# Email sending best practices Human Guide

## What This Is For
Use this skill when the user wants to review, audit, improve, or plan email sending best practices. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for email marketing: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the Email sending best practices agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for email sending best practices.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the Email sending best practices guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- diagnose poor inbox placement or sender reputation
- review consent flows, double opt-in, list hygiene, or unsubscribe behavior
- improve subject lines, preview text, sender identity, personalization, or rendering
- choose between campaign, lifecycle automation, and transactional email
- plan onboarding, retention, re-engagement, dunning, or product-update email programs
- review a Loops setup for best-practice gaps
- Identify the primary problem:
- Loops-specific operational behavior
- Load only the relevant reference files.
- Give generic email best-practice guidance first.
- Add Loops-specific caveats, defaults, and product behavior where relevant.
- If the user is drifting into cold email or promotional use of transactional email, call that out directly and steer toward opt-in lifecycle or marketing sends instead.

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: When To Use, Working Style, Category Routing, Output Checklist, Supporting file: references/audience-and-consent.md, Source URLs, Core Guidance, Lists vs Segments, Preference And Unsubscribe Management, Importing And Audience Expansion.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- Do not default to this skill for pure implementation tasks like "send an event with the Loops API" or "wire up transactional email in Next.js". Use the `loops-api` skill for those.
- avoid stale or low-intent imports
- Do not treat old CSV imports as safe by default.
- empty cells do not overwrite existing data
- `null` is required to clear a field
- Pending double-opt-in contacts do not trigger normal contact webhooks until they confirm.
- If custom HTML/CSS behavior is required, Loops expects MJML imports rather than arbitrary HTML email content in normal editor flows.
- Avoid fragmenting traffic across many domains. Loops explicitly recommends a single well-established sending domain over multiple weak or occasional domains.

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the Email sending best practices human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the loops-so/skills skill entry for `loops-email-sending-best-practices`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

# Email Sending Best Practices

This skill helps review and plan healthy email programs. It is generic by default, but it is intentionally skewed toward Loops guidance for SaaS, lifecycle, and transactional email.

## When To Use

Use this skill when the task is about email quality, risk, or strategy rather than low-level API implementation.

Typical use cases:

- diagnose poor inbox placement or sender reputation
- review consent flows, double opt-in, list hygiene, or unsubscribe behavior
- improve subject lines, preview text, sender identity, personalization, or rendering
- choose between campaign, lifecycle automation, and transactional email
- plan onboarding, retention, re-engagement, dunning, or product-update email programs
- review a Loops setup for best-practice gaps

Do not default to this skill for pure implementation tasks like "send an event with the Loops API" or "wire up transactional email in Next.js". Use the `loops-api` skill for those.

## Working Style

When this skill is active:

1. Identify the primary problem:
   - deliverability
   - audience/consent
   - content/design
   - email type/program strategy
   - Loops-specific operational behavior
2. Load only the relevant reference files.
3. Give generic email best-practice guidance first.
4. Add Loops-specific caveats, defaults, and product behavior where relevant.
5. If the user is drifting into cold email or promotional use of transactional email, call that out directly and steer toward opt-in lifecycle or marketing sends instead.

## Category Routing

- Deliverability, sender reputation, domain setup, warming, inbox placement, Postmaster, BIMI, or large-list sends:
  Read `references/deliverability.md`
- Consent, list hygiene, double opt-in, preference centers, mailing lists, segmentation, or stale audiences:
  Read `references/audience-and-consent.md`
- Subject lines, preview text, sender fields, personalization, styling, themes, dark mode, or template/design review:
  Read `references/content-and-design.md`
- Campaign vs loop vs transactional, onboarding/lifecycle sequencing, product updates, or email KPI framing:
  Read `references/email-types-and-program-strategy.md`
- Loops-specific behavior such as `addToAudience`, transactional tracking differences, attachments, webhooks, or multi-domain constraints:
  Read `references/loops-operational-caveats.md`

## Output Checklist

Aim to leave the user with:

- the most likely root cause or opportunity
- a concrete set of recommended changes
- any Loops-specific caveats that materially change the recommendation
- the metrics or signals that should be watched after the change

When relevant, explicitly separate:

- immediate fixes
- medium-term program improvements
- things that are out of scope or risky to infer from limited evidence

---

## Supporting file: references/audience-and-consent.md

# Audience And Consent

## Source URLs

- https://loops.so/docs/contacts/double-opt-in
- https://loops.so/docs/contacts/email-blocklist
- https://loops.so/docs/contacts/mailing-lists
- https://loops.so/docs/contacts/filters-segments
- https://loops.so/docs/deliverability/maintaining-a-clean-list
- https://loops.so/docs/add-users/csv-upload

## Core Guidance

- Only send marketing email to recipients who clearly opted in.