Editorial Newsletter Email Template

The template reads like a weekly print publication, not a promo blast. It opens with a small "Read this issue in your browser" link, then a dark ink masthead (near-black #17161c) carrying the "Frontier" wordmark, a thin editorial-red rule, and an edition row ("Issue No. 47" on the left, the date on the right). That single red line does a lot of the brand work.

Next comes the editor's intro. A red "From the desk" label sits above two short serif paragraphs and an italic byline ("Dana Okafor, Editor"). It sets a voice before it sells anything. Below that is a bordered "By the numbers" card with three stats (Avg. CPM, Reach index, New entrants), each with an up or down arrow, so the data feels like a real briefing.

The layout holds one lead story, not five competing ones. "The big story" gets a red kicker chip, a full-width image, a 36px serif headline, two body paragraphs, and one button: "Read the full breakdown." That is the single-message discipline. Everything after it is intentionally smaller: a numbered second story ("02 / The smaller idea") with the image to the right, then three one-line "Quick hits" marked with red slashes. The hierarchy tells the reader exactly what to read first.

Type and color are deliberate. Headlines and labels use Space Grotesk, a grotesque sans; body copy uses Newsreader, a real editorial serif. There is one accent color, editorial red (#d83a2c), against a cool near-white paper (#f4f3ef) and ink text. A near-black "Pass it on" forward block and a quiet footer (social text links, the weekly cadence note, a real mailing address, unsubscribe) close it out.

Email clients are not browsers. They strip CSS, ignore flexbox, and break modern layout. This template is built the old, reliable way so it survives that.

The whole thing is nested tables with a fixed 600px content width, inline styles on every cell, and a single media query for mobile that stacks the two-column story and widens the padding. Outlook gets its own conditional path: MSO comment blocks set the table widths and pixel density, so the layout does not collapse in the Word rendering engine Outlook uses.

Every headline, stat, and link is live HTML text, not an image of text. That means it stays sharp, stays readable with images off, and stays accessible to screen readers. The two buttons ("Read the full breakdown" and "Forward the issue") are bulletproof: a VML roundrect for Outlook and a padded anchor with a background color for everyone else, so the button shows up as a real, tappable block even when CSS backgrounds are dropped.

The template declares color-scheme light only and uses x-apple-disable-message-reformatting, so dark mode does not invert the ink masthead or wash out the red. Web fonts load in Apple and iOS Mail; Gmail and Outlook fall back to Helvetica for display and Georgia for the serif, so the design keeps its character with no broken text. The result is one file that looks the same across Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook.

You do not need to rebuild anything. The file is one block of HTML.

In Klaviyo: create a new email, choose a blank template, and drag in an HTML block (or use the full code editor). Paste the template's HTML in. Klaviyo will render it in the preview.

In Mailchimp: start a campaign, pick "Code your own," then "Paste in code," and drop the HTML there. Mailchimp imports it as-is.

Then make it yours. Replace "Frontier" with your publication name, swap the issue number, date, and the editor's note. Change the two image sources to your own hosted images and update the alt text. To rebrand the color, find the editorial-red hex (#d83a2c) and replace every instance with your accent; do the same for the ink (#17161c) and paper (#f4f3ef) if you want a different palette. Point every example.com link at your real URLs, and set a real unsubscribe and mailing address in the footer (your ESP usually merges these in).

Before you send, run a test. Send a preview to yourself and open it in Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook, and check it on a phone. Confirm the stats card reads cleanly, the buttons are tappable, and the second story stacks correctly on mobile. Then send to your list.