Fundamentals and Best Practices

What is a Message

A message is the email content you plan to send out in a campaign. Each message includes the following elements:

From Name: The sender's name. This is optional but strongly recommended. It should be instantly recognizable to the recipient to avoid being marked as spam, deleted, or ignored.
From Email: The sender's email address. This must be a monitored mailbox. Avoid using "no-reply" or similar addresses. You will need to verify ownership of this email address before sending it.
Subject: The best subject line is concise, clear, and compelling, grabbing the recipient's attention and encouraging them to open the email. It often includes a sense of urgency or a benefit, making the reader curious or eager to learn more.
Body: This is the main content of the email. Direct Mail lets you create rich emails with images, links, and so on and automatically generates a plain-text version for recipients who prefer that format. You can use our built-in templates (link) or import your own designs (link).
Attachments (Optional): Files or folders you want to attach to your email. Due to strict file size limits, attachments should by small in size. In many cases, it is better to upload your attachments to a file hosting service and send out a link to download instead.
Extra Headers (Optional): These can be used to specify Cc or Bcc recipients, a different Reply-To email address, or other custom purposes. Learn more here.

Messages can be created, edited, and deleted in the Messages tab. There is no limit to the number of messages you can create.

Two very important things to keep in mind when drafting your message:

Ensure the content of your message is relevant to what people signed up for and is interesting or useful. Irrelevant or uninteresting content will likely result in high numbers of spam complaints and unsubscribes combined with low open rates. This kind of negative feedback signal will make it more difficult for future campaigns to reach the inbox. This is due to the way modern anti-spam systems track the “reputation” of the sender. Conversely, senders whose email campaigns generate high numbers of opens and clicks and low numbers of complaints and unsubscribes will enjoy good inbox placement.
Your email campaigns should include the following important information in the footer, in an easily readable font size and color:
- An unsubscribe link. Our templates include this by default, but if you are importing your own, here's how you can add an unsubscribe link.
- Sender’s contact information, such as the company name and physical address.
- A “permission reminder”. This is a sentence that reminds the recipient how they joined your mailing list. For example, "You are receiving this email because you signed up at [link to your website]" or "You are receiving this email as a customer of [business name]." Permission reminders are effective at reducing spam complaints by reminding recipients that they gave you permission to email them.