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- Planning a Successful Newsletter Template
Tips and Recommendations for Planning a Successful Newsletter Template
Dimentions, personalization and subject lines - all there is to think about when creating your newsletter tamplate.
Dimensions of the newsletter
The maximal recommended width of a news letter is 650 pixels,
but reaching up to no more than 600 pixels is preferred. If you
send a wider newsletter, the recipient may have to use the scroll
bar in order to view the entire content.
Length of the newsletter is unlimited. However, an excessively long
newsletter may deter recipients, who may not even bother to read it
through. As a result they may miss the content at the bottom of the
mail. To solve this problem, we can build the newsletter only with
starting sentences of the sections and articles and refer the
readers interested in the subject to read the continuance of the
section or article, by clicking a link leading to other web
pages.
HTML code
It is important to pay attention to the quality of the HTML code
and use content editors generating pure and clean HTML code, As it
has an influence on the presentation of the mail by different
e-mail boxes and the mail's size. (Clean code does not include
additional commands being attached to it by other software
applications such as Office applications or open and redundant HTML
tags).
Parts of the newsletter
Like almost anything else; the newsletter is divided into three
parts: Name banner, body of the newsletter and credit box.
Name banner
The name banner, containing the name of the newsletter should be
positioned at the head of the newsletter, in a designed way with or
without the logo of the company combined into it and a name tag,
describing the subject of the newsletter and the date and number of
issue.
If possible, it would be advisable to position in the name banner a
link to the company's website.
Personalization
Some combine, by means of mail merge feature, the name of each
of the recipient into the introduction part of the newsletter (for
instance: Hello Joel, this week we learn thatג€¦ ). This simple act
will quite increase the recipient's interest to review the
newsletter.
We should aspire to having the headline of each volume and the
personal appeal to the recipient visible at the preview window when
the mail is received, even without the recipient opening the
message. The name banner should be well designed so it will be
easily recognized and pleasant to receive.
Body of the newsletter
Design of the body of the newsletter depends on the amount of
content we wish and can supply.
It is advisable to plan ahead and know in advance if we can supply
each time large quantities of content. Can we edit materials and
place them in a complex template containing many sections? Various
organizations reached different conclusions: An organization with
fewer resources may reach the conclusion that it would suffice with
one article each time.
Design of the body of the newsletter - we can choose a simple
design that is comprised of one table divided into lines and in
each line a single article or section. Even such a template can be
designed professionally.
If you reached a conclusion that you can feed multiple contents
into a complex template, you can choose a more advanced structure
comprising of many tables with merged cells and asymmetrically
distributed (see example).
It is advised to allocate place for permanent sections in the
newsletter, such as: A professional article contributing something
to every customer, monthly special, news from the field or sector,
word of the editor, etc. This action will save us a lot of time
when feeding content into the newsletter.
We need to feed the content and graphics into the template
carefully, and be particular about combining them within the limits
of the template, so we will not distort it. For instance, when a
combination of an image "expands" the template, we need to reduce
the image size. In order to achieve a professional look, we should
maintain proportionate measurements. This can be done by any
graphic editing software.
Contact details and credit box - here it is advised to include the
details for establishing contact, such as: Physical address of the
company, phone numbers and e-mail addresses which can be clicked to
establish contact and also a friendly option to remove the
recipient from the mailing list.
Design of follow-up pages
Windows opening upon clicking the links should be identical in
their general design to the newsletter's main page. Colors, font
size, graphic supplements, and so on. If we are talking about
windows through which product can be purchased, it is important
that they are very easy to use and it would be even preferable to
embed in them the known personal details of the recipients of the
mail (for instance, name) to make the experience of buying easier
for them and to motivate them to do this immediately upon receiving
the newsletter.
Name of sender and the subject line in the mail containing the newsletter
The name of the sender and the wording of the subject line of the mail containing the newsletter should also be part of a fixed pattern. If you decided to write in the name of sender the company's name in English, you should persist with that and stick to this decision, throughout all the newsletter mailings. In the subject line of the mail we can decide, for instance, that it contains the name of the newsletter and the number of the volume. For instance: "Our newsletter - Volume 35" (If we are particular on this, the recipient will be able to find previous newsletters sent to him by sorting the mail by address of sender or subject line).