Email Creative Best Practices

Create a Compelling Offer

A compelling offer increases the likelihood that your consumers will convert.

Incentivize a response, and call this out clearly in your subject line: give consumers a reason to open your email and take your desired action. Examples include: free shipping, discount offers and coupons.
Strong call to action: make sure your call to action is clear and relevant to your subject line. Consumers who open an email that doesn't match the subject line are more likely to opt out of communicating with you.
Create a sense of urgency: create an expiration date for your offer, even if you don't have one – this creates a sense of urgency and compels consumers to act.
Landing page consistency: your landing page should mimic the offer highlighted in your email with the same overall look and feel, and vice versa.

Email Best Practices

Be sure to keep these general principles in mind when designing your email creative.

Prioritize content hierarchy, with the most important content featured first — above the fold.

Avoid embedding forms in emails.

Use a Retina images and/or responsive design optimized for both desktop and mobile devices

Maintain sufficient text to image ratio of 60:40 or 70:30. If a consumer has turned on image blocking, this can lead to them not being able to see anything in your email message.

Keep your email size under 100 kb. A lighter file ensures your email passes through more spam filters and prevents Gmail from “clipping” your email. It also ensures your email can be properly opened on a mobile device.

Avoid Javascript and Flash — most email platforms do not support this.

Try to send your email between Tuesday-Thursday. Emails sent on these dates are shown to have higher open rates.

Email Layout

Design your campaign to be clear, balanced and to promote engagement with these tips.

Your email layout should help the viewer know what they should check out first and where they should go from there. The reader should be able to scan your email quickly using a logical hierarchy with large headlines and images focusing the attention.
Aim to keep your email to 600px but no wider than 800px.
Keep your email size under 100 kb unless you're including GIFs. A lighter file ensures your email passes through more spam filters
and prevents Gmail from “clipping” your email and ensures your email can be properly opened on a mobile device.

Colors, Fonts, and More

Design your campaign to be clear, balanced and to promote engagement with these tips.

Use headings and subheadings to maintain visual organization, and use plenty of whitespace. This helps to divide up your email into sections and makes it easier for the consumer to scan your email quickly.

Use email friendly fonts in minimum size 12-14 such as Arial, Georgia, and Times New Roman. In addition, use no more than three font colors in total.

Avoid using red or white in your creative. Red text often triggers spam while white can lead to hidden text.

Be consistent. Try not to stray too far from the content and design that your audience already associates with your brand, website, and/or social media channels.

Keep your emails under 500 characters.

Images

Images: For enhanced Retina-quality images, design your image with double the height/width that your email will be coded at. For example, if an email is coded at 650 px, you should design your image with 1300 px width.

Dimension: As stated previously, keep your email between 600-800px wide. However, to keep your image crisp on high-resolution displays, be sure to make your image 2x the size (ie. 1200px) and use the image attributes and CSS to keep the image the width you want.

Alt Text: Add in helpful alt text in case your image doesn’t load or breaks during the sending process. This way, consumers can still read your text even if your image doesn't load.

Use images that complement the email: An image should add to the email and messaging and not be the messaging. A simple way to test this is to view your email with images turned off and make sure your email still makes sense and that your message is still clear.
Stock Images: If using stock imagery, make sure the images are on brand and genuine. A better alternative is to create specific imagery for your email campaign in lieu of using stock photography. If you absolutely must use stock photos, source them from paid sites or reputable free sites.

Video & GIFs

It's important to note that many email providers such as Gmail, Outlook, and Thunderbird don’t support autoplay videos inside the email.

Many ESPs enable you to have a static image with a play button that links to the hosted version of the video. You can also use an animated GIF instead.
When including a video or GIF, add a video thumbnail with a play button or a GIF teaser of the video to generate more clicks.
Animated GIFs are a great alternative to using video if you want to add moving content to your emails.
Animated GIF files can get rather large the more animation, frames and colors there are in the image. To keep them as small as possible, only animate what you need to animate, keep it short and don’t use every color in the book.
Keep your GIF file size as close to 1MB as possible.

Subject Lines

Your subject line is the first opportunity to engage with your consumer and is a critical first step to driving strong performance.

Length: For many recipients (especially those reading emails on mobile devices), shorter is often better. We recommend you use no more than 9 words and 60 characters. In fact, most email subject lines are between 41 and 50 characters. If you need space for additional copy, use pre-header text.
Caps and Punctuation: Avoid using all caps or excessive punctuation. Our research shows that it’s best to use no more than 3 punctuation marks per subject line. Too many punctuation marks can make your email look like spam, especially if you use a lot of special characters.
Copy: use the subject line to announce what’s in the email. Also, avoid using one word subject lines or spam trigger words (ie 'FREE').
Personalization: This is a great tactic that allows you to connect with consumers on an individual level. Subject line personalization is also shown to increase open rates for most users and may work well when combined with targeted automations such as birthday deals and post-purchase follow-ups. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
Emojis: Another great way to capture users' attention in your subject line with a visual element. Use emojis to complement your copy, not as a replacement for words. According to our research, you should use no more than 1 emoji at a time.

Mobile Optimization

It's important that your email is optimized for mobile - over 50% of emails are opened on mobile devices, and the average revenue per mobile email is 4x higher than that of a desktop email click.

Make sure your email has a responsive email design. This allows users to view your email optimized for whichever device they are consuming it.
Keep subject lines short so the reader knows exactly what your email is about.
Use preheader or snippet text to your advantage by summarizing your email content or including a CTA.
We recommend including a call to action button in your mobile creative to drive engagement.
Your CTA should be big and bold to ensure consumers who are viewing your email on a smaller screen can still easily click on it. Additionally, CTAs can be coded differently for mobile and desktop using the hide and show method.

Responsive Design

Responsive design ensures your email renders properly across a variety of devices, window and screen sizes such as desktop, mobile and tablet. It allows your creative to adapt to the device and screen size where consumers are viewing your creative for an optimal viewing experience.

Stick to a single column layout.
Your title font size should be at least 22px.
Keep your copy line width to 6 words of 12-14px font size - this is ideal for both desktop and mobile.
Keep line spacing around 1.5 times your font size.
Don't forget to include a call to action button. An ideal size for the button itself is 44×44 pixels with a font size of at least 16px for your button copy.

A/B Testing

Test your email to see what works best and to address any issues before your live email deployment. Below are some A/B tests you can try.

'From' name: Try sending your email from different variations.

Email length: Though you should keep your email to under 500 words max, test your email length within these parameters. For example, create a version with more text versus a version that sends the consumer almost immediately to your landing page.

Call to action: Test different treatments and styles for your CTA buttons and links.
Subject line: Try variations in length or copy. For example, Mailchimp found that subject lines with more than one word capitalized perform best.

Creative Coding

Keep your HTML simple and use basic HTML tags for coding.
If your HTML software uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for formatting, adjust the preferences to apply formatting using basic HTML tags only. If absolutely necessary, inline style sheets are an acceptable substitute for CSS.
Avoid comments in the HTML code - these can potentially flag spam triggers.
Create the HTML in an HTML editor in plain HTML. Do not use MS Word, MS Publisher or other graphic/desktop publishing software. These programs often carry code which is already in the document which can negatively impact the code in the email. Additionally, heavily coded pages take longer to download, and Google often penalizes sites with slow download times. Finally and perhaps most importantly, users are impatient so slow download times can negatively impact the user experience.
Avoid JavaScript, submission forms, layers, or rich media (e.g., flash movies, animation). These cause deliverability issues that affect the campaign response and hinder deliverability for future campaigns and do not render correctly in many email ISPs.
Keep the offer, CTAs and key information above the fold – 250 to 300 pixels in height is recommended.
Design as a half-page rather than a full-page ad. Do not force the consumer to scroll.

For more information, view our Connect Self-Serve Guide.