Newsletters 101: the basics
Email newsletters are a fantastic way to stay in touch with potential customers, provide them with useful information, and publicize your latest news and product offerings. But you already know this. Just as you know that when it comes to newsletters, the biggest challenge is handling the email overwhelm that many people experience. You spend time carefully crafting an email that your users won’t even open. Or, if they do, they might only scan it for a few seconds before hitting the “Delete” button.
Newsletter templates can go a long way towards grabbing people’s attention and holding onto it while you deliver your message.
Facts to consider: usage of email and reach
- Despite the rise of social media, email is still most people’s preferred method of communication.
- Email has a huge reach—did you know that around 4 billion people have an email account?
- Once you’ve built an email list, you can always use it—you’re not dependent on a particular platform whose rules might change.
- Sending email is cost-effective. It’s free, of course, to write an email, but even the email marketing services for sending bulk emails are quite cheap—as are the newsletter templates from our collection!
- With these services, you get to see how many people open your emails and which links they clicked, giving you a great insight into what your subscribers want.
Things to keep in mind: email client compatibility
A tricky thing about email newsletters is that people can read them on their phones, tablets or computers. Also, they
may be using a number of different browsers and programs, such as Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail and so on. If you’re
designing your own email newsletter from scratch, it can be hard to figure out how to come up with a design and
structure that will look good in all of these scenarios.
Newsletter templates help out a great deal here. They’ve
been thoroughly tested to make sure they display perfectly in all kinds of different software and across
different devices.
Decisions to make: newsletter software
If you’re sending emails to a large list of subscribers, you’ll definitely want to use a newsletter
software. A couple of popular options are MailChimp and Campaign Monitor—both offer free basic packages, and you
pay more as you have more subscribers. But which one should you pick? We recommend you check out this useful
comparison and description of how they work:
MailChimp vs. Campaign Monitor: Which is the Best Email Newsletter Software?
Plenty of the newsletter
templates in our collection are designed to work with one or more of these services—you can check the item
descriptions to see the exact compatibility, or search by tags. For example, here are some themes compatible with
MailChimp and
Campaign Monitor.