Great advice from Smashing Magazine about how to design and build your email newsletters:
- Respect your reader. Don’t waste their time or attention.
- Ask nicely first.
- Focus on relevance.
- Design with a goal in mind, so that you’ll know if it worked.
- Make unsubscribing easy.
- Code like it’s 1999 (literally) and use inline CSS.
- Always include a plain text version.
- Don’t assume that images will be viewed.
- Follow the law.
- Test everything before sending, because you can’t take it back.
Read the entire article: Design and Build Email Newsletters Without Losing Your Mind (and Soul)