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Emails
General best practices for writing emails
Guidelines for writing emails
George Orwell's six elementary rules for writing- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
General best practices for writing emails
- All emails MUST be from a real person. Do not send email from a no-reply or system account.
- Remember that you're not designing a printable piece of paper, but an actionable email.
- Make sure there is one clear action in the email. Don't add confusion with multiple actions.
- Have a clear title, lead with "Scaffold" if possible.
- Make sure it has a clear preview, or "toast" that the reader can easily see in thier email queue, be it Mobile, Outlook, or gmail. If they can't tell what its about without clicking into it, they may never read it.
- Test on mobile. Don't assume it looks good just because it looks good on your Hi-Res Mac. Make it work well on mobile first, and then on Outlook. Hold your phone at arms length to make sure its still legible.
- Font Sizes & Colors:
- The magic number is 4. Use at most 4 font sizes and 4 colors.
- Text should 18px if you want people to read it.
- Legal text or other boilerplate that's less important can be 12px to 14px.
- Bold counts as a font size and color.
- Generally, use the Scaffold Brand Color as a highlight color and grey for smaller less important text like boilerplate.
- Yes, white is a color too!
- Remember, the emails are FOR the readers. The number one priority needs to be making them usable, not adding cool design elements.
- Watch out for using industry jargon in emails, don't waste space with things people outside the business might not understand.
- While testing, send emails to people directly through the app. Forwarding an email destroys the formatting.