Email design - best practice

It is advised to keep emails to a fixed width of no more than 600 pixels. This ensures that, in the majority of cases, the email can be viewed as intended across different email clients.

All Reapit emails must be a fixed width; they are sent via Microsoft Outlook which cannot send responsive email layouts that resize to fit the device the email is viewed on.

All images should be provided in JPEG or PNG format as these have the best compatibility in emails. For the majority of email clients, animated GIFs are not compatible, so should not be used.
If a property image does not have an image added, awaiting image is shown. The image below is the standard Reapit awaiting image; if you wish to have a custom awaiting image, please provide an image file with the required design.

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Video links can be included within emails but cannot be embedded within the email.

Fonts
Web-safe fonts should be selected to ensure the font is common on all computers, tablets and mobile phones so the email will be viewable as designed on all devices.

The table below shows a list of web-safe fonts:

Serif

Georgia
Palatino Linotype
Times New Roman

Sans-serif

Arial
Arial Black
Comic Sans MS
Impact
Lucida Sans Unicode
Tahoma
Trebuchet MS
Verdana

Monospace

Courier New
Lucida Console

Formatting Merged Text

Merged text can have formatting applied, including font type, size, colour and weight. Bullet points can also be added to property Attributes and the Accommodation Summary.

It is not possible to format text in different ways that is stored within one field in Reapit

Colours
Emails use RGB or hexadecimal values for all colours. Colours should be provided in one of these colour values only.

Subject Line & Preview Text
It is recommended that your company name is included within the email subject line; this is due to the from field containing the name of the sender, rather than the name of your company.

Preview text is a snippet of the email body, typically displayed next to the subject line in the subscriber’s inbox. This is generally the first line of the email but can be customised to show particular text where required.

Example subject and preview on an iPad:

Salutations
Emails, including applicant-to-property-match emails, that are sent to an individual can include the contact’s preferred salutation. The standard property-to-applicant-match email is sent with all matched applicants in the BCC field so therefore cannot include their name. However, if this is required, a personalised property-to-applicant-match email can be provided.

Signatures
Email signatures can be added into Reapit templates but are not always required, dependent on how Outlook and your email server are setup. If signatures are shown when writing a new message in Outlook they will not be automatically added to Reapit emails. Signatures which are added on the email exchange server, once the email is sent, will show on Reapit emails.
Signatures added on the exchange server which are over 600 pixels wide can cause formatting issues with some email clients as it is wider than the Reapit email. Some signature applications can be set up to not include the signature if an email contains certain words or phrases. If these are provided to Reapit they can be included in all emails.

Your IT Company will be able to provide you with details on how your email signatures are set up.

A disclaimer should be included on emails to give all parties a fair level of protection; this can be in the form of text or a link to a disclaimer page on your website. It is advised to have your own legal team write/review this.