Email Marketing 

Interactive and fast, email marketing is the most powerful and cost-effective communications tool around. 

What better way to develop your customer base and drive new traffic to your web site at minimal cost, right?

Unless your marketing message is carefully crafted to deliver results -- solid leads and closed deals  -- then you've done little but waste valuable time and resources.  Worse yet, you may even alienate many valuable prospects.

Top 20 Email Marketing Tips 1)   Be clear on what you want your campaign to achieve - more subscribers? brand awareness?  better customer relations?  new sales leads? 2)  Track all reader activity - delivery, clickthru's, open rates, etc.  Try testing with different headers, copy styles, graphical elements.  Something as simple as a new button or typeface can produce surprising results in your response rates. 3)  Be sure neither you nor your email service provider are black-listed anywhere.   4)  Format.  You have mere seconds (some statistics report as few as one or two seconds) to attract and keep a potential reader.  While content is always king, and beauty may only be skin deep, the results are in - in most cases HTML performs better overall. 5)  Make subscribing or unsubscribing easy, and state how or why they are getting your email - this builds trust and credibility.   6) Email often enough. 39% of email readers, given a high level of control over their subscriptions, choose to receive information at least twice a month or more and only one in four subscribers choose to receive email less than once a month. (source: Marketing Sherpa's Email Benchmark Guide 2006) 7) Make your subject line enticing,  Use personalization and action words, keep it short, and avoid all caps. 8) Use your company name (or brand name), not just an email address, and never use an unfamiliar person's name or email. 9) Accommodate various preview pane and blocked image settings so that users can view key content even when images are blocked or only a portion is viewable.  ALT tags on your graphic images is vital where users block graphic content. 10) Provide a link to a web version, at or near the top of your email content. 11) Use a "forward-to-a-friend" link to a web form which will launch a copy of the message to another recipient (and also gather and track the new recipient's info). 12) Provide a link to allow readers to change their address or email preferences. 13) Include an offer to subscribe andlink it to your site's subscription form, or a specially designed landing page. 14) Request in your email that you be added to their safe-senders list: A simple line of text, preferably placed at or near the top of the email. 15) Include at least two non-email links pointing to other destinations on your site. 16) Include a link to your site's search function in email body copy. 17)  Link to your privacy policy or statement.  Readers want to know it's there, regardless of whether or not they read it. 18) Clearly show all your contact info in the email - phone, email, web and physical (not P.O Box) address. 19) Use ALT tags -- Some email readers are set not to show graphics (pictures or images) An ALT tag tells readers what they would be looking at if the picture were viewable in their email inbox. ALT tags also reinforce relevance, with readers and with search engines.  On every image (ie your logo and action buttons such as unsubscribe, contact, forward to a friend, specials, etc) be sure to include in your ALT tag who you are and what your offer is, and or the action you want the reader to take. A good ALT tag is two to 10 (short) words long.    20) Top Email Click-thru Rates by Industry:   Automotive (5.7%) Conference events (14.2%) Consumer packaged goods (8.6%) Entertainment (8.1%) Financial services (11.0%) Government (9.5%) Insurance (9.5%) Pharmaceutical (23.8%) Publishing (55.6%) Restaurants (57.5%) Retail (6.0%) Technology (10.9%) Travel and hospitality (23.4%) Source:  Harte-Hanks Postfuture Index of comparative e-mail metrics for January-June 20