Create eye catching newsletters for email and Slack with these resources

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In 2017 Morning Brew’s newsletter had 100,000 subscribers, within 18 months they grew to 1.5 million subscribers. Morning Brew delivers a newsletter that provides professionals engaging, entertaining business news. Growth.Design shares an amazing case study on what makes Morning Brew a winner; including their tone of voice, catchy titles, and easy reading format. I was really intrigued with how a newsletter could generate so many subscribers. It even had me analyzing newsletters that I subscribed to.

In 2019, I noticed an issue with a newsletter not meeting accessibility standards. That experience led me down the proverbial rabbit hole, where I came across an entire community dedicated to email marketers, designers, and developers. I originally just meant to find courses on creating accessible newsletters but I stumbled upon a plethora of helpful resources. 

My experience got me thinking more. What about creating stellar learning related newsletters for learning content? It’s definitely not an innovative idea. However, there has to be an opportunity to raise the bar in the space of newsletters for learning. A newsletter for learning will deliver personalized resources, events, short tips, tutorials, and more. I didn’t want to limit myself to email, so I began exploring alternative options to newsletter delivery through Slack.

Here are some resources for both email and Slack that I found on my journey. Let’s take a look at email first.

Email

Be Inspired

I’ve come across two fantastic sites that curate top notch email examples. Think Dribbble or Behance but strictly for email.

The first is Email Love. Email love touts inspiration, templates and resources all related to email. On Email Love you will search email inspiration related to categories like events, announcements, newsletters, and more.

Next up is Really Good Emails. This was the first email inspiration resource that I came across. Really Good Emails describes themselves as, “The web’s best, and most attractive 😉, curated collection of over 7,198 emails, showing off both design and code.” Like Email Love, Really Good Emails allows you to search by category.

Learn

In my search to create accessible emails, I came across a course called HTML Email Development by Jason Rodriguez of Litmus, a leader in email marketing.

“Jason is designer and writer advocating for email, the open web, accessibility, and inclusion. As the sole evangelist at Litmus, Jason teaches others how to create better email marketing campaigns through strategy, copywriting, design, and development. Jason is the author of multiple books on email, speaks at industry events on a variety of topics, and writes for publications like the Litmus blog, A List Apart, and CSS-Tricks.” The course from 2019, covers everything from A to Z in getting started with building your own newsletters from scratch. 

Of course, a good newsletter doesn’t only come from good design and development. By conducting a Google search on best practices for newsletters there are thousands of results. Check out these articles from HubSpot for some inspiration How to Create an Email Newsletter People Actually Read and 18 Email Newsletter Examples We Love Getting in Our Inboxes.

Create

What if you don’t have the time to build skills and own creating a newsletter from scratch? No worries, there are tons of tools out there to help you build your own. 

The tool that I have been seeing around the most lately is Postcards by Design Modo. They have a simple modern and intuitive UI, the tool is all drag and drop, and you can use it with many of the main Email Service Providers (ESP), as well as download the HTML. I really love the option to download the HTML, as I use a free email application called Thunderbird which allows you to easily paste in the HTML to send out.

Maybe you still want to get your hands on code a bit. There are some email frameworks out there that provide you with the bare bones and allow you to customize the styling. Check out Cerberus for an awesome option for responsive templates to get your started.

Looking for additional tools? Check out Chamaileon.io, Topol.io, and HTMLEmail.io.

Slack

Build

Why limit newsletters to email? One of the most interesting things I found when I started using Slack was the power of Block Kits. Block Kits allow for your content to pop in a sea of messages. With Block Kits you can build all sorts of interesting layouts using Slack’s built in UI and markdown. And if you don’t want to build from scratch you can start with a template. They already have a newsletter template that’s ready to use! Once you're ready with your Block Kit you select the Send to Slack button and share the newsletter to channels.

Curate

Slack even has some fantastic Slack tips on how to curate content from Slack for a newsletter. Did you know you can create a Workflow to send content to a specific curation channel based on emoji reactions? Then you can check out that content to add to your newsletter. SO COOL. Check out How to crowdsource and curate a team newsletter in Slack for even more examples.

Looking for more ways to curate content on Slack? Check out apps like Curated.

-Mel

Have any newsletter tips, tricks, or resources? Share them in the comments!