- beehiiv Blog
- Posts
- Email Newsletter Design Ideas for Conversion: The Ultimate Guide
Email Newsletter Design Ideas for Conversion: The Ultimate Guide
Design the Perfect Newsletter Optimized for Conversion and Loyalty
Nicola Vaughan
August 30th, 2024
Table of Contents
Email newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with your customer base, but it’s not always obvious how to keep an audience engaged and loyal to your content.
Elevating your email newsletter design is a key way to boost conversion and customer loyalty. If subscribers are receiving regular content from you that is easy to digest and provides them with something that they need, they’ll be more likely to convert and keep coming back to your brand.
In this article, we’ll explore the best ways to improve your newsletter design to maximize conversion and customer retention.
We’ll show you the essential components for a newsletter design to improve Click Through Rates (CTR), some tips for creating a highly converting newsletter, mistakes to avoid, design ideas, and the best formatting practices to keep your newsletter looking super slick.
Essential Components for Email Design That Get the Clicks
There are five key components for email design that will ensure that your newsletter is well laid out and optimized to get the most clicks back to your website.
These five key components include the header, email heading, main content, call to action (CTA), and footer. Take a look at the sections below for more details on each of these components.
Header
The header of your email newsletter is the first part of the design that your subscribers will see, so getting this spot on is super important.
The header should include your company logo/name so that it’s obvious who the email is from. This also gives your newsletter great branding right from the start.
It’s also a good idea to include a small links menu within the header of your newsletter. This can provide subscribers with quick links to access content that they may wish to visit.
For example, a brand selling swimwear may want to include some of their key products such as swimsuits, bikinis, or swimming accessories in this top menu.
Heading
The heading of your newsletter should clearly explain what the content of the email is about.
The heading should be visible above the fold on a mobile device so that users know what they’re about to read, and it should be in a clear font, in a readable text/color.
Ensure that your heading is concise but alluring to the reader. It should encourage them to continue reading the great content that is to come!
Naturally, you’ll want to include text here, but make sure that it’s not too wordy or it will likely be off-putting to a reader.
Section off your content into smaller sections with clear headings. This will make your content easier to digest, and it will also appear better on smaller devices.
Make sure to weave engaging images/infographics throughout your content to break up any text. It will make your email look more visually appealing.
CTA
A clear CTA is vital in any successful email newsletter design. Your CTA should clearly indicate what you want your subscribers to do as a result of reading your email.
Examples of a CTA could be “Book an Appointment” or “Buy Now.” The CTA should be short and sweet and feature a clickable link that will direct your user where to go next.
Without a strong CTA, your newsletter won’t have a strong conversion rate, so including the right CTA is vital.
Often overlooked in an email newsletter design, the footer is equally as important as the rest of your newsletter.
A good footer will be clearly sectioned off from the rest of the template using a block color or separator. It should include quick links to other areas that you want your subscribers to go to, such as your social media pages or website.
You’ll also want to include any necessary legal elements such as your company’s address, unsubscribe options, and links to any relevant privacy policies.
7 Tips for Creating a High-Converting Email Newsletter
So how do you go about creating a high-converting email newsletter?
Here are our top 7 tips to get started.
Personalization
Personalizing your newsletter is a great way to increase your conversion rate.
Giving subscribers the impression that the email is tailored to them will make them feel more connected to your brand and, in turn, more likely to convert.
There are several ways you can personalize your newsletter. One way is to use a familiar “from” name when tailoring your email.
Using the founder’s name or another name connected to your brand will add a human touch to your email and show that your subscriber is important to you.
Another way is to personalize the “to” field is by including your subscriber’s first name when addressing the email. This makes your email much more personal, and a user will be more likely to open the email if they see that it’s addressed to them personally.
A customer of ours that does this really well is Decade Investor. Check out our case study here.
Building a Welcome Series
A friendly email series is a perfect way to introduce new subscribers to your brand and make them feel like a part of your community.
This series could consist of 2-3 emails where you welcome new subscribers to your mailing list. These could begin with a simple hello email, followed with a new subscriber offer or other incentive.
These emails should also indicate what new subscribers should expect to receive from your regular newsletter. Ensuring that they know what to expect will be vital in aiding conversion in the future.
A beehiiv customer that aced this strategy is Smart Nonsense, who went from zero to 10,000 subscribers in just one month. See how they did it here.
Calls to Action
Strong CTAs are key to any successful newsletter design. You’ll want to build your content around your CTAs to ensure that your email is built around increasing conversions.
From the title of your newsletter to your design, you can include appropriate CTAs to regularly allow subscribers to get in touch or meet whichever conversion goals you’re aiming for with your email.
Responsive Design
With 1.7 billion people accessing their emails on a mobile device (Tech Report), it’s more important than ever to ensure that your email newsletter has a responsive design.
This means that your newsletter should scale down appropriately to meet the sizes of multiple devices, including tablets and mobiles.
It’s important to test your email newsletter on a range of screen sizes to check that the design is fully responsive.
If any elements are cut out on mobile devices or don’t perform correctly, these should be adapted accordingly.
Closing off your email newsletter is just as important as opening it. This is the final place that your subscriber will be, so leave a lasting impression by utilizing the following elements:
Social media channels: Include links to all of your social profiles to ensure that your subscribers know where else they can find you.
Contact details: Your address and phone number should be included in the footer of your newsletter, so your followers can get in touch easily.
Privacy policies/unsubscribe options: The boring stuff can get overlooked, but don’t forget to include any legal information in your footer. You should also include links to unsubscribe options. While you don’t want your followers to leave your mailing list, you should make this easy for them to do, if that’s their intention.
A great example of an email newsletter footer that works well is from our customer Big Desk Energy. Check out an example via the beehiiv blog.
Line Breaks
If you’re including a fair bit of text in your emails, line breaks are a great way to break up your content.
Line breaks make your content more readable, integrating space between your content. This will make it easier for your audience to digest and will prevent your newsletter from being too text-heavy.
It can be off-putting to be met with huge chunks of text in a newsletter, particularly if viewing the email on a mobile device.
Subscription Page Set-Up
Lastly, you’ll want to set up a page on your website where users can subscribe.
You may have different mailing lists for different purposes, so creating a page that you can link to regularly from your email newsletter can help you pick up extra conversions.
You can embed a subscription form on your website by following the instructions below:
Click on Settings within the beehiiv dashboard.
Click Publication from the Admin menu on the left-hand side.
Click Subscribe Forms.
Click Create New Form.
Complete the information that you’d like to include on the form.
Save and click View to share and embed your form.
Why Listen to Me? I have been working in the digital marketing space for nearly 10 years, predominantly helping brands with their email marketing and online presence. I now specialize in creating great content for beehiiv to help people nail their email strategies!
Mistakes To Avoid When Designing Your Newsletter
If done well, email newsletters can be a key channel for conversion. However, there are common mistakes that can negatively affect your conversion rate, so here are a few things you should avoid when creating your email newsletter:
Poor Mobile Design: If an email newsletter is badly designed for mobile/small devices, your conversion rates are likely to drop. This is because content may not appear correctly, or CTAs may be missed altogether. Make sure to test your email newsletter design on a range of devices to avoid making this mistake.
Badly Sectioned Content: Content that is too text-heavy can be off putting for readers, which may result in a lower conversion rate. Make use of line breaks and image content to break up your content and section it off appropriately.
Clunky Sign-Up Experience: When a subscriber chooses to sign up/convert, you want to make this process as easy as possible for them to improve their success rate. Test the user journey of your sign-up experience to ensure that this is slick, easy to use, and has no glitches.
The best newsletter layout designs are creative. They incorporate a range of varying content, including visual elements and interactive content within their newsletters to keep readers engaged and converting.
Check out the sections below to learn more about creative newsletter design ideas!
Incorporating Visual Elements
Incorporating visual elements into your newsletters can put your email into the next league design-wise. This helps to captivate your audience, ensuring that they continue to open your emails and will ultimately result in conversions.
Here are two ways to incorporate visual elements into your email newsletter designs:
Using Infographics: Infographics are a creative way to make text look more appealing. You could include statistics and charts as part of these infographics or use them to show the timeline of your brand, for example.
Building a Brand Theme: When creating an email newsletter design, it’s important to consider building your brand theme to ensure that your branding is consistent. This way your company will be instantly recognizable to your subscribers, giving strength to your brand.
To build a brand theme, consider your brand colors, fonts, and style and use this scheme meticulously throughout your email newsletters.
Interactive Content
Interactive content in email newsletters allows subscribers to interact with the email itself. This could include video content, polls, GIFs, or image carousels, amongst other interactive elements.
One brand that incorporates interactive content really well is our customer Big Desk Energy, who use engaging GIFs to showcase the items users could win in a referral program (see this demonstrated here.)
You can also use the buttons on the beehiiv editor to build interactive elements easily within your newsletter layout.
Polls, videos, hyperlinks, and other interactive content can be added to your newsletter at the click of a button, making your newsletter stand out from the competition without taking hours of coding time – a double win.
Layout and Formatting Best Practices
The layout and formatting of your email newsletter design is crucial in ensuring that your recipients can clearly read your email. This will result in better customer retention and ultimately more conversions.
The best practices of layout and formatting in email design are:
Readability: Ensure that your email is clear and easy to read by breaking up content effectively. This can be achieved by using bulleted lists, line spacing, and even just breaking up text.
Accessibility: Designing an email campaign that is accessible can make all the difference when it comes to conversion. Your font should be a readable one and at least size 11, and color should be considered, particularly when presenting text against another background color.
Leverage Advanced Design Tools for Newsletter Customization on beehiiv
You can leverage all of the design ideas that we’ve discussed in this help guide via the beehiiv system.
beehiiv has an intuitive Drag and Drop Editor that allows you to embed advanced designed tools without the need for coding knowledge.
beehiiv’s design tools include rich media integration such as video, polls, GIFS, or other interactive content -- elements that are designed to make your newsletter more engaging and ultimately more likely to convert.
You can also personalize your email newsletter designs with custom fields, including customer details such as their name, giving your newsletter a personal touch and keeping your subscribers loyal to your brand.
For a tutorial on how to embed custom fields into your newsletter, check out this video.
A/B testing is another feature included within the beehiiv system that can assist you in building customer loyalty and conversion.
A/B testing allows you to send an email with two different subject lines to different users and collect results based on which subject line provided better click-through rates.
To experiment with these advanced design tools, start a free, 30-day trial with beehiiv today!
There’s no commitment or payment details required, and you can upload up to 2,500 subscribers.
Get started today with your email designs to increase the loyalty and conversion rate of your audience.
Reply