Bee is a natural skincare e-commerce company that highlights its brand’s strengths in the newsletter by including images of natural ingredients, placing the product at the top, and choosing a calming color palette.

Even though this is a promotional email, we can see that the discount code is highlighted subtly in natural colors — it’s easy to see without being pushy. The brand also uses simple icons to draw attention to their differentiating qualities of being cruelty-free, having no nasty toxins, and 1% to charity.

4. Lyft

Lyft email newsletter with a survey button

This email newsletter from Lyft’s ride-share company is the perfect example of how to leverage the idea of short and sweet! They use a combination of white space and bold text to draw the reader’s eye to the CTA, which is to provide feedback and a minimalist appearance. The shortness of the email also helps set the reader up to expect a quick and short survey, so it’s a total yes!

5. Manchester City

Manchester City email newsletter featuring Sergio Aguero

Manchester City F.C. does an excellent exercise of creativity by using the image of the football player Aguero and tying to him all the goal stats, therefore capturing the attention of the subscribers.

While most of the email design uses the team’s signature blue color, the call-to-action is in a contrasting yellow, catching the reader’s attention and encouraging more clicks. When you design your email you can choose different backgrounds for your design and play with the colors to as this example.

6. Insurify

Insurify email newsletter with a survey

Insurify is a company that lets users compare insurance quotes. Here, the company removes the pace of going to an external website by using email to deliver the survey directly. All this with an eye-catching and playful design!

What’s best is that Insurify makes intelligent use of the color codes in the response options, helping the user understand the question they’re asking about.

7. Disney+

Disney+ email newsletter

This newsletter from Disney+ is an excellent example of an email that uses promotion to solve a customer problem – specifically, what gifts they should give this year!

The dark blue coloring background incorporates the heading into the rest of the email and creates an immersive experience, highlighted by featuring three characters at the top of the email.

Moreover, Disney includes a distinct, specific call-to-action and uses numbered steps to help subscribers navigate the gift purchase process, making it much easier to comprehend.

Building your own newsletter

Even though crafting a beautiful email newsletter may seem a tall mountain to climb, there are plenty of tools to help you along the way to design the newsletter of your marketing dreams.

These include:

Newsletter Builders

HubSpot’s email newsletter builder lets you use an easy drag-and-drop tool to create newsletters that will, for sure, delight your subscribers!

Graphic Design Tools

You can still create stunning emails without a designer on-hand. Tools like Wepik offer tons of ready-made templates and a professional editing tool to build a custom graphic from scratch.

Graphic Design Providers

If you want ready-to-use visuals, Freepik offers everything you can imagine, from graphics and stock photos to fonts and background images!

Flaticon provides stickers and interface icons that you can use to tailor your email’s look to match your brand to perfection.

Email Newsletter Templates

For templates tailored to different purposes, such as product announcements or brand updates, try any pre-built email templates. You can personalize them for optimal performance, or use the template builder to create custom and unique layouts for your brand.

Tracking engagement on your newsletters

Crafting and sending great emails is just half of the equation. Once you send your newsletter, it’s time to track performance metrics, so you can lead the road to perfection!

Check engagement metrics, such as open rate, click-through rate, and shares, to see how well subscribers are converting to sales leads. A good starting point is to pay special attention to website visits and clicks on CTA buttons.

Once you have your engagement tracking set up, you can A/B test everything from subject lines to your newsletter layout and see what resonates the most with your audience.

Final thoughts: The importance of strong email newsletter design + examples

Now it’s as clear as day that email plays a fundamental role in your marketing strategy. Newsletters are such a useful tool, as you can tailor them to fit your current objectives while building a stronger relationship with your clients.

Don’t forget to pay attention to every little detail of your email newsletter before sending them! Visuals nowadays are everything – they can be as impactful as the actual content.

In the end, this is all about building a delightful experience that subscribers look forward to seeing in their inboxes!