How do you make for optimal delivery of your content? To start you'll have to write the body of your email, of course. Then focus on your marketing objectives. But you should always think about the rules that this involves.

Good practices affect your approach to marketing on both editorial and technical sides.

You should use text and images to make your content exciting.  Video is still generally only poorly supported in the email space.

Despite text & image being common, there are many rules. Spam filters are not very tolerant. Make sure you apply the points listed below:

The ALT attribute for images

Images are not displayed by default

In addition to the deliverability issues that come from an excessive use of images, there is a good chance that your email will look like this on a large number of email clients...

Webmail is modernizing. We understand wanting to display images by default. Just remember that in certain sectors, esp. B2B, it can have a negative impact. You should know that in B2B, half of the people will just delete an email when no text displays.

Images are essential in the body of emails. They can summarize information, illustrate examples, and generally make the message more aesthetic.

Be careful: email isn't the same as a website. You should consider the rules when using images in emails. That will help you avoid jeopardizing your deliverability.

Fill in the ALT attribute

This is a must. Never forget to fill in the ALT attributes when creating your campaign. This has a double impact:

• You improve deliverability: the anti-spam services want to see this element,
• You show the recipient what the images that don't load or are being blocked represent

Where to host your images?

Use the same domain you used as a sender to host your images.

You won't have to worry about this at all if you use an email platform like Cakemail. We will host your images and make them load lightning-fast.

Image format

There are two rules to follow about image format:

• Always use reasonable resolutions. Very large images affect your delivery by loading your emails too slowly,
• If you are not using an email platform.. always specify the size of your images in HTML. This will help the email load faster.

Put as much text as images

The text/image ratio is a rule that often comes up in email best practices. For good reason: it's fundamental for your deliverability.

You should know that spammers have taken the habit of sending their messages via images. These become very difficult or even impossible for anti-spam filters to decipher. Fraudsters use keywords like "viagra", "money", or "free" all the time. This is why fraudulent communications are often conveyed in images. That's why spam-conscious organizations don't place much trust in senders using little or no text.

You can very easily be considered a spammer if you use too many images at the expense of text. We advise you to respect a minimum ratio of 50/50 between text and images and, if possible, to aim for 70/30, in favour of text.

This isn't an exact science. Try as much as possible to get your message across via textual content. Images should only be there to synthesize, make reading easier, or decorate. Don't use images to convey what could have been a paragraph.

Js / Flash

Forget making your content dynamic with JavaScript, and stick to HTML / CSS. Flash is incompatible with email.

Related content

• The code of your template and its ability to adapt to all devices make it a strength for deliverability,

• Of the factors to optimize your open rate, the subject is by far the most important,

• To go a step further in improving your open rate, consider optimizing your preheader.

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