Best Practices for Internal Email Newsletter Design
No one likes to feel left out. Unfortunately, employees often indicate they didn’t know about something—even if they received an email broadcast about the topic, and you know the story is on your intranet.
If employees ignore your newsletters too often, it’s time to reconsider your design, content, and channel. Here are six best practices to ensure your newsletters grab employees’ attention and get read.
1. Start with the content.
Before focusing on the design of your email newsletter, consider the content. What topics do your employees care about most? What they care about often reflects their role in the organization, region, business unit, general industry trends, and emerging topics. Some companies let employees subscribe or unsubscribe from topical content areas or specific newsletters.
Research shows that employees want to understand company goals and objectives – and how they fit into the bigger picture. Do you have news and personnel stories that map to strategic objectives? Studies also show employee recognition for a job well done increases employees’ sense of achievement. Consider showcasing successful teams and projects in your newsletter.
You may also use regular feedback loops, like quick polls or surveys, to understand what your audience finds most interesting (or wants to hear more about).
2. Design for reading ease, not distraction.
With your content strategy in place, your newsletter design should highlight stories without introducing complexity or overshadowing important information.
- Keep the layout simple. A single-stacked column or two-column format keeps things clean and easy to follow on any device. A busy layout with too many sections and layout changes makes it challenging to focus, scroll through, and follow.
- Use 2-3 complementary colors. Using too many colors will detract from your message.
- Use 1-2 fonts and 2-3 font sizes. Headlines and subheads should be progressively larger than the body copy. Depending on your brand guidelines, you may use a different font or font treatment: bold, light, or color.
- Use consistent alignment and spacing. Stick to left alignment for text and ensure consistent spacing between elements and sections. This type of uniformity creates a professional look, and white space on the page makes it easier to skim and follow while scrolling.
3. Add an interactive element.
How can you spice up a text-centric email newsletter? Can you incorporate videos, photos, custom illustrations, infographics, or interactions? Here are a few ideas:
- Include a quick survey on an important topic to engage readers. You’ll create two-way communication and increase the likelihood that they’ll read future newsletters.
- Add a poll to turn passive reading into active participation.
- Try adding a like button on your key stories with counters.
- Include a “Did You Know?” section to educate employees in small, digestible bits.
Just make sure you don’t overdo the interactive elements. One or two can help, but overuse will likely distract or annoy your readers.
4. Eliminate the banner and use candid images.
Banners use valuable preview pane real estate, particularly when your ‘From address’ is the newsletter’s name. You gain more attention when you include your text headlines in the preview window. Ask your employees to submit their favorite work photos so you can incorporate real-world, employees-in-action images. This personalization can help employees connect with the message and put faces to names. To take this one step further, include an employee spotlight section in your newsletter where you introduce a person or team to the organization.
5. Be consistent with presentation and timing.
Consistency in content, design, and delivery builds trust and improves employee engagement.
- Include the same sections (in the location) in each issue to give employees something to look for. They may eagerly scroll to see their favorite content sections like the employee spotlight or last quarter’s sales wins.
- Consider using bookmark links for longer newsletters so readers can quickly navigate to the appropriate story. If using a summary+link format, include white space between each story and use consistent link placement. If using images, hyperlink the image to the long-form story.
- Whether you send out a monthly or weekly newsletter, following a regular schedule helps employees anticipate the information. Quarterly, “in-case-you-missed-it” newsletters can pull more people into old news stories that may still be relevant or interesting.
6. Change the channel or combine them.
The two most common problems we see are email newsletters that are too long and infrequent (old news) or intranet newsletters that don’t get much direct traffic. While email increases the likelihood of your audience seeing the newsletter, emails packed with long, complex news are hard to digest.
Yet, if companies skip email altogether and post news directly on their intranet, they may notice that their readership is dramatically lower. Most employees are less likely to seek out newsletters without prompting. An email summary that links to long-form content on the intranet is often the best multi-channel strategy for company news.
While good newsletter design is essential, content should always come first for news. Identify the most relevant topics for your people, then find ways to personalize the content and segment your audiences. Add an interactive element—while still optimizing for mobile—and don’t overcomplicate things. When the content resonates, employees pay attention.