If you’re currently sending email newsletters to a list of subscribers, or considering doing so, there are plenty of resources out there offering great tips on how to do it well, such as this excellent guide.
Here’s a real basic tip … don’t make it look like this:
I’m in the software business, and a lot of our focus is educational technology (not incidentally, that’s where my masters is, too). Since I need to keep up on edtech news, as well as general education news, I subscribe to a number of email newsletters, including this one from EducationNews.org.
But few are as badly designed as this one.
The colors are uninspiring, even muddy. The titles (which also serve as links) are anything but highlighted – they’re lowlighted. And the blurbs about each article are obviously automated – often serving as very unreliable clues as to the actual content and worth of the article.
The result is no shock: I click on links from this newsletter least of any that I get … and I probably won’t be subscribed to this one much longer.