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Good Design Increases Ezine Opens, Click-throughs, And Forwards

Investing in the professional design of your ezine or email newsletter can have a huge impact on the overall success of your email marketing! If your ezine appears unprofessional or messy, contains broken links or images, or doesn’t effectively use margins and spacing, you could be sending out an ezine that is hard to read. This alone can greatly impact your opens, click-throughs, and forwards, meaning it also can greatly affect your bottom line.

Here are some easy to follow design tips to help you present a more professional, easy to read ezine or email newsletter:

Newspaper layout rules apply! To make it easier for the reader to absorb your information and perceive it as a faster read, break up the content into several short 1-3 sentence paragraphs.
Make use of bulleted or numbered lists. If your reader is in a hurry and they just scan your ezine, most will stop for a quick read of a bulleted or numbered list of tips and tricks.
Keep the content away from the edge of the newsletter. Not only is this ugly, it screams “I don’t really know what I am doing!” and subconsciously it is more difficult to read because the readers will get visually distracted.
Make it easy to read! Create a color palette for your ezine with 4-8 different colors and stick to them. If you can’t help it, only add neon for a sale or limited time offer only in very small doses.
Add Alt tags with a description of the email or the actual image to the images in your ezine. When the images are turned off, in some cases, the Alt text will display in its place.
Beware of the “Right-click to download images” warning. Make sure you know what your ezine looks like in this state. Is the important content missing? Can readers tell it’s from you? Consider keeping information in your ezine header HTML so your title still appears when images are turned off.
Understand the ratio of text to images! Reduce chances of getting caught in spam filters by having more text than images in your ezine.
Use a consistent format for your ezine. Design your masthead and stick with it. Only slight updates should be done. If you have a sidebar, keep it the same color in the same place.