We all get far more spam than mail we actually want to receive, so we protect ourselves with ever more complex spam filters, in an attempt to stem the flow of dating offers, male genital improvers and get rich quick schemes into our inboxes.

These spam filters are of course an industry in themselves and as the vast majority of email is spam, they occasionally get it wrong. Here are some pointers to avoid this happening to your mailings.

Email marketing can be a difficult medium to master, but following a few guidelines can improve your results enormously just by helping you avoid bad practice.

Probably the best advice is to put yourself in your recipient’s position. Go to your email inbox and look at which messages you read, which ones you don’t even open because they make you think ‘spam’ and which ones go straight into your junk folder - then use that information to help you design your campaigns.

When creating any form of advertising it's vital to get the right balance between text and imagery.
Too much text and the viewer will lose interest, too little and they'll be left bewildered as to what it is they are looking at.

Applying this to email design adds a few extra considerations: spam rating, legibility, cross platform bugs and more. In this best practice guide we are going to look a little more in depth into these areas and their implication for HTML email design. By the end you should be confident in how to correctly render images in emails along with keeping the right balance between text and graphics. As you'll see, when it comes to email, design matters.

There was once a joke in the industry that some email marketing sales people, of certain companies, told their customers this: their company had such good relationships with ISPs and free email services like Hotmail that their white-listing team could ring up if customers get blocked, offer to take the opposing counterpart out for a coffee and hey presto, the customer would be immediately unblocked.

You know the really funny thing is that for a moment I actually did think that was true – the salesman believed it and certain customers did as well!