The Perfect Newsletter

How many times have you found yourself subscribing to a new site’s mailing list, and then never getting a single email? Or joining a weekly newsletter that is completely disorganized and has more information than a month worth of site content? Just like websites, newsletters can be essential and extremely useful when used the right way, or damaging if their purpose goes to waste.

Anyone can have a newsletter, regardless of what type of site your running, or if you even run a site at all. Designers have newsletters to showcase new work to potential and previous clients. Companies use newsletters to showcase new and on sale products, and of course, new web startups use them to get the word out about launches, betas, and etc.

The question is not really do you need one, but will it benefit your visitors and if so, how? In the case of a designer, the more work potential clients see, the higher the chance they’ll hire you to do work for them. In the case of companies, its always good to advertise sales and fresh products, because it helps get the potential buyer interested, which can lead to valuable sales.

A recent article in Dev Lounge goes into deeper detail, including the various options of sending newsletters. If you’re thinking about it, you’re more than ready for the article.

• Getting a visitor to pay attention to a newsletter requires a bit of design and organizational skills next to the ability to include something worthy of reading. The days of plain text email are dying away, with most email providers allowing html based emails […].
• Don’t sit there saying “what makes a good newsletter design?”, because the question can be both answered and solved simply by looking around. Emails just appear in a persons inbox - they are no different than sites.
• A good place to start is by mimicking your own site design in a newsletter design. [P]ull the colors, logos, link styling, and fonts from your actual site layout to let the reader get a feeling like they’re at the site themselves without leaving their inbox.

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