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Email Design Best Practices

Designing the perfect email can be very difficult, especially when we’re balancing engagement with deliverability. Below are a few industry best practices for designing captivating subject lines and email content while avoiding SPAM filters. As email marketing is continuously evolving, we recommend periodically researching best practices to ensure your emails meet the industry’s up to date standards.

Subject Lines:

Do

  • Keep it short: Subject lines should be captivating, but not overwhelming. Try to limit your subject lines to 5 or fewer words.
  • Segment your audience: We don’t have to please everyone, just your clients! If you know the culture of your client base and the email content matches your audiences needs, crafting a captivating subject line should be easy.
  • Personalize: Adding personalization to your subject line can help your email stand out in a subscribers inbox. User personalized merge tags such as {{FIRST_NAME}} to tailor each subject line to the recipient.
  • Provide value: Ask yourself “Why would I open this email”? What value are you providing your customer, and how can you allude to the value of your email content in a short subject line? If your customers recognize value in your subject line, they’ll be more likely to open and read your email.

Don’t

  • Don’t use ALL CAPS, excessive punctuation and emojis: Although we often think our emails are the most important communications, we have to consider the volume of messages our clients receive daily. Excessive punctuation, ALL CAPS and emojis in subject lines can be annoying to customers, and are red flags for SPAM filters.
  • Don’t use SPAM trigger keywords: Many keywords we think will captivate our audience will actually captivate SPAM filters. Avoid clickbait keywords or offer details such as: Click, buy now, sale, 50% off, deal, offer, trial, free, unlimited, risk free, read more, learn more, urgent, now, last chance.

Content:

Do

  • Keep it personal: LoopSpark provides a large list of merge tags to help you tailor the content for each subscriber. Merge tags will pass dynamic information for that subscriber, such as {{FIRST_NAME}} , {{NEXT_VISIT_TEACHER_NAME}}, {{CURRENT_PACKAGE_NAME}} etc.
  • Reduce the number of images: Spam filters aside, Google’s Promotions Tab is very good at differentiating a newsletter from a peer-to-peer email. Consider emails you send to friends, how many images do you include? Try to maintain a text to image ratio of at least 60:40.

Don’t

  • Don’t include too many links: Try to limit the number of unique links in your email to 2 (not including unsubscribe link). While links to all of your social media pages look nice, if they are not necessary for that specific email, they will increase the chance of your email landing in Gmail’s Promotions Tab.
  • Don’t include large images: Image file size should be no larger than 1mb, and full email content should remain under 2mb. As the width of your email is only 650 pixels, there’s no need to upload images that are 3000 pixels wide. If you need help reducing an image file size, there are many free tools available, we recommend Compressor.io.
  • Don’t embed videos: Videos can seem engaging, but are blocked by most email platforms. While the preview of your email will display your embedded video, your subscribers will likely see a large blank box where the video is embedded. Instead, screen shot your video, upload the screen shot as an image, and hyperlink the image to your video’s URL (Youtube, Vimeo etc).
  • Don’t embed forms: Similar to embedding videos, a lot of email platforms will block the embedded form, leading to a large blank space in your email. Screen shot a portion of your form, upload the screen shot as an image, and hyperlink the image to your form destination URL.
  • Don’t include attachments: Attachments are also a large cause of SPAM red flags. Instead of including attachments, upload your file to a free file hosting service like DropBox, and add a call-to-action button in your email linking to the hosted file url.