Email Template Best Practices You'll Fall in Love With

Email Template Best Practices You’ll Fall in Love With

It’s February and Valentine’s Day is right around the corner. It’s a time devoted to sharing the love and here at LiveIntent we love email, especially email templates. So from the bottom of our hearts, we’d like to share these email template best practices with you!

Be Mobile Responsive

We live in a mobile world. 48% US consumers said their mobile phone is their primary device for checking email. Having a mobile responsive template is essential to ensuring a positive visual experience for your readers.

Account for Gmail Clipping

This one is super important. Gmail has limitations to how long a newsletter can be (102KB to be exact). Any bigger and your email content will be clipped.

Look familiar?

If your ad slots (or content for that matter) fall within the clipped portion then not only will readers not see them but Gmail will clip the code that accounts for tracking opens and your ads won’t serve.

We highly recommend keeping your newsletter content within the 102KB parameter. If you have a ton of email content, try breaking it up into multiple newsletters.

Cleaning Your Subscriber Lists

No one likes bots or dummy-email accounts. They drag down performance and artificially inflate impressions. Take some time to scrub your subscriber list to clear the clutter, reduce cost, and keep your view of your userbase up-to-date.

But we wouldn’t want to limit our affection to just the Valentine’s season. These template monetization best practices will have you feeling warm-and-fuzzy year-round.

Ad Slots Above the Fold

We’ve seen that ad slot placed at the top of newsletters or above the fold, exhibit higher click-through-rates leading to higher CPMs for publishers. Makes sense, right? Top of sight, top of mind. Having your ad units above the fold can also deliver a cleaner look-and-feel to the newsletter. Below is an example of what we mean:

Testing Your Ad Slot Placement:

Have you ever opened an email and scrolled to the bottom right away to see how long it was? We know we have. Sometimes ad slots at the bottom of newsletters show strong performance. That’s why experimentation with your ad slot placement is encouraged. Your LiveIntent team is here to help you run those tests and assess their results effectively.

Use a single-column template and avoid side-by-side formats

Using a single-column format opens up a lot of doors, doors that lead to better monetization (i.e MONEY!). Let’s take a look at what’s possible with a single column.

Multiple ad sizes. The streamlined template frees you from being constrained to single-size demand. Single-column offers you the flexibility to receive demand from a range of ad sizes (all IAB standard sizes, high-impact 970×250 and 970×550, and custom sizes). By allowing more ad-sizes, you’re able to accept more demand, which can lead to greater bid density and, ultimately, higher CPMs.
Collapse, don’t do it. No demand for a particular ad slot? No problem. With a single-column format, ad slots collapse when demand isn’t there or doesn’t meet your price floor. Additionally, our ad slots allow you to serve Fallback ads (default creative selected by you!) when there’s insufficient demand.
Finding Balance. We don’t want our newsletters too hot or too cold, we want them just right. The single-column format generally makes it easier to measure the ad-to-content ratio and experiment with different blockings of ads and content.