Read through our journey towards an improved newsletter. Then take the six steps outlined at the end to implement with your business.
Your business’s email newsletter design can either help or hinder the delivery of important company information, despite your best efforts. Some customers may actually be waiting on features announced in your newsletter. Announcements can be missed due to poor formatting, readability issues, or bad taglines that make the email look like spam.
How many email newsletters are you subscribed to? Is your inbox filled with 20+ emails you instantly delete? What makes you stop and open an email that isn’t work related or from a personal contact?
Update Your Email Newsletter Design
What made us decide to modernize our newsletter, and how did we go about the process?
First, we’d just finished a big update to our product interface and our brand. Our developers worked hard to create a new modern web interface with a sleek design and intuitive, easy to locate features for file sharing. With a new look and feel for our product, it only seemed right that we would carry that over and similarly update the newsletter.
Second, we looked at our data. Our goals were higher than what our stats showed. The numbers were telling us that improvements could increase open rates, clicks, and newsletter engagement.
Newsletters and SaaS
A newsletter is an integral piece of the puzzle when updating your SaaS product because it is one of the ways you present new features to your clients.
As a SaaS company, our product is continually evolving. Our newsletter is a communication tool, updating clients on improvements to our service. Kind of a sneak-peek at what’s new within the service that someone might not yet know exists.
Presenting a newsletter with a modern, appealing design helps promote sharing of your brand and product. When you provide quality information along with company and product updates, current customers who get your newsletter may share and talk about your company with others. Writing great articles for your blog or posting new videos on YouTube provide additional content that can be leveraged in a newsletter. Especially if it is helpful and informative content.
Good Decisions Require Research
Step 1: Competitor Research.
Finding quality newsletters is more than a simple Google search away. We began finding companies that had appealing designs on their website and blog. We decided to focus on competitor blogs and newsletters as well as other SaaS companies outside our niche.
We initially liked newsletters from:
Asana — Their newsletter has a bold block style. It has simple styling and art with lots of colors. Asana also produces additional content to link to so they can provide a small snippet in the newsletter and rely on that to make you click the CTA in each block to read more.
BambooHR — Our CEO loved the Thirty/Thirty concept (what we did in the last 30 days and what is coming in the next 30.) If you get their newsletter, you’ll usually see a big, bold image at the top. Something eye-catching right off the bat can drive engagement.
CloudAPP — This one was another that featured a basic layout with separated blocks. Each block includes an image, headline, text snippet, and call to action button. All of these were elements were put on our wishlist for an updated email newsletter format.
Looking at Existing Design Elements
Initially, I reviewed our current process and tools for creating the newsletter. I wanted to be familiar with the tone, style, and content used in previous newsletters. This included reviewing the following:
- Our newsletter template in MailChimp.
- Previous newsletters sent in Mailchimp.
- Our blog, where we post newsletters after being emailed.
- Internal documentation on content guidelines.
- Our website for overall style.
The first thing I noticed was that our previous newsletters were heavy on written content. Text-heavy content was probably the norm many years ago when companies first started sending content emails. Newsletter emails used to be the most common way to share product information and news with clients. There weren’t as many ways to add graphics, and not everyone had a blog with new content to link to each month.
Next, there were a few styling things that stood out. Links back to our site were posted directly in the body of the newsletter, not linked using anchor text or with a CTA. And NO linkable images. The colors were also limited. Not in itself detrimental to a company’s image, but the colors were black on white with the company bright blue sprinkled in for headings. This type of palette with nothing to break up the text can be jarring on the eyes.
Finally, we considered the overall layout. We had basic paragraph formatting with full-width images. Compare that to the modern block styling of the three newsletters we talked about earlier.
Step 2: Make Decisions.
We decided it was time to update our newsletter format.
BUT…
Would the things we liked in other newsletters work for us?
We had to think about our content — what we want to share in a newsletter. As well as what would be feasible from a design standpoint.
In this phase of the project, we began to formulate an idea of what we wanted. The buts came next.
The Thirty Thirty is a great idea. But, what if we can’t always commit to having multiple things updated each month. Often our projects are more significant and take longer to fully design and implement. So, it could be two months before we are ready to share a new feature with the world.
Bold colors are great and grab attention. But, do we want to add a bunch of random colors to our company color palette? Do we spend the time to A/B test colors? Should we just pick one or two colors we like? Do we try to find a creative way to work with our existing set of colors?
We love the idea of more images! But, creating image assets can eat a lot of time. Plus what type of images come to mind when you think SFTP and business file transfer?
Email Newsletter Content Ideas
Creating more content online — blog posts, feature blogs (like this one), tutorials and how-to videos — could allow you to break out a newsletter into various sections.
Sections that work for the information you have to share such as:
- Most significant update or thing we want to tell people about
- Something else cool or new
- Feature a related blog or video
- Call out a customer, coworker, industry or review
- Social sharing
Now to think about the visual part.
First, we did more research into newsletter best practices and top newsletters in the past year.
Then, we reviewed a lot of newsletter design layouts and compiled a few in a virtual whiteboard to use as inspiration.
Step 3: Creating Mock Ups.
We created a board in Miro for mock ups of what the marketing team was envisioning for our email newsletter.
Previous research led us to decide on mocking up and creating a template that had modular pieces. We wanted a template that allowed for separate block styling, similar to that of many other company newsletters we looked at.
Basic block types:
- Header with logo and date
- Text boxes
- Images (full span, side by side, with accompanying text)
- Additional callouts for social, referrals, blog posts, videos, and quotes
- Plus a CTA button
Next, the mockups were shared with our design expert, Karl.
We discussed the overall concept and idea — and left it in his capable hands for a bit (4 full workdays.)
Email Clients
Step 4: Evaluating Email Clients.
Another thing Karl did after going through our design concepts was to determine if the different elements were possible with our current email client, MailChimp. We wanted to have control of the HTML which could present challenges in turning the designs from our Miro concept board into a usable email newsletter template.
With MailChimp, you can make blocks on the template level. This was definitely a workable option. On the template, you can even create editable blocks and give them custom CSS for styling elements.
You can also have the content creator go into the HTML for the email and add custom HTML for each of the different section types. You can also see the CSS changes in the preview, so the person creating the email newsletter can tell if things are broken.
If the functionality you are looking for to achieve your design goals are not available with your current email client, there are a host of other options you can check out. In addition to Mailchimp, you may want to evaluate the following:
- Sendgrid — they offer the ability to create modules both in template and campaigns, and have fluid replacement text options.
- Campaign Monitor — great if you are looking to use a prebuilt email template and mainly want to customize colors and fonts.
- Hubspot — mainly a CRM, they do offer a selection of free email templates available with their service. Their goal is to help you optimize your emails at a level of skill that does not require designers or IT.
Time to try it out for real.
Step 5: Formatting a Newsletter Draft in MailChimp.
First, add a new block. Then change the block style. We decided to start with several basic block types. More block types can be created and added to the list in the future if we find we are missing something that would be useful to the content we share via email. There can be multiples of any block type, and you can arrange them in any order under the header block.
The CTA is under styles in the editor, not a block style choice. You can’t add a call to action until you are in the editable region for the block — even though Karl showed us this, it was not the most intuitive until I actually created a few CTAs.
With MailChimp, you can have different styles of content blocks. This allows for different styled sections in our email newsletters without requiring technical intervention.
Everything else was the standard MailChimp formatting stuff we were used to. Standard editor, adding images, inserting links, headers, font, etc.
Email Newsletter Content
Step 6: Creating & Sending an Email Newsletter.
BambooHR was the prime example we wanted to be more in line with. We loved the 30/30 concept, but how do we get the content put together each month?
We accomplish this through communication between departments and having all team members use the product. If we know our engineering team is working on creating a new feature that allows you to customize the forms you use to receive files into your account, the marketing team can ask questions and gather information to help write a blog about our form builder. Others can work on video content to show how the new feature works in the application. All this leads to multiple pieces of related content — creating a newsletter with a cohesive message.
Then, add in the different styling elements. We can have two elements separated by a distinct line, or horizontal rule. One section can have a different colored background. Placing two sections side by side is another option. We can even create a clickable image taking you to a new video.
And we’re off…
Finally, after months of work, our first newsletter with modern elements was sent. It was not only newsworthy, announcing a new product feature that many clients have been asking for, but offered more than boring text.
Modernize Your Newsletter
Redesigning our newsletter was a successful project — after we got over the technical humps. The modern template design lets us share information with clients in a reader friendly format.
If you’re ready to tackle updating your company’s email newsletter template, here are the six steps we used:
- Do competitor research and look for what inspires you.
- Ask questions and make decisions. What do you want your newsletter to look like?
- Create mock ups to help visualize your ideas and decisions.
- Evaluate software options to make sure you can accomplish what you envision.
- Stage your newsletter with your new email template and test all the formatting elements.
- Create and send your first modernized email newsletter — put your template design to work!
This article was first published on the ExaVault blog: 6 Steps to a Modern Email Newsletter.
