Getting your newsletter read
– through good design & layout and the use of graphics & templates
Ensure that the subject line grabs attention. Don’t do (as we used to) entitle it ‘XYZ company’s newsletter’. Make it relevant to your audience & the content of the newsletter and include a benefit that will encourage them to open it.
Easy to see what’s in it. If there are more than a couple of paragraphs or sections, consider including a list of contents or index at the top. This makes it easy for people to see if there’s anything of interest there.
Not too long. Make the newsletter easy to scan and read. A long newsletter may put some people off and will make it harder for them to find what they’re looking for.
Summary with links to full articles. Following on from the point above, why not make the newsletter a summary of the points you want to make or the information you’re providing. Apart from making it easy to scan and read, you can still provide the full article by adding it to your web site or blog. That way you get more people to your web site.
Try and make the newsletter attractive. An e-mail of plain text in Times Roman font isn’t very appealing visually. If the subject matter is of great value or importance people will read it but if not…….
Emphasise your brand. Try to ensure that it’s obvious that the newsletter is from you and your company. This means including the logo prominently and featuring your colour scheme. If an overt use of the colour scheme would make the newsletter unreadable (e.g. yellow on red), try to include the colours in backgrounds and borders.
Not all e-mail clients display graphics – either at all or by default. Some e-mail services and clients don’t display graphics – for example, Google mail/Gmail strips out the graphics and images from e-mails by default and doesn’t display some types of images at all. This means that you have to be careful to make sure that the e-mail is still readable without some or all of the images that make it up.
Email clients display differently. Although a newsletter might look great in Microsoft Outlook (the most common software used for e-mail), it might not look so good in the host of alternative e-mail clients that people use. Google, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Incredimail and Thunderbird are examples. There are various ways of testing for these clients before sending a newsletter out.
Making it easy to generate newsletters regularly. Commercial newsletter distribution systems usually include a facility to use, and customise, a template. This means that it’s easy to construct a newsletter with different numbers and types of articles each time.
We can help with all aspects of design, set up and distribution of e-mail newsletters. We can even write the content for you! Costs for the design/customisation of a newsletter template, the set up of a distribution account and phone/face-face tuition on its use starts from £400. For more details see the Newsletter services page on our web site or contact us via email, enquiry@clarihon.co.uk or phone, 01579-342360.
