A Guide to Creating Email Newsletters

Email newsletters are hotter than ever.
They’re a great extension to your business’ communication toolkit and offer you and your clients an excellent channel by which you can reach potential and existing customers.
In this article, we’ll explore common design patterns of email newsletters and learn which approaches work well, so that you’ll be prepared to create one for yourself and your clients.
We’ve also included a compilation and analysis of different newsletter designs so that you can learn from them as well as tips on what to do and what not to do.
If you know of any other tips, please share them with us in the comments area.

Which Came First: Chicken or Egg?

Before you create and send your email newsletter, you’ll need subscribers. Making this process as easy and intuitive as possible is important. After all, users are giving you permission to contact them. You wouldn’t want to mess that opportunity up!

Not Too Many Fields

You don’t need a user’s social security number to send them an email! It’s most frustrating when someone signs up for an email newsletter only to be confronted with a form that asks for their address, age, phone number, mother’s maiden name, favorite pet… All we really need is their email address and, if we want to push a bit further, their name.
Seth Godin, in his article Permission Marketing, offers good insight into getting viewers to sign up and follow you:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

In other words, the viewer wants to listen to you. They are giving you their attention, so at least respect them and don’t ask for unnecessary data.
With that in mind, let’s look at some examples of good newsletter sign-up forms:

Joshua Porter’s sign-up form is an excellent example of what to do right. First, he puts the sign-up form close to his social icons, indicating that this is an extension of his communications with you, the user.
Next, he offers a short blurb explaining what the newsletter is about. This gets you and your users on the same page, so that they’re clear on what to expect from your content.
Finally, he asks only for the user’s email address and name, followed by a big button with a verb label: “Subscribe.” Very simple, yet packed with just the right information!

Threadless also puts its newsletter sign-up form in the social area of its home page. The location is prominent, and Threadless provides information on how often and when the newsletter will be delivered. Also, notice the simplicity of asking only for an email address: no name, no social security number, no favorite pet!

We’ve Got Subscribers!

Your sign-up form is now a success, and you’re ready to send out some content!
Before we move to the design stage, let’s figure out what the focus of our newsletter is. For example, if you are giving away coupons, you could use more graphics and buttons than usual. If it’s text-heavy, you’ll want it to be as readable and scannable as possible.
Let’s examine two newsletters with different goals. The first is from Barnes and Noble, offering promotions for its stores. The second is from Sitepoint, which gives its newsletter a magazine-style layout and structure.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Barnes and Noble newsletter is that it is designed like a website. It’s literally an extension of the main website, complete with top-level navigation.
You’ll also see that it’s timely; right next to the logo it says “This week,” reminding you that the offers are for a limited time only and that you should make your purchase quickly.
Notice how easy it is to scan the page. All of the paragraphs are short, and the images and content hierarchy make the design feel comfortable even in your email browser!
Finally, the designers have put a clever call to action at the bottom of the page. The numbers in big red type attract your attention, sitting beside buttons with verb labels, pushing you to take advantage of the promotion.


Sitepoint goes for a completely different layout because it has a different goal. Its goal is to build a following for its content, to be able to extend its advertising space.
It adopts a magazine style, starting each issue with a letter from the editor, followed by a table of contents (in-page links) that guides you to the concise articles in the email.
One important design decision made by Sitepoint was to include a photograph of the editor at the top of every email. This approach makes the email feel more personal, like it’s coming from a human who took the time to organize the content.

HTML or Plain Text?

Now that we’ve discussed your business goals for the email newsletter and how to support it with the design, let’s briefly consider the construction.
Back in the old days (i.e. three years ago), composing email newsletters in plain text was safer and more common. You would also see full-length articles incorporated in the email (as long as today’s blog posts).
Since then, people have discovered that they don’t really like reading long emails, and that scannable content that functions as a gateway to the main website makes more sense.
With this in mind, the most logical design would be a hybrid of images and HTML text. Jakob Nielsen has this to say about how much time users spend reading a newsletter:

Users spend 51 seconds reading the average newsletter. The layout and writing both need superb usability to survive in the high-pressure environment of a crowded inbox.

Once you’ve got a good hybrid design, you will have to dive in and code the newsletter (unless you have a great coder sitting next to you). A great resource for best practices and insight on the state of HTML emails is Campaign Monitor’s tips area:

Not only can you get started with one of the templates, but you can also consult a comprehensive checklist of supported CSS and HTML features in all modern email clients.

Email Newsletter Software

Now that we’ve got a solid grasp of what’s involved in creating an email newsletter that serves our business goals, we will choose the right software for our design.
You could, of course, manually write the scripts to create the newsletter, subscribe users and send out the email. But you likely have a business to run, and using tools that were created for these tasks would save you a lot of time.
Here are the three most popular email newsletter services today. They are all low-priced and feature-rich:

Campaign Monitor, which we mentioned earlier, not only has great resources for designers but also great prices: a flat delivery fee of only $5, plus $0.01 for each subscriber.


Mail Chimp is another popular email campaign service. It has a great analytics feature for your email newsletter campaigns and a free plan!


Emma offers email marketing with style. It even five trees for each customer who joins. If your business is growing, Emma allows you to easily adjust your pricing plan.

Inspiration

By now, you should have a good understanding of what’s involved in creating an email newsletter campaign for you or your client.
Now for some more fun. Let’s look at some email newsletters for reference and inspiration…

Apple looks good, as always. Its email newsletter is fresh, scannable and beautifully balanced. Notice the attention to detail, specifically how the buttons are color-coordinated with the images.


Zappos’ approach is similar to that of Barnes and Noble: its navigation at the top is an extension of the website, and it highlights its popular free 365-day shipping service.


Target also focuses on scannablilty and clickablity. Notice the email discount, rewarding you for following the newsletter.


Personal success guru Brian Tracy offers a clean, easy-to-read email newsletter. His approach is simple yet focused on his brand and main goal: helping you to achieve success.


Master chef Jamie Oliver has a more artistic email newsletter, keeping the visual language consistent with his upbeat and personal approach to cooking. The buttons match the background nicely and create a fun feel.


Think has followed sensible art direction for its newsletter. The design is consistent with that of its blog.


Clarus Wines beautifully illustrates its newsletter, giving it a human touch. The soft gray offers respite from your cluttered inbox.


A great example of borrowing real-world analogies (in this case, an event poster) and translating it to the web, Blick Shared Studios offers an attractively designed email newsletter.
If your interested in seeing more great examples, check out Campaign Monitor’s Inspiration Gallery.

When Should I Send?

We’re almost wrapped up, feeling inspired and ready to extend our communication with clients through an email newsletter! Just one more topic to cover, and that is what day to send it. 37 Signals has a humorous take on the question:
Want something to blow up? Tell the world about it on a Tuesday morning. Avoids the Monday avalanche people face and gives you the rest of the week to get play.
Want something to fade away? Tell the world about it on a Friday afternoon. It’ll fade into the weekend.

Do you have tips to share with us from your email newsletter experiences? Please post them in the comments below…

Too Many Blogs?

A few years ago, blogging was the be-all and end-all of online content creation.
Individuals and companies alike all wanted to get in on blogging, and they saw it as the best way to reach people.
Blogs about blogging sprouted up everywhere, telling people how to create better blogs, how to make money from their blogs, and how to get more traffic.
But has the blogosphere grown so large that there are, simply put, too many blogs out there?
Is blogging going to fall by the wayside in favor of other forms of user-generated content and social media? Where do blogs fit in the age of Twitter and Facebook?

How Big Is the Blogosphere, Anyway?

Getting a clear picture of the size of the blogosphere is difficult. WordPress has statistics for both WordPress.com (15.1 million blogs and counting) and self-hosted WordPress installations (17.4 million active installations), which gives part of the picture.
There are more than 10 million tumblogs on Tumblr. Blogger doesn’t offer any public statistics on how many blogs they host. Technorati is currently tracking more than 1.2 million blogs. And there are likely millions of other blogs out there hosted on other services like Movable Type, TypePad, Expression Engine, and other CMSs.
Conservatively, it would probably be safe to assume that there are over a hundred million active blogs out there. And more blogs are being created every day. A lot of people have multiple blogs, and plan to create more. And there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of blogs out there that have been abandoned by their creators due to a lack of interest (or a lack of traffic).

Who’s Blogging?

There are three basic types of blogs out there, though there is often some overlap between the types on a lot of blogs.
The first type is the personal blog. These are blogs run by on person, and usually reflect their own views, activities, and unique outlook on life. In most cases, personal blogs aren’t written with the idea of making money directly, and most of these blogs fall into the category of only having a few hundred or maybe a thousand visitors each month. And usually, their authors aren’t too worried about their readership, as it’s more of a hobby than any kind of business activity (they blog because they want to).
Next are topic blogs. Virtually all of the most popular blogs online are topic blogs. These blogs are often run by more than one person, and focus on a particular subject or niche. A topic blog with good, unique content and active marketing can usually easily surpass the thousand-visitor-a-month benchmark, though many topic bloggers don’t bother putting the time and effort into their blogs that they need to get beyond that point.
Corporate blogs are the third type of blog. These blogs are run by a company as a secondary activity to their primary business. Some of these blogs are excellent, and come across more like topic or personal blogs than corporate ones. Others are nothing more than corporate spam, akin to a series of press releases that only talk about the company’s new offerings.
Hybrid blogs combine two or more of the other types of blogs. For example, if the CEO of a company has an official blog, that’s a hybrid of the corporate and personal blog models. A corporate blog that focuses on providing content on a specific topic is a hybrid of those two models. And a personal blog that focuses on a specific niche is a hybrid of the personal and topic blog models.

Content Overload

The problem with so many blogs is that readers are suffering from content overload. We only have so much time in a day to read blogs, and even if we limit our reading to a particular niche or topic, there are still way more blogs out there than we could ever hope to read.
This is one reason so many blogs are abandoned after a little while. It’s probably safe to say that most blogs never surpass roughly a thousand unique visitors each month, and many don’t even reach that level. It can be very discouraging to a blogger to plateau at a few hundred visitors each month. But each of these blogs is contributing to the feeling many users have of there simply being too many blogs out there.
Think about it: how many blogs do you currently subscribe to or read on a regular basis? Even avid blog readers out there probably don’t read more than a couple hundred blogs on a regular basis. And most of you likely don’t read more than a couple dozen with any kind of consistency. So why do you care if more blogs are created?

The Blogosphere as an Echo Chamber

Another common criticism of the blogosphere is that it’s little more than an echo chamber. And it’s an honest assessment when applied to the majority of blogs out there. A lot of blogs out there keep rehashing the same topics and the same arguments. A lot of them don’t create original content. Instead, they simply reblog what others have said, sometimes adding a line or two of commentary (and other times not even bothering to do that).
That portion of the blogosphere that is little more than an echo chamber provides little value to blog readers. And those are the blogs that rarely climb the ranks to become popular.
Not every blog is like that, though. It’s quite the contrary when you look at the most popular blogs out there in any given niche. Most of these blogs are providing useful commentary, new insight, and even breaking news ahead of mainstream media. The idea that the entire blogosphere is nothing but an echo chamber is not only false, but it’s the kind of argument old-media adherents cling to to try to discredit blogs and their authors.

Is There Room for New Blogs?

With a hundred million or more blogs out there already publishing regular updates, what more is there to be said? If the blogosphere is really this overcrowded, one can’t help wondering if there’s any room for new blogs?
The good news is that there’s always going to be plenty of room out there for new high-quality blogs. The bad news is that there are a lot more challenges facing bloggers now than there were a few years ago.

• It takes a huge investment in terms of both time and energy to create useful, original content, and then to get out there and promote that content to prospective readers. Because there are so many more things competing for reader attention than ever before, you really have to stand out to get noticed.
• Building a loyal readership and engaged fanbase is a slow process. When you’re starting out, you may have days when only a handful of people visit your blog, if anyone at all. Can you handle these kinds of ups and downs?
• Unless you become a very, very popular blog, and one with a tight focus and engaged readership, there’s very little money to be made blogging.
• Competition fierce, and with more blogs now resembling major media corporations, there isn’t as much of a “buddy-buddy” feeling in the blogosphere as there once was. Don’t expect a helping hand (though that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reach out to others in your niche anyway, as some bloggers out there are still happy to help out noobs).

Should You Start a New Blog?

With all that said, just because you want a blog doesn’t mean you should have one. There are plenty of other avenues for building an online following that don’t include traditional blogging.
For example, if your primary reason for starting a blog is to share cool information you find online related to a topic, you might be better off just setting up a Twitter account or a tumblog to share links. Blogs are better suited to original, long-form content.
Likewise, if you want to build a community, then why not just start with a community? Set up a social networking site or a group on an existing site. There are plenty of open-source, free, and low-cost tools out there to help you do those things.
If you’re still sure you want a blog, then make sure you have clear goals in mind when you get started. Know whether you’re blogging just as a hobby or for some other purpose. Produce high-quality content and then network like crazy to get that content in front of people.

What are your thoughts on the state of the blogosphere? Is there still room for more blogs, or is it better to invest in other means of reaching people and sharing content? Share your thoughts in the comments!