Free Outlook Newsletter Template
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A Litmus Email Analytics survey of over 1.4 billion opens that was conducted in October 2021 reports that Outlook is the third most popular email provider of choice. That's a lot of emails being sent via Outlook! If your organization operates using Microsoft Outlook, then you’ll want to know how you can use an Outlook newsletter template to send internal emails with ease.
Lucky for you, you’re in the right place.
Publicate provides you with an easy-to-use web-based platform where you can pick from hundreds of free newsletter templates and even send them using Outlook.
Email newsletter templates exist so that your team can continue to focus on its main responsibilities rather than get bogged down in designing and structuring an email newsletter.
Companies can rely on internal communications templates or any email newsletter templates to get their messages in front of their employees who need to read them.
The benefits of sending email communications in a timely manner can help to:
Along with the variety of templates you can choose from, Publicate makes it easy to personalize your newsletter however you envision. Using our drag-and-drop editor, it’s simpler than ever to make any template branded and customized to your message.
You can also save your brand kit and styles so that templates will be branded as soon as you get started editing.
Publicate provides an array of choices when it comes to free email newsletter templates (that can be sent using whatever email provider you already use).
Let’s take a look at some of the best email newsletter templates to use.
In a world where content is everywhere, it can be hard to grab your employees’ attention. You can use an Article of the Week template to get the best published content (be it from your company’s blog or industry publications) in front of your team’s eyes.
A template like this provides an easy way to quickly skim the content so that the reader can choose what interests them most and click through to read more. You can even keep the interactive ending that allows readers to submit their own favorite articles to share with their peers.
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It’s always a good time to host an event! Whether it be an online or in-person event, you’ll need attendance to make it happen. An event newsletter can help spread the word.
With an event newsletter template, you won’t have to hire a graphic designer to make it look pretty or branded because you can upload your company’s branding to the Brand Kit on Publicate so your employees can quickly recognize it’s a company event.
Also, even if you decide to host an event last minute, you will have a beautifully designed email template waiting for you to publicize the details almost immediately.
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Before hitting send on any email, ask the big question: “Why should my team care about this?” If the answer isn’t clearly explained by the content itself, then get creative to connect it to the readers.
Here’s an idea: if you’re sharing some industry news about new trends, then share the company’s initiatives on what’s happening to keep up with the trends and how employees are making this a reality.
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Make the most of the season by letting subscribers know about relevant offers or launches.
Subscribers tend to be more susceptible to promotions when it’s relevant to their day-to-day lives. So, they’ll be looking for a lighter wardrobe for spring, and Christmas gifts in the lead-up to the holidays.
Choose an Outlook newsletter template with ample images and an exciting design.
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Use your employee newsletter to let staff know about the latest hiring initiatives.
Promoting from within means employees already know about the business and its culture, so there’s usually a shorter learning curve. It’s also a way to show you value your people, so they’re more likely to stick around and grow with the organization.
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Give employees the opportunity to progress their skills. This doesn’t just benefit the business by helping staff become better at their roles, but employees appreciate when organizations invest in them.
Make sure no one misses out by sending everything your team needs to know about the training day. Start with an Outlook newsletter template that contains all the important elements.
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When you’re creating newsletters to send in Outlook, you have a few considerations that are worth paying attention to.
Let’s review what they are so that you will be prepared to handle them:
Choosing to build your email newsletter in Outlook itself is another option, but it will be less of a visually-driven experience. You can search Microsoft Office Templates and scroll down to Newsletter to find your template. Keep in mind that Outlook’s primary purpose is not to serve as an email builder.
Then, click Download. Once you make the edits in Word, you can save it and upload it to your email provider.
Don’t forget to add email addresses and a subject line.
Using Publicate, the process is guided by the web-based email builder platform, which offers a visual experience so you can create, test, export to send and monitor your internal communications newsletter template from a single location.
The newsletter creator on Publicate doesn’t care if you have knowledge of HTML or not because it all works on a drag-and-drop basis within already created templates.
The upside of sending your emails in Outlook is that you can personalize your message and deliver it to small batches of recipients or your entire organization. There’s no need to have third-party software with subscriber management when you can do it within your existing email provider that everyone in your company is already familiar with using.
If you decide to create a newsletter template without using an email builder like Publicate, there’s a risk of the format being disrupted. The solution here is to send your newsletter as an email attachment. However, this comes with limitations, as many company firewalls will stop large attachments, and lots of people won’t bother to download or open them. Sending a visually captivating newsletter in the body of the email is a much better option.
But if you can’t use an email builder, the best option is to use PDF. Save your template as a PDF and in the Outlook email composer window, select ‘Insert’ and ‘Attachments’.
Locate the attachment and upload it.
Don’t forget to add a subject line and some body copy to introduce the attachment, or recipients would likely be wary of opening it.
For that reason, we generally don’t advise sending newsletters as attachments. It’s best to create the newsletter in Publicate, where you can be confident that it will be formatted as intended when you send the newsletter via Outlook or over 50 other email providers.
If you must send emails as an attachment, you can also use an email builder for this. Simply design your template as normal, export it as
Since plain text emails are less engaging than HTML emails, bring third-party templates into the mix and level up your newsletter.
Use an email builder like Publicate to select the ideal Outlook newsletter template for your purpose.
From there:
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If you don’t want to add the Publicate Chrome extension, simply copy and paste your template from Publicate into Outlook and continue to step 5.
Outlook has some very basic design features to add a little more interest to your newsletter.
These features are limited, so you won’t get as much room for creativity as third-party email builders offer, but it’s still worth mentioning.
You can apply stationery, backgrounds or themes to email messages in Outlook, plus design elements like fonts, bullets and colors.
This guide covers Outlook’s design features in more detail.
Keep in mind that these features are only available on certain versions of Outlook.
Saving a newsletter you create in Outlook as a template means you don’t need to start from scratch every time you need to send a similar newsletter.
Here’s the quickest way to save a template in Outlook:
Imagine you’ve saved a newsletter template (or multiple) that you created in Outlook, here are the steps to find and open it again:
It is very difficult to get emails created solely in Outlook looking like well designed, professional newsletters. Put simply: They can seem quite dull and it is almost impossible to customize the design within the Outlook compose window
The best way to ensure your Outlook email looks like a newsletter is to design it in a user-friendly email builder like Publicate, before exporting and sending it in Outlook.
Choose from hundreds of pre-designed, highly-customizable templates in the Publicate library. They’re filtered by purpose so you can find the ideal template in a few seconds.
Use Publicate’s powerful drag-and-drop editor to customize the template as needed, and add your own content and company branding. Publicate integrates with great stock photo sites, so you get access to over 2 million free images and GIFs without having to leave the platform.
Publicate also offers inline image editing which lets you crop, edit and move images to easily format your newsletter. These features time spent sourcing, saving and editing images elsewhere.
Again, the options are limited if you are creating a newsletter within Outlook itself, hence why most people use an email builder. If you can’t use an email builder here is how to add images to a newsletter using only Outlook.
You’ll need the desktop app to add multimedia to your template within Outlook. It’s not possible to add images to templates with the web version of Outlook, but you will be able to add them later during the editing process.
To add images to your newsletter in the Outlook compose window:
Microsoft does have a selection of pre-made newsletter templates. These are free to use and can be customized to your needs.
However, there are a few limitations to know about.
The selection of templates is relatively limited, and it’s very difficult to edit or customize them.
Plus, the templates are stored in Microsoft Word. That means importing them to Outlook isn’t straightforward. To edit these templates in Outlook, you’ll need to download a template with the ".emltpl" extension (for Mac) or the ".oft" extension (for Windows) and then open them and further edit in the Outlook compose window, which again is limited.
All of this is why most people choose to use purpose-built email design tools like Publicate.
You can use Outlook to send out a newsletter to a list of contacts by following the steps outlined in this blog.
Outlook’s sending capabilities are great, but it falls short when it comes to designing newsletters and monitoring their performance.
The best approach is to use an Outlook newsletter template. When you use Publicate, every template is optimized for Outlook, which means it will be formatted well whether you send it via Outlook or over 57 other email service providers.
You can then easily customize your chosen template with features like in-line image editing and integrations with third-party images and videos (Publicate gives you access to over 2 million royalty-free assets).
Publicate also lets you track the performance of your newsletter, whether you send it from Outlook or anywhere else. Monitor metrics like open rate and click rate, to get a clear understanding of which content works best so your newsletters can improve every time.
Segmenting your audience for email newsletters is all too common. So, it pays to know how to do it within Outlook, too.
You’ll need to create an email group. To do this within Outlook, follow these steps:
Once your email HTML is loaded into Outlook and ready to send, you can type the name of the list you just created in the Bcc field and it will populate. Using Bcc means that no one else can see the recipients of the list, and it’s a recommended best practice for privacy.
Say you want to send an Outlook newsletter regularly, then you can set up reminders on Outlook so that you don’t forget about it. You can set reminders for daily, weekly, monthly, or any other schedule you wish for.
If your company is already using Outlook for its email communications, then it’s a no-brainer as to why you’d want to use Outlook to send your email newsletters. Publicate’s outlook newsletter template options make this a seamless experience to design, send, and track your email newsletters using the email service that your team is already used to using.
Plus, Publicate makes it easy to customize your template right in the email preview window so you can see all your changes live so you can see exactly what the newsletter will look like for the recipient.
Be the designer, developer, and manager of every newsletter without needing to call on anyone else; try Publicate out for free to see how easy sending newsletters can be.
