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Email Marketing Best Practices

In a world of increasingly crowded inboxes, it’s harder than ever to avoid the spam folder, dodge the promotions folder, and get your contacts to open your email. Here are some best practices to help you cultivate a strong sender reputation and craft emails that land.

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Deliverability

Content

Design

Deliverability

The Technical Stuff: DNS and DMARC

Good email marketing doesn’t start with creating a beautiful template, it starts with making sure the underlying architecture is in place.

First, have your network administrator implement email authentication measures like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to verify your legitimacy as a sender, prevent fraudulent activity, and ensure your emails reach inboxes. This includes saving the Spark DNS records to your domain. To learn more about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC policies, see Understanding DKIM, SPF and DMARC.

When you start sending emails from a new domain, email service providers (ESPs) might initially see you as a high-risk sender, so if your sending domain is new and doesn’t have a history yet, gradually increase the volume of emails sent to establish trust with email service providers and improve deliverability. Slowly ramping up your sending volume and ensuring you're sending to a highly engaged list will help establish trust with ESPs, prevent your emails from being blocked or filtered as spam, and improve your overall deliverability.


List Quality > List Quantity

It’s tempting to send every campaign to everybody you possibly can - after all, it’s a numbers game, and the more people you email, the more homes you’ll sell, right? Unfortunately, this mindset won’t get you good results, it will actually make them worse!
Prioritize the quality of your email list over its size. A smaller list of engaged subscribers yields superior results compared to a larger, disengaged list. High engagement rates positively impact email deliverability and reduce the risk of being marked as spam.
One way to maintain high quality lists is to maintain clean lists (more on that below), and another way is to segment your audience for each campaign based on shared characteristics or behaviors to deliver personalized and relevant content, leading to higher engagement and conversions. For example, instead of sending a “Featured Homes” email to all prospects, send it only to those that you know are interested in the type of home you are featuring - if your featured home is a 2-bedroom unit priced at $899,900, don’t send your campaign to prospects who are interested in studios with a budget of $500,000.


Cleanliness is Key


When building your contact lists, do not purchase email lists or scrape them from the internet, as these often contain invalid or outdated addresses even if it does not violate your local anti-spam legislation - and it might! Build your list organically and obtain explicit permission before sending marketing emails. This ensures that your emails are welcomed by recipients, preventing legal complications and reputational damage.

Regularly clean your email list by removing outdated, inactive, or disengaged contacts. Sending emails to stale addresses negatively affects your sender reputation and increases bounce rates and spam complaints.


Monitor Your Results


The job isn’t done when you hit send on a campaign. Monitor key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns and understand audience preferences. Positive engagement, like high click rates, signals to ESPs that your emails are wanted, and this improves your deliverability. On the other hand, negative interactions, such as high bounce rates, spam complaints, or unsubscribes, can signal that your emails are unwanted or irrelevant, damaging your sender reputation and email performance.
If you notice a sudden and significant decrease in your open rates from one campaign to the next, this could indicate issues with your domain reputation. Check to be sure that you are not on any block lists!

 

Content


Write Captivating Content

Ensure your marketing email content is direct and engaging. Your subject line and email body should provide value to the recipient, and it should be immediately obvious why they are receiving your email. Include a relevant and clearly defined call to action (CTA) in your email to encourage recipients to take the next step, whether it’s making a purchase, scheduling an appointment, or downloading a resource. 

You should also be mindful of anti-spam laws like CASL (Canada), the CAN-SPAM Act (USA) and GDPR (Europe), which demand transparency. Your emails must include an unsubscribe option, a physical business address, and avoid deceptive subject lines or misleading content. Failing to adhere to these laws could cause your emails to end up in spam folders or even lead to fines or penalties.

Finally, know the differences between transactional and marketing emails and when to send each type. Transactional emails are specifically related to an agreement, purchase, or transaction, between the sender and the recipient. They should be sent promptly with clear, relevant details about the recipient’s purchase or transaction. Marketing emails are promotional and require recipient opt-in. They should offer value and be sent strategically as part of a broader campaign. It is not advisable to add marketing content to a transactional email.

 

Personalize Your Emails

Personalization increases email engagement and deliverability. Tailoring emails by name, referencing past behaviour, or offering relevant content creates a stronger connection with the audience, builds trust, and improves open and conversion rates. Personalization strategies can include things like using merge tags in your templates to address the recipient by name, but should also go further to ensure the content you send is relevant to them. This is where segmentation comes in handy - for example, instead of sending an e-blast to your entire database about your new 2-bedroom feature floorplan, only send it to contacts who have said they are interested in 2-bedroom homes.

 

Design

 

Don’t Send All-Image Emails

Why do all-image emails often go to spam? Spam filters are designed to assess emails for certain behaviours or signals, and one of the red flags they look for is emails that contain only images. This is because spam emails often rely on images to bypass text-based filters, which can hide the true content of the email. When your email relies too heavily on images, especially if the text is embedded within the image (which can’t be read by spam filters), it makes it difficult for filters to determine whether your email is legitimate or spam.

Having a 60:40 ratio of live text to images means that there’s enough text in your email to clearly communicate the purpose and content, making it more likely to be recognized as a legitimate message. This also ensures that the message is still readable for recipients who might have image-blocking settings enabled or slow internet connections.

 

Add Alt Text

Alt-text is an additional layer of accessibility and deliverability. Alt-text provides descriptions for images in case they don’t load, and it also helps the email to pass spam checks. If the image is part of a marketing message, providing descriptive alt-text helps spam filters understand the image's context and content. Alt-text also improves accessibility for screen readers, allowing visually impaired recipients to understand the email's content.

 

Mobile-First Design

A mobile-first design means creating emails that are optimized for mobile devices before desktop versions. This is crucial because over half of all emails are now opened on mobile devices, and if your emails aren’t optimized for smaller screens, recipients may have difficulty reading or interacting with your content.

Spark’s templates are responsive to ensure that your email adapts to different screen sizes, providing a smooth and visually appealing experience across mobile phones, tablets, and desktops, but if you are importing HTML templates, make sure they are responsive too! This is particularly important for improving engagement, as recipients are more likely to read, click, and take action when the email is easy to interact with on their mobile device.

Mobile optimization includes using large fonts, clickable buttons, and single-column layouts to make the content easy to read and navigate on small screens. 

By adopting a mobile-first philosophy, you ensure that your emails will reach the largest possible audience, while also improving the likelihood of engagement and reducing the risk of emails being ignored or marked as spam.

 

Take Your Time and Test

Everyone sends a rushed email from time to time, but don’t do this for email campaigns. Aside from being prone to typos and bad design that can harm your brand reputation, email clients, devices, and operating systems vary widely, and this can affect how your email is displayed. It’s crucial to test your email templates to ensure they look good and function properly on all platforms. An email that looks great on Gmail for desktop may not display the same on Outlook or Apple Mail on mobile.

Testing allows you to identify rendering issues, broken links, or design flaws that could reduce the email’s effectiveness. By testing on multiple devices, operating systems (iOS, Android, Windows), popular email clients (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.), and in both regular and dark mode, you can ensure that your email will reach its audience as intended.

Efficient testing can be done using email testing tools that allow you to preview your email in various environments and analyze deliverability.

Following these best practices improves email deliverability, engagement, and overall effectiveness. Testing, optimization, and personalization are key to avoiding spam filters and achieving compliance and positive reception.