Newsletter Format

One of the best forms of marketing your company, club, school or products is through a regular newsletter. It is a platform to share and impart information, and inform the readers about activities and upcoming events, such as a promotional campaign, product launching or a graduation event.

Newsletters can come in different formats; it is important to choose a newsletter format that best suits your needs. The four most common formats are plain text, HTML, PDF and print. Online newsletter formats are becoming more popular, as they are more economical to produce, and can be delivered to readers or customers at any time, in any place.

Newsletter formats in plain text are easy and fast to create. Newsletters in plain text email format have a further advantage in being accepted by the recipient's mail or server system. However they can be seen as unattractive and boring, especially if they contain a lot of text. Plain text formats do not allow graphic or any visual images to be incorporated.

HTML and PDF newsletter formats present a more professional appearance. Newsletter formats in HTML web page and HTML-based emails allow colors, font styles, graphics and sound effects to be incorporated, rendering them more dynamic and appealing. However, newsletters in HTML emails are sometimes blocked by anti-spam filters by the recipient servers. Moreover they are not always readable and images cannot be viewed by certain email client softwares.

A newsletter format in HTML can also provide for measuring of marketing effectiveness of the newsletter, using counters which keep track on the number of readers through a clickable hyperlink. Newsletters in PDF formats allow high quality graphics to be included, greatly enhancing the appearance of the newsletter. However they take longer to download and require Adobe Reader software in order to read the newsletter.

School and teacher newsletters are one of the best ways of maintaining communication with parents and students. Sample newsletter formats are widely available for both corporate and academic purposes. Corporate newsletters must project professionalism, while academic newsletters can adopt a plain format for easy reading.