Newsletter email for ecommerce

This is a new-arrivals drop email. The job is to move inventory from a fresh collection without spreading attention across twenty products.

Trigger and timing. DTC stores send a new-arrivals newsletter within 24 hours of a drop, before the products show up in paid social. Subscribers get first pick, and that is the offer. Most strong-performing drops land Tuesday through Thursday, late morning local time, when owned-list engagement peaks. Sending the same morning you restock a bestseller lifts click-through over a generic weekly blast.

Offer. One lead product at the top, full price, with a clear hook. "Subscribers see it first" beats a discount code for owned lists because it rewards membership without eroding margin. Pair it with free shipping over a threshold ($75 here) instead of a percent off.

Copy angle. Merchandiser voice, not copywriter voice. Name the material, the make, the batch size. "Stonewashed Belgian linen, finished by hand. Three colors, made in small batches." That outperforms lifestyle abstraction like "elevate your space" in DTC A/B tests because home-goods shoppers scan for material and price first, then decide whether to read on.

Link count. Three to four total. Logo, the lead product CTA, two secondary products, footer. Ecommerce newsletters that push one product above the fold and cap total links below five see higher click-to-open than the everything-is-new grid format. Focus beats breadth on a phone screen.

CTA. One primary button, verb-led. "Shop the Throw" beats "Shop Now" because it names the object and matches the subject line. Repeat the product once in the preheader, once on the button, once in the footer. That is enough.

Real example. The hero features the Marlow Linen Throw at $68, with a $75 free-ship threshold nudging basket size up. Two secondary products sit underneath at lower price points ($42 vase, $28 candle). A store running this format on an engaged owned list typically sees a 35 to 40 percent open rate and a 2 to 4 percent click rate, against a Klaviyo DTC campaign benchmark near 37 percent open and roughly 1.5 percent click. Subject line that earned it: "New: The Linen Throw, in three colors."

The HTML is built the way email clients still expect it built.

Nested tables, not divs or flex. Every layout block is a table inside a table. Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo all strip or ignore modern CSS layout, so tables are the only container you can trust across the board.

Inline CSS on every element. Style attributes sit on the td, a, img, and span. External and head styles get dropped by Gmail clipping and by forwarding chains, so what survives is what is inline.

Bulletproof VML button for Outlook. Outlook 2007 through 2021 render on Microsoft Word, not a browser. They ignore border-radius and padding on anchor tags. The button ships with VML markup so it draws as a real rounded rectangle with a working link in Word's engine, and falls back to a styled link everywhere else.

Live text, not image text. Headlines, prices, and descriptions are real selectable text. Subscribers who block images still read the offer, and spam filters score all-image emails harder.

Dark-mode color-scheme meta. The head carries a supported-color-schemes declaration and a set background color, so Apple Mail Dark Mode and Outlook dark theme do not invert your palette into an unreadable mess.

One mobile media query. A single max-width: 480px rule stacks the two-up product row and sizes the hero image to full width. No pile of breakpoints, no overengineered responsive system.

Web-font fallbacks. Headings fall back to a Helvetica/Arial stack when the brand font is unavailable, which it is in Gmail web. Text stays legible on every client.

1. Copy the HTML. Export from Mailwright, or copy the rendered output below.

2. Paste into your ESP. Klaviyo: open a campaign, drag a Text or HTML block into the email, click the source icon, and paste. For a reusable version, go to Templates, create a template, and paste into the source view. Mailchimp: start a campaign, choose Code your own, then Paste in code.

3. Swap the brand. Replace the logo text or image, change the brand colors in the inline styles, and point every link at your store domain.

4. Wire merge tags. In Klaviyo, use {{ first_name|default:'' }} for a greeting, and drop a dynamic catalog product block onto the hero so the image, name, and price update from your Shopify feed each send. In Mailchimp, use *|FNAME|* for the first name, and connect your store through the ecommerce integration so product content blocks pull live inventory and pricing.

5. Test before you send. Send a proof to a Gmail address, an Apple Mail address on iOS, and an Outlook desktop address. Toggle dark mode on the iPhone. Confirm the hero image loads, the button clicks through to the product page, and the two-up row stacks cleanly at 375px wide.