Often considered the flagship inclusion in many email marketing operations, a finely-tuned branded newsletter can truly leave a lasting impact on the members of your contact list. Unfortunately, the same notion holds true for the less than stellar iterations of this inbox asset.If you’re not interested in coming up short with your upcoming newsletter offerings, let’s take a moment to talk about the five design mistakes your brand simply can’t afford to make with this piece of content. Once you’re done covering these newsletter faux pas, you’ll have all the tools you need to craft a winning selection that resonates with the person on the other side of the screen.
Missing the Mark on Design Minimalism
From a big picture perspective, Ginny Soskey of the HubSpot Blog explains that plenty of brands fall flat on their metaphorical faces before ever pressing the “Send” button thanks to over-the-top newsletter designs. The truth of the matter is that whether you’re willing to admit it or not, newsletters are easily cluttered and confusing, so it pays to embrace design minimalism.In terms of minimalistic design tricks, Soskey goes on to point out that white space is your friend. Instead of jamming a picture or graphic into an empty border or copy break, take a moment to ask yourself if this template really needs another element to consider on the user end of the equation. Being “stingy” with your response to this internal query ensures that your newsletter design stays crisp, clean, and easily consumed by your brand’s viewership.
Incorporating Non-Traditional Fonts
Another major design flub comes in the form of incorporating non-traditional fonts in your newsletter. Yes, Comic Sans can be a cute edition to a personal email conversation with a friend, but when this kind of font represents a serious brand or organization, it does little to add to your email’s professional aesthetic. In reality, you’re much better off keeping things simple and straightforward with a traditional font like Times New Roman or Arial; basically anything that conveys the important and official nature of this offering.
Leaving out the Alt Text
If you’re familiar with the current outlook on graphics and images in the inbox, then you know that successfully including these items within a newsletter can be a tricky affair. The problem here is that many inbox viewers have visuals disabled automatically, so generating any value from these assets requires the clever use of alt text.By tagging pictures and other images with a descriptive and accurate alt text, you not only mitigate the risk of confusing viewers with a seemingly blank or undefined space within the message, but you also increase your chances of convincing these individuals to enable and view the graphic in question.
Lacking Social Buttons
The final design mistake that’s worth avoiding at all costs comes in the form of not adding in social share buttons to this template. Your email marketing and social media outreach operations aren’t just semi-related endeavors, they’re digital channels that heavily support one another and – when leveraged properly – can magnify your brand’s reach exponentially.It is important to note that simply jamming every social share button imaginable into your newsletter design isn’t the right way to go about rectifying this problem. In fact, doing so simply puts you in a position to fall prey to the cluttered design issue described at the beginning of this post. A better course of action comes in the form of auditing your audience preferences and spotlighting the buttons that represent the most relevant social channels to these viewers.As you can see, maximizing the potential of your newsletter design requires plenty of hard work and keen insight into email marketing best practices. Even so, with what we’ve covered here now on your side, there’s no reason why your upcoming campaign shouldn’t incorporate a sleek, efficient, and optimized newsletter design.
