Done correctly, an e-newsletter can be a great investment. Whether you’re using it to boost sales or to educate, you should definitely expect a payback that offsets the costs of publication. But sending one out that nobody will want to read because of bad design is a common mistake.

One newsletter I signed up to would come in week after week – and each time I took just one look at it and clicked delete without reading it. Comprising just plain text with no layout whatsoever, it looked so cluttered and it was difficult to see what it was hoping to tell me about – I didn’t even want to try to make sense of it.

Luckily the editor was aware of its shortcomings – but didn’t have the technical knowhow to fix it. After a short consultation about what they needed and the possible bulk email systems out there, we came up with a solution.

As they were editing the newsletter in their free time for the community there was no budget to spend on sending it out, but MailChimp came to the rescue: they offer a free plan for up to 1000 subscribers and a monthly email limit of 6000 – more than enough for this purpose.

We designed a simple, easy-to-understand and navigate template that the editor can change and update each week with very little training.