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Email Content Best Practices

Even though ISPs have shifted away from filtering or blocking messages based solely on content, it does not mean that the content of your emails is any less important. It simply means that additional measures have been put in place to enhance the ISPs’ content filters and their abilities to recognize and block spam. You must be sure to continue to follow all of the best practices for email content, subject lines, graphics, and coding.

As mentioned in the reputation section of this white paper, targeted, relevant emails that are sent in a timely manner to the right person not only have the highest conversion rates, they also have the lowest number of complaints. Also, emails that are branded properly in the From address and subject lines are less likely to generate complaints as senders easily recognize the sender. Listrak has written many white papers covering these topics, including “How to Make Your Emails More Relevant”, “Crafting a Must Read Subject Line”, and “Creating Relevant Email Campaigns with Dynamic Content.”

You must also make sure that the HTML structure of the email is solid as design errors will not only cause your emails to render incorrectly in your recipients’ inboxes, but email servers may block the messages completely. Best practices for coding emails include:

Avoid CSS: Cascading Style Sheets is a tool used by web designers to streamline the development process while ensuring consistency. While it is a helpful tool for websites, CSS should not be used when developing HTML email templates as they can be stripped out or overwritten by different email clients.

Avoid Scripting: Like CSS, scripting, such as Visual Basic and JavaScript, may be stripped out of your emails or cause them to be blocked completely as email clients may mistake the scripts for malicious code.

Host images, audio, visual, and flash on your website: Embedding these items in your emails will greatly increase the size of your messages, and could, therefore, cause your messages to be blocked or filtered. Graphics, audio, visual, and flash should be hosted on your website and your emails should include a link pointing to the full URL address.

Code emails by hand, or use an ESP: Coding for HTML emails is different than coding for websites. Some programs, like FrontPage, can add extra code to your emails that can lead to your messages being blocked, or delivered incorrectly and mislabeled as spam by your recipients. If you cannot have an experienced programmer code your emails, you should either build the emails using your ESP’s integrated HTML editor, or you should outsource the development to the experts at your ESP to do the design work for you.

Follow table best practices: Avoid using 1 x 1 pixel spacer gifs to force the width of your table as they are commonly found in spam messages and can cause your emails to be blocked or filtered.

To learn more about HTML best practices, read Listrak’s white paper “Checklist for Outsourcing HTML Newsletters.”

Before you send your messages, you should also test the emails using a spam scoring application as this will check the content of the message and catch potential issues in advance. If you are using an ESP like Listrak, it should have an integrated spam scoring feature that evaluates the message using specific tests to determine whether or not the message contains items commonly found in spam.

If your ESP does not provide a spam scoring feature, or if you are using an in-house product, you may download Spam Assassin for free, or use a paid service, such as Return Path’s Campaign Preview, that offers a snapshot of how your email will look in the different email clients as well as spam score.