Building An Email Newsletter

Before you begin building an <a href=""http://www.mailblaze.com/"">email newsletter, you need to do some planning. Consider who you are sending emails to, how frequently you are going to send them, what kind of content you are going to include, and what sort of visual design you want. Most importantly, you need to ask yourself why you are sending out these emails.

If you’re trying to drive sales, your newsletter will probably offer a promotion for your store. This kind of email would focus more on graphics and buttons and a strong call-to-action. On the other hand, if you want to <a href=""http://www.mailblaze.com/sign-up"">send emails to build a following for your content, your email will be text heavy with a magazine style layout and structure.

Once you’ve decided on the purpose of your email, you can set measurable goals for your <a href=""http://www.mailblaze.com/blog/what-is-email-marketing/"">email marketing campaign. What results do you want your newsletter to achieve specifically? Maybe it’s your goal to get people to click through to a certain page on your website, or to get a certain number of new subscribers each month. Keeping this goal in mind will help you design your newsletter. You’ll be able to decide what content to keep in and what to keep out.

With the planning out of the way, you can turn your attention to design and technical factors. Building an HTML email newsletter (as opposed to a plain text email) presents unique challenges to designers. It’s difficult to design an email that renders well across all the various email clients. Unlike web browsers, email clients are not built to a set of standards.

So how do you go about building a newsletter that displays well in most email software? Experienced developers recommend that you keep your email design simple and use primitive code. The more complicated a design is, the less likely it is to display properly in an older email client. Here are a few guidelines to follow when coding for an email environment.

First of all, you should use tables to control layout instead of DIVs and CSS. There are more than a dozen email clients out there and their ability to render CSS and HTML varies. As a result, you need to use structural tables to position your design elements if you want them to display consistently across different readers. Although CSS support is poor with mail clients, you should still use inline CSS to store all your style information, such as background colours and fonts, once your nested table layout is in place.

Secondly, don’t rely on images. They may not be visible to subscribers. Most email programs do not allow images to load by default. Keep that in mind when you design your email so that no important content is suppressed by image blocking. Whilst the use of images can lead to very creative layouts, if images don’t load, then the email is worthless. If you still want to use an all-image email then make sure your email has HTML text as well as plain text. Test your design with images turned off before sending to see how it affects layout.

However, if you use Mail Blaze for <a href=""http://www.mailblaze.com/"">bulk emailing, you can rest assured that your images will always be visible to your subscribers. Mail Blaze is one of the very few companies that embeds images in body of your email campaign. There will be no need to ‘click to download’ images if you use our service.

Finally, check that your newsletter displays well across a variety of email clients by sending it to a range of test email accounts. In fact, you should test your designs regularly as there has been continual change in some clients, especially the web-based providers like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo!

If creating your own HTML newsletter seems a bit daunting, you can always get the team at Mail Blaze to manage creation, sending and tracking of your email campaigns. You tell us your requirements, and we’ll create a custom designed <a href=""http://www.mailblaze.com/"">newsletter template for you that’s easy to edit and add content to. <a href=""http://www.mailblaze.com/"">Bulk email marketing has never been easier!