Best practices for newsletter designs

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Convertito on October 29, 2008 at 12:29pm

I recently suffered thru one of those best practices seminars, and the best bits I got out of it were:

- "raise the flag" concept: short, enticing words lead to the site (#1 goal is site visits, right?) text = death
- know images will be blocked by default, but still have a 50/50 split of sharp images and great copy above the first "fold"
- 600 pixels wide will view well in most any email program
- avoid the morning spam deluge: send it between 10-3, tues thru thurs...even better if you can develop a timeslot where it's expected ie: "where's my Tuesday Noon newsletter?"
- keep it simple stupid

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Permalink Reply by Chip Means on October 29, 2008 at 12:32pm

That's great, Kevin, thanks so much. I appreciate the mix of design and delivery tips here, and I'm sure my team will benefit from this.

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Permalink Reply by Rob Oberheide on October 29, 2008 at 3:44pm

With a new design, you have the luxury to redefine the user experience and create new internal standards for newsletter creation. This chance doesn't come along very often so take advantage of it.

Obviously you will have your branding rules and some past design expectations that will have to be taken into consideration but the # 1 question should be - What do your customers want?

--Daily, weekly or monthly transmissions?
--Breaking news, in-depth analysis of your topics or simple links to blog posts.
--Are images important or is it words that make them react?

Do a short survey to your e-mail list and ask your users what would make a newsletter valuable and worth a read. You will learn an immense amount of information about your readers and will have more insight into creating the best newsletter for your particular audience.

Also make sure your looking at any data you currently have.
--Open Rates
--Deliverability
--Clicks
--Conversions

Tweak and test. The beauty of e-mail is you can receive results in near real time and make adjustments easily for future sends.

Good luck.

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Permalink Reply by Chip Means on October 29, 2008 at 4:00pm

Thanks Rob!

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Permalink Reply by Keith Gregory on November 4, 2008 at 9:04am

Timely topic for me- and I was actually looking for similar info, specifically from an ad side.

We're in the process of redesigning our newsletters, and my main goal is to create a compelling ad platform.

Early on we ditched the notion of a 600 pixel limit. Our last design suffered from need to format the newsletter to be printer friendly!

Print thinking dies a hard death!

Curious about what others are using for ad size.

I have pushed for a combo of ad image and text.

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Permalink Reply by Rob Oberheide on November 7, 2008 at 4:46pm

We have come up with a standard ad format across all of our niche / hobby related newsletters.

(1) Top Sponsorship Banner 230X64
(2-4) Right Column ads 120X240
(2-3) Mixed text and Image Ads scattered through the main editorial section.

This gives us the opportunity to increase advertising sales by offering various options at different price points.
This flexibility has proven successful.

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Permalink Reply by Keith Gregory on November 12, 2008 at 2:05pm

such small ad units!

Agree about including text elements.

Are your text ads separate from or part of the banners?

And if part, are they close to the banner ads?

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Permalink Reply by Michael Zingalis on November 4, 2008 at 10:03am

I work for a cms company that works with many b2b magazines. I have to provide the disclaimer.

I think about re-design beyond the pictire, becuase if you think about the 're-design' in a wider scope you can add relevance / traffic / subscriptions to your site.

1. Deliver newsletters that have association to the taxonomy / sections on the site.
2. Set it up so that it is an automatic content pull so someone can't state their job is creating newsletters.
3. Define the point people that have to approve changes, and do not let others in to try to edit the newsletter record.
4. Archive them on the site. Get a double whammy on seo and searchability on top of the send. You could do it privately, and still ship the records to an xml sitemap, get people to see them, but then be required to register or sign in.
5. Get some type of lead generation on the site (IE: tracking actual users info per record viewed [name / email / company]), so if people come to the site to view the newsletter vs. getting it in the email you can still count them and have their full info vs. ip's.

Check out www.npnweb.com for a quick example of this. My comments are a little different here becuase re-design could mean just as much design as it does relation to functionality for the site. Considering the fact that we are talking about simplicity here, you could just make a rss feed that has a setup that includes a text advertiser or even an image using encoded content for the initial record (per feed), and have a unique query string variable so you could get traffic results from the feeds vs. even doing an email newsletter...or in conjunction. It's all about providing the most options with the least amount of manpower and server resources. Please note that this example site does not use this specific concept listed in this paragraph, but it is very much possible.

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Permalink Reply by Christian J. Morris on November 11, 2008 at 4:05am

Try taking advantage of the very recent changes in digital edition platforms; allowing creative teams to drop rich media by copying and pasting to designated position.
The more interactive your newsletter the more data capture/analytics you can achieve-the better understanding its impact.

This in-turn:
-Could find some editorial has a big following and some can be cut
-This info is not just for ad-based magazines/new-letters but also acts as a "true" constructive critic to inter-business info, intra-business info, and client relationship sales materials.
-Keying on what your end-user is enjoying, will lead to the impact you want from your end reader.

Hope this makes sense its late

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Permalink Reply by Chip Means on November 12, 2008 at 3:16pm

Thanks so much for the advice and input, everyone. I'll let you know how I make out with this project.

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