The content of your emails will not only help you improve the quality of customer relationships, but will also raise your reputation in terms of deliverability. An engaging, organized and well-written communication is therefore essential to reach your audience in the right way and keep growing. In this article, we will list all the best practices when it comes to the content of your communications and will see how they can affect deliverability.
Contact information of the sender
Personalization of the sender
Types of content
Relevance of content
Changing the design
The subject line
Unsubscribe link
Link to mirror page
Text-to-image ratio
Text and HTML multipart
Text colors & spam words
Last check before sending: review & test
Identification of your brand
Contact information of the sender
By adding your contact information as the sender within your email, you can make quick contact in case a client has a question to ask, improving your brand's image. The presence of a real physical location (not a PO Box), as well as a fast and reliable means of contact, are only required by some laws, but it is recommended to put this information in all your messages anyway.
Avoid using addresses starting with “noreply@”: communications must be possible in both directions to give your contacts the opportunity to continue the conversation. If you do not want to, or cannot, enable your recipients to reply to the sending address, state it clearly inside the message and explain why. In addition, we recommend not only providing the customer with a response address but also taking care of the communication with the customer and giving personalized answers to their requests and comments. In order to make sure you receive replies, insert the right address in the "Reply-To:" field. For instance, it could be the email address of your Customer Service department.
Personalization of the sender
If you choose to humanize your sending address, for example, "Sophie from customer service”, make sure that it is generalized for your other contact points (Twitter, Facebook, your website, etc.).
The content of your emails
Several technical criteria on the recipient's email server-side determine what can lead a marketing email to be considered spam, starting from the content of your messages. Most MBP (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) classify millions of emails as spam each day based on their content. The HTML code and the content of the plain text version is analyzed by various anti-spam filters. If the algorithm of these companies considers that the content of your email lacks relevance, it may then consider your sending server as a source of spam.
Types of content
Your communications should focus on creating a strong bond with your customers. While interesting promotions may attract customers from time to time, loyalty is built through the knowledge of your brand. Alternating different types of editorial content increases the recipients’ interest, especially when compared to the weariness that many may feel with messages whose only purpose is to generate more sales.
Here are a few examples of the types of content you may write:
• Informative: news about the brand, such as store openings or product launch events
• Use cases: how to use the products, tips from pros
• Promotional: special offers on some products (with respect to the interests of each recipient)
Relevance of content
When they subscribe to your newsletter or create their profile on your site, your contacts will certainly have given you or would have liked to give you, information relating to the content that interests them most. It is important to respect their choice and not to send more emails than your recipients want or emails containing information that is of no interest to them. If you have not collected this information at the time of the subscription, it is not too late to do so. Give your contacts a choice: in this way, you will decrease the risk of spam complaints while increasing responsiveness and your ROI.
Reminding the recipient why they are receiving the message can be a good idea. In some cases, it may also be required by law. A simple sentence such as “You are receiving this email because you subscribed to our newsletter on 2018, May 18th” could prevent a few spam complaints. This is especially true for reactivation campaigns. Read this article to know more.
Changing the design
We advise you to avoid changing the design abruptly so that your recipients are able to recognize your usual communications. If your design is not recognizable enough, users will be tempted to classify you as spam. This could ultimately lead to mailbox providers downgrading you in terms of deliverability.
However, it is important to understand that taking care of the design is not enough: in order to maintain a strong reputation, you need to find a combination of proper design and active target.
The subject line
Spam filters are inflexible with the subjects lines of the emails. Here are some recommendations:
- do not write subjects that are too long
- avoid using capital letters, exclamation points or question marks, special characters such as %, $, +, &, etc.
- when used wisely and cautiously, emojis or other Unicode characters are an effective way to attract attention. However, some webmail providers or software programs may not be compatible and will display a big square instead.
Unsubscribe link
All promotional emails, including marketing triggers such as replenishment or abandoned carts, are required by law to include an unsubscribe link that is readable and clearly visible. It is advisable to place this link at the top of the email, so the recipients do not have to look for it if they wish to unsubscribe. For this reason, the unsubscribe button should be clearly visible for the contact: the font must be big enough and not in light grey. The process of unsubscribing should be fast and easy: the contact should not have to fill a long form or click several times. If the process is not simple enough, the contact will find it easier to classify your communication as spam.
If the "this is spam" button is easier to find, it is the one on which the recipients will click. This can lead to negative consequences.
Placing the link only on the word "here" rather than on the whole sentence "click here to unsubscribe", are all obstacles to unsubscribing that will make filing a complaint an easier option.
Link to mirror page
The presence of a mirror link, which allows your contacts to view your message in their browser in case it does not display properly in their email, is also important. The absence of this element is a typical feature of spam messages.
Links in which the description between the tags AND is a URL may be classified as fraudulent if the reference hyperlink (value entered in href="") is not the same. This occurs when the links are tracked. For this reason, we recommend you do not add a URL in the description of a link.
We also recommend you avoid shortening links and using host images in free hosting services: since such services are often used by spammers, their domain reputation is usually bad and this can affect yours as well.
Text-to-image ratio
Regarding the percentage of text and image, we recommend a 60% (text) - 40% (images) or a 50-50% ratio. Even if this percentage is only recommended and not mandatory, different proportions could have consequences on your interaction with customers and also on your deliverability. Customers might not be comfortable with the design of your communication and therefore classify it as spam, while mailbox providers might block the message.
Text and HTML multipart
Anti-spam filters tend to prefer when a message is available in both plain text and an HTML version. A recipient using an email client able to read HTML will automatically see this version. However, a recipient with a text-only reader will see the text version instead. Both versions are embedded in the same email. This is done with the use of “multipart” messages as part of the MIME standard (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). This mechanism is quite simple and widely available.
Text colors & spam words
Some practices in your email formatting are also to be avoided since the anti-spam filters compare your messages with recurrent patterns of spam. Fonts with a bright red color scheme are not recommended as well as the repetition of a punctuation mark (especially ones like "!!!" and "???''). We also advise against choosing a font color that is too close to the background color.
The topics most likely to trigger spam are mainly related to adult content (such as “Meet singles” or “XXX”), pharmaceuticals (“Weight loss”, “Fast viagra delivery”, “Human growth hormone”), freebies (“Free gift”, “Free money”, “Free hosting”), promotions (“Cheap”, “Cash”, “$$$”) or financial services (“Work from home”, “Get rich” or “Increase traffic”).
If you do not want your message to be considered spam, you should avoid over-promising and sensationalizing more than necessary, whatever the subject matter. Excessive pressure on the recipient can also lead to a spam complaint, for example with phrases such as "Do it today", "Once in a lifetime", "Call now" or "Urgent". Lists of the most common spam words are widely available on the internet.
Last check before sending: review & test
Even if you think you have followed all the best practices of email deliverability, it is important to test your message before sending it. Several tools (SpamAssassin or Email on Acid, for instance) allow you to analyze the structure of your message to ensure that it does not contain elements that could prevent it from passing through to the anti-spam filters. These tools can be used to help improve the design, but their use should not be systematic: each MBP has its own rules and may use different filters. It is therefore very important to test your message on different webmail and mobile devices in order to ensure that it is properly sent and displayed on a maximum number of webmail services and media.