Create Great Email Newsletters with these Free Templates
Have you ever been caught in a pinch where you needed to update a customer's HTML email template and just can't get the right look and feel? As a veteran of the email marketing wars I have spent more hours than I would care to mention tinkering with and cobbling together templates to create email newsletters that 1) Function well in the majority of email clients, and 2) Offer layouts conducive to getting users to click through. As savvy email marketers, we know we have to create compelling offers and persuasive calls to action. All that hard work is for nought, however, if the newsletter layout is not user friendly. Then there's the ultimate challenge...What happens if your template won't work in a recipient's email client? If that happens they'll never even see your marketing message.
Thankfully there are a few good resources available such as Campaign Monitor's 30 Free Email Templates. This template collection not only includes a variety of content layouts but the templates have been tested in all major email clients. These templates even work in Outlook 2007, which can cause some rendering problems through its use of Microsoft Word's HTML rendering engine. A little tinkering and you can add customer brand-specific colors and other tweaks to customize these sample templates.
If you're going to be doing some heavy newsletter template tweaking, you may find yourself in the market for a good text editor. I've found over the years that people get pretty attached to their text editors. I remember one company I worked for practically insisted that employees use one particular editor. Over the years I've tried so many editors but keep coming back to Arachnophilia 4.0 (scroll down the page for download links). The newer versions of Arachnophilia are built to be platform agnostic, so if you're not running a Windows machine, you might want to use a newer build. The Build 5310 version I use is quite old - from 2001! I heartily recommend it to Windows users for its nice array of command and macro functions without a lot of fluff to slow you down.