10 Email Content Best Practices to Avoid Spam and Increase Open Rate

Did you know that one email subscriber is equal to $1 in profit?

But this is only when your emails reach your target audience. This means you need to ensure that your emails don’t get lost in the spam and have well-optimized email content that brings in clicks and results.

Effective email marketing requires attention to detail, particularly with regard to email content. You need to be careful about what content you put in your emails.

Whether you are dropping a cold email, an announcement email, weekly newsletters, product promotion emails, or deals & discounts emails, your agenda will only be fulfilled when you follow the right email content writing practices.

That is, avoid looking like spam, establish relevance, and offer good readability and a clear message on what your readers will get out of your emails.

So, here we have come up with these 10 best email content practices that will help you boost your deliverability(avoiding spam) and drive clicks on your emails.

Email content plays a crucial role in deliverability and open rates.

Using clear & relevant content for your email subject lines can help you increase deliverability. A well-crafted subject line that does not contain spammy phrases can help you avoid being flagged as spam or filtered out by email providers, increasing the chances of reaching the intended recipient's inbox.

Similarly, if your email content is not engaging or relevant to your subscribers, they are less likely to open your emails as 64% of recipients decide to open an email based on the subject line content. Whereas personalized email marketing content and subject lines that offer relevance show a 50% higher open rate.

Now, let’s look at the key things you should keep in mind while creating your email marketing content that brings in good results…

Here are 10 best email content practices that will make your emails engaging, relevant, and conversational, helping you avoid the spam folder and increase your open rate.

Proper email campaign management is crucial to avoiding spam filters and ensuring your messages land in subscribers’ inboxes.

To start, always get permission to send an email — only send to those who have willingly signed up for your content and have characteristics that line up with your buyer personas. This not only respects your recipients’ preferences but also improves your sender's reputation.

It’s also crucial to avoid using spam trigger words and phrases. These are terms that email providers view as‌ harmful to their customers, such as “fast cash”, “as seen on”, or “full refund”. Essentially, you want to avoid using any kind of messaging that comes across as over-promising or over-sensationalizing.

It’s also important to avoid using strange formatting in an effort to “stand out”. Instead, use email content templates to keep your formatting professional and focus on sharing relevant email content that’s personalized to your audience.

Build trust with your ideal customer by using a clear, professional, and identifiable sender name and email address. This is key to protecting your sender's reputation, avoiding spam folders, and promoting higher open rates.

For instance, instead of “[email protected]”, try “[email protected]”. Instead of “[email protected]”, try “[email protected]”.

There’s a caveat here, too. Using misleading or confusing sender information doesn’t just put you at risk for spam and higher unsubscribe rates, but it can even get you blacklisted.

TL;DR: Always remain transparent and professional by using a professional sender name and email address, just like Wander does in their email marketing content.

Did you know that 69% of consumers report emails as spam after reading the subject lines?

That’s why it’s vital to:

A good rule of thumb?

Immediately list the value your audience will walk away with after reading your email.

For instance, “8 productivity tools your B2B firm can’t live without” or “How to build a project timeline, step-by-step”.

Since they’ll have a clear picture in their minds of the value they’ll receive, recipients will be more inclined to open your emails — as long as the “value” you’re providing can help them solve their specific pain points!

Here’s an example from Alex (ReliableSoft Academy) to get inspired from:

The email preview text is the additional line under the subject line that gives recipients a further sneak peek or “preview” into what they’ll be learning or getting from your email.

In addition to the subject line, one study shows that at least 24% of recipients read ‌preview text before deciding to open an email. Check out the following email preheader examples
which generated a 50+% open rate for inspiration.

To write captivating preview text, start with a value-driven verb and phrase, such as
“Discover how to”, “Learn about”, or “Recieve a ____ to help you ____”.

Piggybacking on our previous subject line example, “How to build a project timeline, step-by-step”, your preview text could be: “Discover how to please stakeholders with a strategic project timeline”.

And if you’re looking for additional inspiration, take a peek at what Semrush is doing:

In a sea of competitors, the only way to grab your target audience’s attention is by making them feel like you’ve crafted your email content and copy just for them.

Beyond just addressing the recipient by name, go the extra mile by personalizing your greeting based on their preferences, pain points, and past activity.

For instance, you could bring up a topic they’re passionate about, a page they’ve recently viewed, or remind them about a previous offer they’ve shown interest in.

Here’s an example:

Here are some additional personalized greeting ideas:

Speaking of audience segments, always make it a point to personalize your email marketing content by customer type. You can do this by setting up automation for email segmentation. This increases engagement and reduces the likelihood of your emails being marked as spam.

Since segmented email marketing content targets specific groups within your current audience, it helps to further drive your personalization efforts so you can solve each audience segment’s individual problems.

Depending on your unique business goals, you can segment your email list by demographic, purchase history, interest, engagement level, action step, pain point, offer, or funnel stage.

Simply lay out your email marketing content goals for each segment so you can send each of them relevant information and personalized offers.

For instance, let’s say you’re a pet insurance provider that’s looking to create demand-generation campaigns. You have an audience segment that’s interested in adopting pets, another that lives and breathes all things pet content, and a third that’s interested in caretaking tips.

In this case, you could share the following targeted email content:

These email marketing content options can help you build your reputation, educate your audience according to the topics they’re most interested in, and promote your service in a subtle and helpful way.

You can also share snippets from some of your most beloved blog posts when relevant. For instance, if the following blog post on operational excellence gets rave reviews from your B2B audience segment, consider repurposing the most valuable content assets inside of it.

Here’s a checklist on how to achieve operational excellence:

Some additional examples of valuable content you could send subscribers include:

Pro-Tip: It’s also important to clean your email list often so you can keep it up-to-date. Be sure to remove inactive subscribers and reach out to those who haven't interacted with your emails in a long time to see if they’re still interested in the content. This improves your open rates and reduces bounce rates, both essential metrics for hitting the inbox.

Keep your emails clean and professional with branded email content templates and engaging email copy.

Break up large chunks of text with bulleted lists, quick checklists, and engaging visuals, like short-form videos and screenshots. Consider including other forms of media when relevant, too, such as audio content (i.e., a link to your latest podcast episode), interactive content, and infographics. If you're wondering how to send video through email, just ensure it's in a compatible format, like MP4, and keep the file size manageable.

When writing the email copy, focus on speaking directly to your target reader. Your goal should be to create copy that's easy to understand, engaging, and inspires a specific action.

Here’s a great example of how Asana is directly speaking to its users and has clear action elements for user interaction.

Pro-Tip: Consider using an AI copyediting tool like Writer to spot copywriting red flags, such as misused jargon, non-inclusive terms, overly-formal sentences, and clarity issues.

To further build trust, infuse social proof in your sales campaigns, such as customer review screenshots, real customer stories, and positive brand mentions.

Hold onto your audience’s attention as soon as they give it to you by keeping your email calls-to-actions (CTAs) above the fold. In other words, make sure your CTAs stay visible as subscribers scroll down your email.

When constructing your CTAs, keep them simple and specific, so there’s no confusion.

For instance, “sign up here”, “claim your discount”, or “grab your free trial”.

Did you know that image-heavy emails without enough text can trigger spam filters? That’s why it’s critical to maintain a 60/40 text-to-image ratio when creating your email content.

The good news?

If your email has 500 characters or more, you can ignore this advice. In this case, your content-to-image ratio does not affect your email deliverability rate.

TL;DR: As long as your emails have 500 or more characters, it doesn’t matter how many images you add.

Make sure all of your email marketing content includes a clear, easy-to-find unsubscribe link. It may seem counterproductive, but this is an important email content practice as it respects your recipients' autonomy and reduces the chance of your emails being marked as spam.

You can make the unsubscribe process simple and hassle-free by including a quick link with “Unsubscribe Here” anchor text. Just make sure you don’t take the recipient through endless forms or polls before they can officially unsubscribe.

Effective email campaign management requires a careful blend of respecting email deliverability best practices, crafting relevant and engaging content, and maintaining a clean email list.

That’s why it’s vital to create an email marketing workflow that includes all of the checks and balances your team needs to deliver high-quality content.

That’s it for now, marketers.

Here’s to your success! 🥂

PS: Need a way to ensure the quality of your email list?
👉 Try Clearout’s Real-Time Email Validation.