Here is a template for a basic email newsletter:
http://www.jamesbachini.com/misc/emailnewsletter.zip
http://www.jamesbachini.com/misc/emailnewsletter.html
Some important things to note when creating email newsletters:
- Inline CSS Only, no style sheets or <style> tags as they will be stripped by most clients.
- Make it responsive, a lot of email is read on mobile, it should collapse and expand beautifully.
- Add utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email newsletter to links to track it in Google Analytics
- External JS/CSS/Fonts/API’s are all a no no.
- Images have to be hard linked i.e. put the domain in there.
- So do links for that matter i.e. don’t link to index.php you have to include http://example.com/index.php
- Test before you send it out.
- Always be A/B or multivariate testing, whether that be headlines, layout, or content
- Don’t forget to add a text version too as not all email clients read HTML, yes it is 2015!
There are some more complicated and probably better looking email templates out there but this was designed as a generic base to build on. I hope it’s of use.
