For my company, we avoid using exclamation marks in our Subject Lines because we have concerns about deliverability / being marked as Spam.
Does the same rule apply for Preview Text, or should we consider it a more open space to experiment with the exclamation mark?
What do others do? Any links to blogs on best practices for preview text would be appreciated as a quick Google returned virtually nada of relevance.
TIA!
Lisa
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Q: We avoid using exclamation marks in our Subject Lines because we have concerns about deliverability / being marked as Spam. Does the same rule apply for Preview Text [in emails], or should we consider it a more open space to experiment with the exclamation mark?
Short A: n/a
Longer A:
These big dogs are responsible for sending / testing over 25% of the world’s non-spam email. If it’s not on their radar it should probably be considered a low priority concern.
- see 15 Email Deliverability Best Practices for Gmail (SparkPost)
- see Make It to the Inbox—Not the Spam Folder—with Litmus Spam Testing (Litmus)
- see Top Tips to Avoid Spam Filters When Sending Emails (SendGrid)
- see How to Avoid Spam Filters (MailChimp)
- see A Marketer’s Guide to Email Deliverability: How to Avoid Email Spam Filters (HubSpot)
As a side note, SparkPost also has some excellent information about ramping up sends to large lists (>1M contacts) and warming up sends to lists in general. Just excellent stuff every email marketer should indelibly impress in their brains. 
Finally, gotta shout out to our HubSpot girls Lindsay Kolowich and Beth Dunn for their awesome job directly addressing the use of exclamation points in email. Enjoy.
- see Do You Really Need That Exclamation Point? [Flowchart]
(see image)
Nice.
Always happy to help you build on HubSpot.
Best,
Frank
Help find this post quickly … accept this solution now.
Thanks for the tips @MFrankJohnson!
I want to pull in a few other users who have discussed email marketing before to get them in the conversation: @Jems212, @sksonu, @theScott, @DMurphy1 do you all have any thoughts on when exclamation points are appropriate?! 
Thanks,
Jenny
I also think it has a lot to do with your personas. I used to work in higher ed, so using an occasional exclamation point was acceptable since out audience was predominantly 16 and 17 year-olds and much of our content was fun and conversational. Now I work for a company who sells tech products to law enforcement. I never use them in email now.
As the infographic says so well, use your words to make your point.
The easy answer is to A/B test. Best practices don’t matter because they aren’t referring to your audience. They’re just standardized averages. What you need to know is how your recipients respond.
Is it bad if I say, though, that I don’t know that this is even an issue worth worrying about? Personally, I would want to test the preview text as a whole rather than being concerned with an individual punctuation mark. The preview is really just a line of ad copy with the goal of getting the click. I would test different sentiments, writing styles, CTAs, lengths, etc. - just like any other short-form ad copy. I’m betting those more macro-level tests would have a larger impact than the micro issue of whether an exclamation point exists in the text.
