Email Content Overview: Why Content Analysis in Email Spam Testing Matters

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

Content is the heart of your email. Sounds good, right? But to keep this heart beating in harmony with your subscribers, you should understand the basics, know certain tricks, and stay updated with all the latest trends.

We’re here to help you master the nuances of email content and choose the most suitable type to create your own content strategy.

What Is Email Content?

The term “email content” means everything you send in your message to someone’s mailbox. It can be any information sent to an unknown recipient, existing subscriber, or prospect either personally or through an email template builder or automation platform.

Types of Email Content

Luckily, there are many types of content that you can use to diversify your email campaign and achieve your goals. Each business needs its email marketing content plan, special format, and each message should be personalized to the specific audience segment it is sent to.

Here are the most common types of content:

Plain text: This can be short messages, excerpts of articles, blog posts, medical, technical, financial, contact, or other information that carries data that can be conveyed in plain text without attachments and formatting.

HTML: Making your emails with HTML code allows you to use different colors, fonts, styles, images, and various multimedia to create visually compelling and interactive content.

Images: Graphic elements in various formats (the most universally accepted file types for email are JPEG, PNG, and GIF) that are used to add visual interest, showcase products, and generally convey a message more effectively.

Links: Direct links, hyperlinks in the text, or various CTA buttons that lead to another web resource.

Video: Emails that include an embedded video are considered one of the latest trends for engaging subscribers, promoting services, or demonstrating products.

Audio: Voice messages, audiobooks, music, podcasts, sounds, and anything else that you want to convey in an audible format.

Attachments: Various documents, spreadsheets, educational materials, guides, other PDFs, and anything else that can add value to your message.

However, we’d like to point out that embedding audio and video in the email body is not a good idea in most cases. Spam filters can flag such content, affecting your email deliverability rate. So, if decide to add some new content part it is always better to conduct a spam test before sending the email to your subscribers.

So, we’ve covered the main types of content by format. Also, emails are divided by text amount, as it is also an essential factor in the campaign’s success.

By copy length, emails are usually classified into:

• short form – up to 50 words;
• standard – up to 100-125 words;
• long form – more than 150 words.

What is the best length for email content? Experienced email marketers say that to achieve the best results, the body of your email should be between 50 and 125 words. If you think that 125 words are not enough to convey everything you need to say, you’ll be surprised that if you write more, there will be chances to lose the reader’s attention at a certain point. Shorter texts perform better, show higher response rates, and are generally easier and faster to read. Break your content into paragraphs, add bullet points to structure it, and if you want to provide additional information, it’s best to add a “Learn More” link so that subscribers can conveniently read it.

The next criterion for categorizing email content is probably the most popular – by type of information they contain. For instance:

• Welcome letters
• Transactions
• Newsletters
• Sales/collaboration offers
• Promotions or advertisements
• Re-engagement emails
• Reminders
• Event announcements
• Thank you email
• Various triggered emails

We’ve already explored each of these types of email marketing in depth in our blog posts, so be sure to check them out.

Why Email Marketing Content Matters

Content is the key. Its importance and value in email marketing cannot be summarized enough, because what your email contains directly impacts your final results. It’s not just about sales and financial returns, but also about brand awareness, informing customers, and most importantly, building your company’s reputation.

Our statistics prove that businesses actively use email daily, so almost all of us receive emails regularly. Isn’t that right? Of course, it is, because our inboxes are crowded with various content that makes it hard to imagine life without it.

So, when you create your emails, building them with modern templates and filling them with different buttons, images, fonts, links, and attachments, always think about the flip side of the process – spam filters and their perception of your content.

Email Marketing Content Best Practices

There are a few tricks that you should know so that email spam filters perceive your content well, and recipients open and interact with it more often. Keep these things in mind when creating effective content for your email marketing campaigns:

1. To successfully avoid modern spam filters, create emails that subscribers will interact with, as the behavioral factor is crucial.
2. Content should be short and to the point. Always remember that people are busy and simply do not have time to read long and irrelevant texts.
3. Focus on something specific and valuable – don’t confuse your reader with a lot of offers, news, or any other information.
4. Don’t overload your email with links, check the resources you are referring to.
5. Use 1 call to action. There are different strategies for providing a call to action in emails, but in general, it is advisable to use 1 main button and place the rest as hyperlinks in the text or image, keeping a healthy balance.
6. Add graphic elements wisely, keeping in mind the correct proportion with the text – 60/40 – and adding alt text to them. Also, make sure all your images are optimized properly for the web so that they load quickly.
7. Be consistent and make content in line with your branding and overall marketing strategy. Customers get used to good service and emails, so maintain the quality, chosen tone, and style.
8. Keep your email content fresh and relevant. Newsletters should have updated information, don’t send the same letter week after week. You can create a content template just for specific types of emails – triggered, welcome series, follow-ups, etc., but other formats should spark interest in opening and reading each time.
9. Don’t overuse interactive elements such as media files, JavaScript, large attachments, and forms – instead, place them on a web page and add a link in your email.
10. Create dynamic content with personalized information based on the recipient’s specific need. For example, a brand with locations across the country can use dynamic links to redirect users to the right website based on their geographic data. It also can be a letter created based on behavior or a certain stage of the customer’s life cycle. Such messages show good results because people feel personal value in them.
11. You may often come across advice to avoid spam words in your email. Nowadays, this practice is considered a bit outdated due to the constant improvement of spam filters, but it is still not worth overusing such spammy methods.
12. Once sent, you won’t be able to change the content of the email, which is why it’s important to test thoroughly beforehand to make sure everything works perfectly and that spam filters accept your message well.

Email Content Analysis: Why It Is Crucial in Spam Testing

Obviously, the basic theory of how to create good email content is not enough to achieve strong results. Thus, we’ve reached the most important step in creating an email content strategy – spam testing. GlockApps’ Inbox Insight test allows you to test your content in different sending environments, and get your spam score, HTML support level, and email placement across the main global providers. By running our spam test, you send an email to a comprehensive mailing list and receive a detailed report on its effectiveness and useful tips for fixing issues.

Let’s take a closer look at the Content Analysis report in the GlockApps spam test:

1. In the Content Analysis tab, you can find information about your message size, images, and URLs used in the email.

2. The Email Information block contains your total message size, the size of the plain text and HTML parts, the size and count of the images, and the link count.

Total Message size counts email headers and embedded content.

Image size – the size of all external images associated with the message, not including embedded images.

Images count – total number of images (embedded and linked) used in the email content.

Link count – the number of URLs added to your email content.

3. In the Images section you will find the following information:

Preview – displays the used images.

Status – indicates whether or not the image was loaded properly.

URL – links used for inserting images into content.

Redirects – the amount of redirects for the image link.

Alt – the alternate text for the image when it is available in HTML.

Size – image size.

Response time – response time of the image URL.

4. In the Link section of the Content Analysis report you will see the following information:

Anchor Text – anchor text of the link if available.

Status – indicates whether or not the URL opened properly.

URL – link used in the email.

Redirects – quantity of redirects for the URL.

Size – the size of the web page the URL refers to.

Response time – response time of the web page.

5. The HTML checker part displays the calculation of your email’s overall support for different platforms and devices, providing a detailed view of the compatibility of your marketing email content created with HTML code.

The test generates a detailed list of warnings, indicating which clients fully support, partially support, or do not support the relevant HTML element, along with specific notes.

Which platforms are covered by the GlockApps HTML checker?

Our HTML checker calculates compatibility percentages for the following platforms:

Android: AOL, 1&1, Gmail, LaPoste.net, Orange, Outlook, ProtonMail, Samsung Email, SFR, WEB.DE, Yahoo! Mail

Desktop Webmail: 1&1, AOL, Fastmail, Free.fr, GMX, Gmail, HEY, LaPoste.net, Mail.ru, Orange, ProtonMail, RainLoop, SFR, T-online.de, WEB.DE, WP.pl, Yahoo! Mail

iOS: AOL, Apple Mail, GMX, Gmail, LaPoste.net, Orange, Outlook, ProtonMail, SFR, WEB.DE, Yahoo! Mail

macOS: Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook

Mobile Webmail: Gmail

Outlook.com: Outlook

Windows: Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook

Windows Mail: Outlook

You can view compatibility percentages for all platforms at once or select one or more platforms for specific analysis.

The information you get from the report with the detected warnings gives you an understanding of how it can affect your email campaign performance. Once you make changes to your HTML code and fix the errors, you will easily improve your results as recipients will see your message properly.

6. Tips on how to fix your email marketing content are also available in the Action Steps tab.

Our spam test reveals issues with your deliverability, sending infrastructure, and email content, and gives you helpful recommendations for improving your results. Be sure to read this tab carefully and follow the suggested steps to help improve your email performance.

Wrapping Up

High-quality email content is proven to take your customer relationships to the next level. Keeping your message valuable and readable increases the chances that your subscribers will read it and make the desired conversion. Pay attention to the proper creation of your content: don’t clutter it with unnecessary information, don’t overload it with a large number of characters and a ton of calls to action.

Once you’ve created new content of email, always pre-test it with special tools like our Inbox Insight test. This way, you can make important changes at the drafting stage, increase your inbox deliverability, and get the most out of your emails.

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