One of the most valuable assets you will obtain during your music career is a healthy list of fan e-mail addresses. Unlike posting status updates on social networks, which tend to get lost in the mess of everyone’s news feeds, sending an e-mail to a fan is a direct channel of communication. A fan that opts into receiving your e-mail newsletter usually means that he or she wants to hear from you, and is interested in you and your music.
Since you are communicating directly to your fans, it is important that you get it right from the beginning. One big element of developing a newsletter strategy is the overall look, feel, and presentation of your newsletter. Is your newsletter just simple, plain text at the moment? If it is, consider livening up your newsletter a bit with this free HTML template download.
Design your own HTML E-mail Newsletter
If you have very basic HTML & CSS knowledge, this should be a breeze for you. There are several mailing list services (ReverbNation, FanBridge, AWeber, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc) that provide you with customized templates, but I always found that they rarely seemed to work nicely with the look and feel of the artist. So why not create your own?
Here is a free e-mail newsletter template that you can snag for free, if you wish… 
I know it looks pretty generic, but that’s the point — spice it up with images and colors that reflect your overall online presence to make it your own! Get creative, just like if you were sitting down to write a song. Open the “newsletter-template.html” file in any text/code editing program (Notepad, TextEdit, TextMate, Dreamweaver, etc) and change fonts, background colors, images, borders, and more.
Also, I’d like to point out that simplicity with e-mail newsletters is becoming more important, since more and more people are reading e-mails from their mobile devices. If you have an elaborate newsletter design, it is very possible that your e-mails will not look right on cell phones and other handheld devices.
This template uses inline CSS, which means that it is embedded within the HTML that creates the template’s structure. Many mailing list services don’t allow you to attach separate stylesheets, or even include them in the “” section of the same document, so you have to write the CSS “in line” with the HTML.
Here are two examples of newsletters that I have created in a matter of minutes from this template:
Chris Bracco is currently the digital marketing coordinator at Intrigue Music, LLC, a boutique music management company in NYC. This post was originally published on Chris Bracco’s blog, Tight Mix.