Email Marketing Best Practices

When you create an email blast to go out to your email list, you want it to look wonderful! Therefore, you hire a graphic artist. The graphic artist creates a gorgeous design of your newsletter. Should you send it as an attached image, as an attached PDF, as a single image embedded in the email, […]

By Gentian Shero

attachments. And some spam filters filter out most emails that have attachments — especially bulk emails.

Many computer users are naive about what type of attachment could contain a virus. You might have enough expertise to know that a PDF or JPG probably cannot contain a virus, but most of your recipients don’t know (unless they are IT professionals). Therefore, they will take a blanket approach and delete or ignore any email with an attachment.

It makes no sense to attach your beautiful newsletter as an image or PDF. Don’t do it. And don’t kid yourself if you have tried it, and it has seemed to work. Without email statistics (see below), you will never really know how your email is performing.

Email Marketing Best Practice: Balance Text and Image Content

Spammers have abused bulk email so much that spam filters have become very picky. You need to stay a step ahead of the spam filters by knowing this: You need a certain ratio of text and images in your email blast.

The spam filters work on key words within the email. These words were in text – things like Viagra, weight loss, and free. So spammers started making emails that contained mostly images that had the words in the images. This was harder for spam filters to detect. Spam filters were updated so they filtered out emails with too much image space (square inches of images) versus text.

We cannot tell you exactly the best text-to-image ratio, but suffice it to say that if you turn your email into one big image, it might end up in a lot of spam boxes. Additionally, you should take any opportunity you can to have text in your email, rather than an image. If your image has text that does not require fancy formatting, it is best to leave it in the email as text.

Another reason to have both images AND text is that most email recipients have their images turned off by default. If you do not provide some text in the email that entices them to turn on the images, they will not see your email content at all.

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Email Marketing Best Practice: Engage Them

It might be tempting to send out an email that looks like this:
“Hey, folks! The latest edition of the Splatter Paintball Newsletter came out today. Just click this link to see it!  _________LINK__________”

This email lacks a motivation step. How many subscribers will actually be motivated enough to click through to read the newsletter on a web page? Not too many. Why should they click? They have not been charmed. There is no promise of a reward if they click. Yawn.

It is fine to have an HTML version of the newsletter on a web page, especially for mobile users or subscribers who do not have their images turned on. (Having trouble viewing this email? Click here to read it in a browser.) But do not use that online HTML version as the primary way of delivering the newsletter. What you need is a good HTML newsletter that has trackable links.

Email Marketing Best Practice: Make an HTML Newsletter with Trackable Links

An HTML email blast is skillfully created to include formatted text, graphics, and layout that looks great in all email systems. Email marketing programs such as Constant Contact and MailChimp send out emails like this. These programs are also able to track who opens the email, and who clicks which links.

All the best practices so far in this article have eliminated the ideas of attaching your newsletter and making an image-only newsletter. This leaves an HTML newsletter as the only viable option.

But your graphic artist has made an AMAZING design of the newsletter! How do you turn that into an HTML email?

The short answer here is that it is tricky to do on your own. Do you have an excellent HTML coder on staff who knows the insider tricks and limitations of making HTML emails? Are you so skilled in programs such as Constant Contact that you can make an email that looks nearly identical to your design? For most people, the answer is “no”. Therefore, you may need to hire an experienced professional such as Shero Designs to code the HTML newsletter for you. We can help turn all your hard work into a final HTML code with trackable links, so you can send it to your email list and get results. Contact us for a free quote.

Chief Strategy Officer at

Gentian, CSO and co-founder of Shero Commerce, guides the company and client digital strategies. He's an expert in technical SEO, Inbound Marketing, and eCommerce strategy.