What a pleasant surprise to come across this newsletter design created as a presentation by VMware’s SMB group. While you may or may not know much about the virtualization of servers, I think you’ll appreciate the composition and delivery of great marketing content epitomized by this newsletter.

Rather than a static PDF, web page or email, VMware has crafted a truly engaging newsletter layout high on personality that blends multimedia, storytelling, and an attractive design while maintaining a degree of a traditional newsletter’s look and feel.

It’s eye-catching right from the beginning and immediately reaches out to its target audience on a personal level.

This newsletter layout is a spot-on brand builder, and may just cause you to rethink your staid old newsletter and pull it out of the boring marketing content bin. I already have the impression that this business understands their customer, they’re trying to help them, and they’re innovative. Sounds like someone I’d like to do business with.

Also, be sure to check out the first edition of their newsletter. You can see they did a noble job maintaining consistency in style and bridging the customer story across the two newsletters. I look forward to seeing their next edition!

Ain’t Too Proud To Borrow

We’re not too proud to let our users lead us into using online presentations in new ways. We’ll go ahead and take VMware’s newsletter design as inspiration to create our own. So, look for a new SlideRocket newsletter layout in the coming weeks. It’s never too late to adopt a better habit, right?

Good Riddance to the Traditional Newsletter Design

I for one will not miss having to compose an email newsletter. Not only is it cumbersome to format a newsletter in an email editor, but also there has always been that certain anxiety in hitting the send button. What if I discover later that there was a misspelling, or if I get feedback that one of the links is broken? I’d be stuck! And will those great images affect how the email renders in different browsers? Will they harm the delivery rate? With an online presentation you can immediately make the fix all my recipients will already have the updated version in his or her inbox. It’s magic.

Newsletter Templates on the Horizon

Taking this a step further, we’ve just launched a newsletter template for the SlideRocket Get Inspiration gallery so all SlideRocket users can take advantage of a free newsletter layout. The project is already underway, so expect that to become available in the next few weeks. And it will join a number of other presentation templates our designers are already cooking up for you, including this new marketing plan template.