Email Content Best Practices

There are a few tricks to remember about content besides the mantra of “sending something people want”.

• Personalize your emails to each recipient. Ideally, the content should reflect the recipient's specific interests or usage patterns in your application. At least address them by their name. Tenon has merge tags that you can define and use with your email templates to achieve detailed levels of personalization.
• The higher the text to link and text to image ratios, the better. Too many links and images trigger spam flags at MBPs.
• Misspellings, spammy words (buy now!, Free!) are big spam flags, as are ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• The domains in the from field, return-path and message-id should match the domain you are sending from.
• Make sure you are using unsubscribe links and headers in your emails. Many MBPs (particularly Hotmail) pay attention to this and if they are not there, you are likely to get filtered. You can always use Tenon's auto unsubscribe handling if you don't want to deal with this on your end.
• Gmail pays particularly close attention to Message ID and Received headers. Message IDs that are formed incorrectly (without brackets < > and with wrong domain after @) can make Gmail think you are a spammer. The simplest way to create the right Message ID with Tenon is to not include one. Then Tenon will create a perfect Message ID for you.
• Links should include the domain that is sending the email. Also, popular url shorteners can be a bad idea because they are frequently used by spammers.
• A/B test your emails to optimize recipient engagement. Subject lines are particularly important. You can use Tenon's tracking statistics in order to measure A/B testing and improve your content.

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