Email Best Practices

Is there a Definite Model to Inbox your Mass Emails?

Generalizing is a sin in email marketing and each brand is like a unique case to crack.

And when it comes to Email Deliverability of Mass Emails, you cannot have a go-to

model!

But by following the 3R model you can improve your Email deliverability, Here 3R’s

stands for Right Mailing List, Right Email Infrastructure, and Right Email Template.

The Right Mailing List:- Choosing the right email list is a very important step if you
are serious with the inboxing business.

Let's look at three of the major aspects that you should keep in mind while building an

emailing list:

● End-User Affinity
● Segmentation
● Sunset Policy

End-User Affinity:- While choosing the right mailing list, you have to assess the affinity of
the end-user. The 2 questions you may want to ask are :

1. Does the user have an affinity to my brand?

2. Does the user respond to promotional emails in general?

Segmentation:- Now that you have buckets of users based on affinity, it’s also necessary
to consider the other attributes which can be associated with the users. We need to
understand what kind of offers or products our users can love to see.

Sunset Policy :- If your users are not responding to your mails for a long time then stop
sending them mails.Its like you are knocking their door but they are not opening it.So,
please stop knocking their door because it's bad practice.
The Right Email Infrastructure:-

● The Sender Ips:- The IPs assigned must be dedicated or shared with other
brands which have a high inbox placement ratio and high open rates.
● The Choice Of The Sender Domain:- The choice of the sender domain-the
domain name used to send the emails-is crucial. The domain must not be listed
in any real-time RBLs and must have had a good mailing history or neutral
reputation which you can make good with your good mailing.

● Alerts & Monitoring:- you need to check with your email service provider about
all the alerts and the monitoring system: basics like tracking Spamhaus listing, IP
blocks need to be taken care of. The key to averting delivery errors is close
monitoring of the user complaint rates. Spamhaus, Spamcop, Barracuda,
Composite Blocking List(CBL) are some of the top email blacklists.

● Authentication:- Make sure your DKIM, SPF, and DMARC (if you have) are passing.

● Delivery Errors:- Marketers may also want to look at the delivery errors on Gmail
postmaster. Gmail postmasters will display spikes in the delivery error graph
whenever the IP is sending emails at a faster rate and larger volumes than it has
been warmed up to send. Delivery errors must be closely monitored and fixed
immediately.

The Right Email Template:- It’s important to note any new email template which
hasn’t been used earlier would not cause spam issues. There are two problems w.r.t.
Email content, that any marketer wishes to solve:

1. The template must not have an associated negative reputation, thus land in
the user’s inbox.
2. The template must be engaging enough for the end-user to click and visit
the landing page.

A few hacks to be used to make a template engaging:-

1)Make your CTA buttons prominent. For mobile phones, the CTA buttons must be available
within the first scroll.
2)Place your logo strategically. The logo always builds brand affinity. If you are sending a
promo email campaign with plenty of scrolls, place the logo at the top. If you don’t want to
place it at the centre, place it at the top left because people read from left to right. If you are
sending a transactional email communication with only 1 scroll, you may place the logo at
the bottom.
3)Use catchy and trending words for your CTA buttons. The words should be in sync with
your offers. Eg. Get Now, Book Now etc.
4)Never have horizontal scrolls : the width should be under 600 pixels.
5)Don’t include java scripts/flash. These aren’t supported by most email clients.
6)Play smartly with colours : Try to keep the dark colours reserved for the smaller sections
eg CTA buttons, links etc.
7)Lighter the better : try to reduce the size of the email by moving some of the content to the
landing page/getting rid of redundant styles.Also keeping the size under 102 kb would help
the email not get clipped by Gmail.
8)Preheader text : It’s the part of the email campaign which compliments the subject line.If
the email lands in inbox and the user has brand affinity, a study revealed that the subject line
and preheader had a 60:40 contribution respectively towards opens! Make the preheader
text catchy and in sync with the subject line.
9)Short & catchy subject lines : the subject line must grab eyeballs. It must not reveal the
entire context of the email but drop a hint to the end user! The intent of all email subject lines
must be to invoke curiosity so that the end user opens the email to know more.Name
personalization helps in some cases as it makes the end user feel important.
10)Make your email campaign sound like the campaigns on the other channels like web
push/app push. According to a survey by Littmus in 2018, only 24.8% of the brands who took
part in the survey, had their email programs highly integrated with the other channels.Hence
making your campaigns highly integrated with the other channels will give you an edge over
75.2% marketeers!

Best practices while writing HTML code for email template:-

1)Don't use domains blacklisted by google.
2)Don’t use Malfunctional HTML tags.
3)Don’t use any blacklisted email, contact no.
4)The content shouldn't have javascript.Only the javascript for Gmail annotations is
supported.
5)Don't send cached content. Gmail caches the contents which are marked as spam with a
signature.
6)Alt,Title & Map tags should be removed.Alt & Title tags often have generic keywords like
facebook, instagram etc. which may bring down the overall score of your template. MAP tag
is an old hack to enable clicks within certain parts of an image and generally causes emails
to land in spam for Gmail users.