There are many ways you can make your newsletter user friendly and attractive. The last thing you want is a boring document as this is going to be one of your primary list-building strategies, and you want people to read it and respond. Establish a well-designed template and be consistent so that subscribers will recognize it. Customize the template to reflect your business branding elements, colors and fonts. This will help to maintain your image and strengthen your brand recognition, making your next sale more likely.
What you need is a page for preview with offer, exciting headlines and have working links in the right places. Your newsletter will probably contain several different items and messages, so keep them all short and easy to read so that the reader can skim them quickly and get to the point without losing interest. Research has shown that people respond better to links which are bold, blue and underlined rather than banners or buttons, so avoid the gimmicks and go for whatever will bring more click-throughs for you.
Provide press releases and relevant newsworthy content as a service to your subscribers, adding credibility to your professional knowledge in the field. Don't overdo the use of news feeds as they are not welcomed as a substitute for editorial news. Make your newsletter relevant to public holidays and seasons, so that recipients are aware of the personalized nature of your output.
Send out your newsletter on the same day at the same time, preferably on a Wednesday around 3pm. That way your subscriber will come to expect your newsletter and hopefully to look forward to reading it and will generally be more likely to follow up on special offers or promotions.
Prefill forms on the landing page so that you make purchasing easier and have sign up boxes on every page to make it simple for visitors to sign up when and where they want. Your opt-in form needs a box for their name as well as their email-address - so you can address them by name next time. And make it easy for subscribers to change their email addresses as you want to keep every subscriber possible.
If you don't reply to requests within 24 hours you risk losing your customer. You should also display your own contact information - Phone/Fax/Address as this inspires confidence and enables people to contact you if need be. It is also required by spam laws in the USA.
Make sure your feedback form contains a double opt-in, so that when a reader subscribes to your mailing list, they will be sent an email with a link for them to click on to confirm their subscription. This is important because people may enter a wrong email address or worse, someone else's address. If that person gets your newsletter without having requested it they may report it as spam.
Watch out for the open rate of newsletters - it is a controversial indicator and may or may not be helpful to you as you design your newsletters in your marketing campaign.
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