How to Create a Stunning Newsletter Email Design

Newsletter emails can either help or hurt your business. When you send a newsletter that doesn’t look great, you might find most of your recipients will unsubscribe. Therefore, you can’t pay to neglect your newsletter email designs when marketing your business.

It’s better to design an email layout that’s engaging to readers. While design plays a crucial part, the content must also be relevant and add value. 

Here are a few great tips and tricks to creating a stunning newsletter email design.

1. Avoid Making Your Email Too Wide

When emails are too wide, they create a horizontal scrolling effect, creating a poor user experience. As a result, readers are likely to skip the content, especially if they can’t see the whole width of your newsletter campaign.

Instead, consider keeping your email width at 600 pixels for a seamless layout.

2. Stick With Safe Fonts

One element of your newsletter email design that you should pay attention to is the typography. The fonts you use can significantly impact your email campaign results. That’s why it’s important to stick with safe fonts.

Complex script fonts are what you should avoid including in your newsletters. Consider simple typography for readability instead of making your newsletter fancy-looking.

If you have fonts associated with your branding, keep those consistent in your emails to help with brand awareness and recognition.

3. Choose the Right Colors

If you have branding colors, consider sticking with those in your emails. If you don’t have brand colors yet, avoid choosing random colors that appeal to you.

Colors can provoke different sets of emotions — and can also influence your readers’ perceptions.

For instance, red communicates passion, yellow inspires warmth and green elicits nature and peace.

Consider what mood you want to convey before getting started with choosing colors.

4. Select the Right Images

Imagery can take your newsletter content to the next level with engagement. While your copy can get the message across, your images will communicate the story or idea.

Therefore, your images uphold much of the influence in perception. When selecting images, ensure they deliver the message accordingly. 

For example, if the reader is expecting to learn something, you can use a pie chart image to communicate specific insights. 

Aside from using eye-catching images, you could also use backgrounds or animated GIFs to make the content pop.

5. Create Subtle Directional Cues

A directional cue, such as an arrow or line, points the reader in a specific direction. For example, suppose you have a CTA (call-to-action) button you want the reader to click. In that case, a directional cue is an effective hack to emphasize taking action. 

Careful not to overuse directional cues. Too many can confuse the reader and convince them to unsubscribe from your emails. In essence, less is more in newsletter email design.

6. Use Visual Hierarchy

You can create a stellar design in your email. Yet if you’re not using a visual hierarchy, your readers might not be able to make sense of the content.

Visual hierarchy is simple, so here are a few factors to keep in mind:

• Engage the reader by starting with the most important points to take away.

• Highlight your most important points with color, contrast and position.

• Start the top with large typography, then gradually smaller with less important information.

Most subscribers don’t have time to read through the entire email. Therefore, establishing the main points at the beginning is best for engagement.

In addition, you can also use bold or italics to make your main points scannable.

7. Get More Clicks With CTA Design

Part of the success of your newsletter email design comes down to whether it gets more clicks. Your CTA button is the most critical element of engaging your subscribers. To gain more responses with your CTA buttons, make sure it:

• Is actionable and visible.

• Appears in various formats — like links and buttons.

• Is included multiple times throughout the email. Three is a standard number to stick with.

The colors of your CTA buttons play an important role as well. For instance, blue conveys trustworthiness, whereas red is for more urgent matters.

Make sure to test out these features to determine which colors give you the best results.

Incorporate a Newsletter Email Design That Works

Design can often be an afterthought when creating an email. However, no one should ignore it as it has the power to capture your subscribers’ attention.

To get your readers engaged in the email, get strategic with your layout. Certain parts of your email will play a significant role in content digestion and taking action.