Best Practice Advice

Almost 100% of the time people will want to see an option to opt-out of receiving further emails. Including an opt-out link is easy to do and it will reduce the number of complaints received. To find out what's involved with creating an opt-out link click here.

Some types of emails such as important service notifications, invoices, registration emails etc. do not require an opt-out link and for those types of communications validation can be relaxed using the settings within Email Profiles.

Including a link at the top of each email that people can click to view their email in a web browser can improve the user experiences for some. If the email you've sent is not displaying correctly, images are disabled or there's other issues then presenting a link for people to click will still enable them to view the message they have received properly.

There's no coding required as the content is generated automatically when people click the designated link. To find out what's involved with creating a view-online link click here.

99.9% of people will be able to view HTML emails but there will be a small number of people that are not able to and so by including a text version you're not leaving them out and stopping them from seeing your message.

Mail filters also like to see a text version being included with HTML emails and if you don't do that when you view an Email Template the Junk Mail Filter results will score that quite badly. Including a text version is so easy to do there's no reason to leave it out.

ISPs such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and others will reject emails from unauthorised sources and where they appear to be insecure.

Email authentication standards should always be used to ensure the that emails you send have been digitally signed and are being sent from server IP addresses that have permission to do so.

DKIM and SPF are the two main email authentication standards and should be setup and monitored for each sending used within your Email Campaigns. Click here to find out more about setting up and monitoring email authentication using DKIM & SPF.

Set the 'From Email Address' or the 'Reply Email Address' to something that starts with 'noreply' is very bad practice and may lead to higher numbers of complaints.

It also means that you could be missing out on valuable feedback from Users and there's the risk that more emails will be filtered before actually getting into the inbox.

This blog post from Econsultancy covers just 5 compelling reasons why you should never use 'noreply' in your Email Campaigns.

Make emails personal and consider how you would feel if you received the message you're about to send. Here's a few suggestions on how you can easily make emails more personalise and as a result engaging.

Personalisation

Use Merge Tags such as {?$contacts_first_name?} to create personalised messages. More on Personalisation.

Condtional Content

Create conditional content that is more relevant to recipients using the Template Language.

Share with Friends Link

Encourage recipients to share the content with other people.

Social Share Tags

Encourage recipients to share the content or a URL on social networks with Social Share Tags.

Link Customisation

Control what happens when links are clicked, easily tag Users, trigger emails and control web metrics integration. Click here for more info.

Use preview text to capture your recipient's attention which can encourage them to open. Preview text can also be used to influence user's behavior - for example, by encouraging user's to scroll and or click specific links within the template.