Email Best Practices

• Personalise the email
• If possible cater to the individual preference in frequency and content (relevance of topic)
• Be timely - maintain a regular time interval - 
• Make the subject line short and attractive and persuasive to the target audience
• Perform an A/B testing of subject line to choose the best
• Do audience segmentation and provide personally relevant content 
• Simple to view design - aesthetically perfect and simple to go through
• Keep right balance between text and images
• Avoid large images that replaces text
• Use absolute links to images ( img src="http://www.symbusis.com/newsletter/jan2014/tree.jpg" )
• Use web safe fonts
• Avoid javascript
• Avoid style sheet embedding
• Use inline styling to get best result
• 600px is the optimum width of the page - Avoid too wide
• Make both HTML and text only versions
• Test in all devises for proper rendering
• Alt text for images - Do not put most important information as an image only
• Highlight call-to-action and conversion request - upper left part 
• Offer something of interest to audience
• Avoid words and phrases ticked as spam by ISP and SPAM filters in the email
• Go for opt-in to join email - Double opt in is the best to avoid blocking
• Make available opt-out facility
• Be consistent in the FROM name
• Identify pinterest of audience
• Use pinterest icons in your web site for articles. 
• Add a facility to share your email
• Keep the email in your server to view alternatively

Industry averages

• Open rate - 20%
• Click through rate - 3%
• Unsubscribe rate - 1%

If found useful, buy me coffee for the time you saved.