How far in advance do you start making your newsletter? As a small business owner, if it takes you more than two weeks, you’re probably spending more time on it than you should.
Despite the effort you put in, your newsletter might end up going out later than planned. This is where newsletter email templates make a world of difference.
They come in pre-built formats and designs. Just paste your content, and you’re good to go. However, you don’t want to send customers duplicate emails as your competitors. This can affect your brand identity as well as email deliverability.
You need to adapt your newsletter email template design and message to avoid falling behind in your marketing goals. Newsletter email templates allow you to customize your campaigns with the brand tone and voice that customers resonate with.
In this blog post, we’ll share proven tips on designing, writing, and formatting your newsletter using templates and workflows. We’ll discuss:
- Benefits of using email newsletter templates
- How to select the right newsletter template
- Where to find the best newsletter email templates
- How to incorporate content into your newsletter
- How to use advanced template features
- Best practices for newsletter email campaigns
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Benefits of Email Newsletter Templates
Whether you’re starting from scratch or interested in changing the layout, an email newsletter template can help by providing:
Speed and scale
If you struggle with formatting or design, a newsletter email template takes it off your plate. Create your content and put it into the template. It’ll look like a professionally designed newsletter. A template gives you a pre-built layout to plug in your branding and content.
This means you can get more done quickly and scale your reach and engagement.
Brand consistency
Without consistent formatting and design, your newsletter could look less than ideal.
Worse, it could send the wrong signals to your target audience. A newsletter email template, on the other hand, gives you a framework for on-brand design and formatting for visual and text elements.
The result: cleaner and more aesthetic emails that your subscribers will appreciate.
Better readability across devices
Rendering issues can crop up across different email service providers like Outlook. For example, images may appear as attachments, or font sizes may be inconsistent. Email templates are generally designed to be responsive, which means they can adapt quickly to different devices and screen sizes.
Most of them come extensively tested for rendering issues, making them a safer bet for marketers.
Dynamic content for better targeting
If you have multiple target segments, dynamic elements let you create personalized emails for each without having to create separate lists.
For example, you can send different offers to male and female subscribers, retaining the overall layout but changing the copy, offer, hero image, etc.
Improve email deliverability
Poor formatting and display issues are major red flags for spam checkers. Responsive email newsletter templates improve deliverability by optimizing images, formatting, and content structure. This improves email deliverability and provides better returns on investment.
How to Create a Newsletter: From Concept to Launch
How to Select the Right Newsletter Template
What do you look for when selecting an email newsletter template? Let’s take a look.
Responsive
More emails get read on mobile devices today than at any other time in history. Unlike regular marketing emails, newsletters feature multiple sections, images, and links. So the template you use must adapt to any screen while maintaining loading speed and resolution.
It should comply with the display guidelines of major email service providers and email automation tools.
Minimalist design
The right template will have a clean, simple design with a header, hero image, and CTA button.
It should have text and image blocks to add your branding, images, and copy within minutes. It should provide ready-to-use design, layout, and type font options.
Comes with a drag-and-drop builder
Look for a template that easily customizes layout, text, and visual elements. You should be able to add your branding and copy or change fonts, colors, and text.
If you need deeper customization, make sure the template is HTML so you can code the necessary changes.
A/B testing functionality
A/B testing allows you to remove any graphic, content, or formatting errors that may impact your email newsletter’s overall appearance and performance.
It is also helpful in identifying the best-performing subject lines, CTAs, placements, and design elements so you can capitalize on those.
Enhance Your Email Marketing
Keep your audience engaged and informed with our beautifully crafted, easy-to-customize newsletter email templates! Simply personalize your brand’s images, headings, and CTAs, and send captivating, value-packed newsletters in minutes!
Where to Find the Best Newsletter Email Templates
If you’re wondering where to find email newsletter templates, we’ve got a whole bunch of options for you:
EngageBay
EngageBay is a CRM with comprehensive sales, marketing, and customer support features. It offers over 1000 free email templates, including several newsletter email templates, across various industries, campaigns, and seasons.
The templates are responsive, compatible with most email marketing tools, and require no coding knowledge. Coupled with EngageBay’s comprehensive email marketing features, you can easily create beautiful newsletters, launch them, and track their performance.
Features
- User-friendly drag-and-drop builder.
- Built-in A/B testing to optimize design and copy
- Comprehensive suite of features including autoresponder, analytics, and workflows
Pricing
Four pricing plans – Free, Basic, Growth, and Pro
- Free: $0/mo
- Basic: $13.70/mo, billed annually
- Growth: $59.79/mo, billed annually
- Pro: $110.39/mo, billed annually
Mailchimp
Mailchimp offers over 100 newsletter templates with customization, scheduling, and reporting features. This means you can find opportunities for improved engagement and revenue. What’s more, it comes with integrations for a wide range of tools and has a low learning curve.
You can readily integrate it into your marketing stack and respond faster to changing customer behavior.
Key features
- Creative Assistant: Mailchimp’s AI tool creates custom images and graphics based on your inputs
- Advanced automations: It has a workflow builder with pre-built and custom email sequences for all types of campaigns
- Landing page builder: Mailchimp doubles up as a landing page design tool in addition to newsletters. Personalized landing pages are a great way to increase subscriptions or sales.
Pricing
- Free: $0/mo
- Essentials: $6.50/mo, billed monthly
- Standard: $10/mo, billed annually
- Premium: $175/mo, billed annually
Sendgrid
In addition to various newsletter email templates, Sendgrid also provides deliverability testing to ensure your emails get into the recipient’s inbox.
This includes spam testing, rendering previews, and link validation. What makes it even more compelling is a list management feature that lets you personalize messages for different customer segments.
Key features
- Email analytics: Sendgrid provides comprehensive campaign performance insights and helps find opportunities for optimization. For example, it can help optimize send times, content, design, and formatting based on engagement patterns.
- Drag and drop editor: Helps you add branding and personalization elements to your email newsletter
- Dynamic content: Enables you to personalize emails for multiple customer segments within the same campaign.
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How Do You Structure a Good Newsletter?
When it comes to structuring your newsletter, you might wonder about the most professional format to use. Here are a few of the most popular ones.
Bulletins
This format lets you provide short summaries of events in your industry and links to external sources. If you plan to share how-to’s, useful tools, and free resources in your newsletter, bulletins could be a great format.
Short stories
This format is perfect if you provide daily briefs or round-ups of around 200 words each on different topics. Most newsletters of this type carry around 3 to 5 articles, making for a quick read.
Numbered list
This format replaces bulleted points with around 5-10 numbered points. It includes quotes, examples, reviews, expert advice, product recommendations, etc. This format is best suited for people who have a large following online.
Curated content
You don’t necessarily need to be a real estate agent, financial advisor, or hotel to share updates on rental rates, stock prices, budget offers, etc. These newsletters curate offers, deals, and discounts from various sources to help subscribers make or save money.
Expert analysis
This type of newsletter provides daily analysis of news and events written by experts in the field.
Visual newsletter
Think of it as a series of infographics with alt-text under each for context. This format is popular as it conveys information at a glance. It’s a great way to break down topics for your audience and maximize engagement.
Ideally, you want to focus on one CTA every time you send out your newsletter. This allows you to use a single-column layout, simplifying the reading experience.
As attention spans get shorter, use bullet points, sub-headers, links, and pull quotes to direct the reader’s attention to specific parts of your newsletter. Put all the key information at the top, giving them a quick synopsis of what a piece of content contains. This is like the reverse pyramid layout used by newspapers and print publications.
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Using Advanced Newsletter Email Template Features
There’s always room to improve your email newsletter, and advanced templates open up some distinct possibilities.
Product carousels
Newsletter templates are generally geared towards providing valuable information. However, there’s no reason not to showcase your products at the bottom to drive traffic.
Opting for newsletter templates with dynamic product carousels lets you show personalized product recommendations based on user behavior and preferences.
Readers can swipe through the images and click on those that interest them.
Survey forms
Now and then, you may want to collect feedback from your subscribers about their experience. Instead of emailing a Google Forms link, you can embed a survey form or poll into your newsletter. Subscribers are likelier to complete a survey that doesn’t redirect them to another page or site.
Integration with CRM
Syncing your newsletter email template with CRM lets you auto-populate customer information like names, birthdays, and anniversaries and use dynamic content to show special offers. CRM integration also lets you get real-time performance reports as soon as your newsletter goes out.
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Best Practices for Newsletter Email Campaigns
Now that you know how to select and build email templates, let’s look at how to use them in your newsletter campaigns effectively.
Stick to one newsletter email format
More often than not, people can’t decide which format is best. To settle this dilemma, compare a few competitor newsletters that you like and go with one that best fits you. Running a survey to get real feedback is another great way to decide. Once you’ve found a format that works, be consistent with it.
This way, you’ll be able to churn them out faster over time while readers get a familiar experience.
Leverage A/B testing strategies
When it comes to newsletter subject lines, pre-headers, CTAs, body copy, and length, it helps to keep mixing things up. Some subscribers may want bullet points and links instead of longer articles in your newsletter. A/B testing the number of articles, total length, or dynamic content based on segmentation data can help increase engagement.
EngageBay has a preview option for optimizing your email newsletter’s appearance across email clients.
Optimize timing and frequency
Newsletter templates allow you to iterate your messaging rapidly based on the time of day. For example, if a subscriber hasn’t opened previous emails sent during morning hours, you can adapt the content into an ‘evening edition.’
This strategy can help you deal with rising unsubscribe rates or poor engagement. Similarly, consider analyzing open rates for emails sent at different times to identify the best frequency.
For example, you can switch the frequency of your weekly newsletter to bi-weekly for 30 days to measure the incremental difference in engagement.
Reporting and analytics
Data-backed insights are key to ensuring your newsletter aligns with business objectives, marketing KPIs, and changing customer expectations. Depending on your KPIs, you can set up your newsletter email template to track open rates, click rates, etc.
The best way to do this is by importing your template into an email marketing platform like EngageBay. It syncs engagement data across one or more campaigns and presents it in real time via a dashboard interface. This means you can quickly identify trends and make strategic decisions.
For example, you can compare the daily conversion rate against the average weekly conversion rate.
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Conclusion
When used effectively, newsletter email templates can give you the reach and volume desired. However, you may have problems on the production side: tracking performance, managing multiple newsletters, or manually updating customer details.
With EngageBay, you get an email marketing hub that helps you design attractive newsletter email templates while providing a complete feedback loop across campaign scheduling, performance, and ROI.
This gives you predictability and confidence regarding your email marketing strategy.
Sign up today for a free trial and see the difference for yourself.
FAQ
1. How do I create an email newsletter?
To create an email newsletter, you’ll need to:
- Define your goal: Decide on aspects like type of newsletter, frequency, structure, design, etc.
- Choose your email newsletter tool: Email platforms come with a variety of features and price points. Sign up for a free trial to test the tools you shortlist.
- Select a template: Choose a newsletter email template that aligns with your branding and personalization needs. Consider aspects like white space, layout, placement, responsiveness, customization, etc. Email marketing tools like EngageBay let you add visual and text elements via drag-and-drop email builder.
- Customize and personalize: Finally, write the subject line, preview text, body copy, CTA, and round it off with a hero image. Use dynamic content to personalize for various segments.
- Test and iterate: A/B test the content and design elements in your emails and use seed testing to remove deliverability issues.
2. How do you structure a good newsletter?
When structuring your email newsletter, the key things to consider are:
- Layout: Choose a single-column layout for easy readability across devices.
- Content: Include a mix of content, including quizzes, info-graphics, and articles
- Navigation: Create sections, headers, and sub-headers so readers can skim through your newsletter
- Format: Adjust the resolution, font size, margins, and spacing to suit reading within an email
3. How do you make an email newsletter template?
To make an email newsletter template, you can choose one of two options – use a pre-built template from your email marketing platform or code your own using an HTML template.
Using pre-built templates is quick and easy. They can be customized with graphics and interactive elements via the platform’s drag-and-drop email builder. You need coding knowledge to use HTML templates.
