Many sites distribute costly templates for professional emails, but free email template downloads provide a much quicker and budget-friendly way to communicate with your customers. Whether promoting a product, site, or general information related to your company, these free email drastically improve your marketing campaign. With Email Template Pro, you can find the exact template you are looking for such as a newsletter or showcase. Each free template has a small description to provide you with the exact information the template design offers.

Designing email templates can often take hours and are sometimes too specific to use for the next email. For the most efficient process, Email Template Pro  gives a broad but professional looking list of email templates, perfect for any type of company email. These free templates take seconds to download and are even quicker to implement into the email form. Provide the titles and small body paragraphs into the template, along with any pictures you wish to show, whether a product or Web site. Once you are finished, you can send the email to hundreds or thousands of customers on the company’s distribution list. The chances of response and visitations from customers will go up dramatically after viewing your customized email, and you can repeat the same process for your next mailing.

Email Template Pro features customized color templates for users as well. The “Opt-In” free email templates have a green, red, blue, or sometimes orange variation. Use this to your advantage by changing the color each time you send out a new email to provide the customer with a different, updated look. The color aspect may also attract more attention and larger responses. Pick from four different colors.

To take full advantage of email templates, browse through StreamSend. This site provides simple ways to create, manage, track, and use statistical data gathered from email sending. Carefully look through their list of ideas and links to make your emails worth the time and effort you originally put into them. The tour on their StreamSend’s home page will give a step-by-step process to success.

In an effort to gain the competitive edge businesses are continually trying to find ways to grab client attention and be remembered long after their competitors’ advertising attempts have fallen to the wayside. With this mindset it can be easy to lean towards using Flash imagery in your email marketing campaign, and while this may be a brilliant idea in a perfect world we are far from enjoying such a scenario anytime soon.

Where as there are only a handful of popular web browsers and they nearly all support Flash, there are countless potential email servers that you may be sending your email to, and chances are that the majority of them will in some way impede your Flash advertising. For this very reason alone, we recommend straying from the bright lights and sticking to the basics in terms of email marketing.

Your animation may be cute, perhaps even hysterical and relevant, but when it causes excessive download times, email crashes or is simply stripped from the message by the client all of your hard work will end in being counter-productive.

By far and away, for the time being, a simple, professional template is your best bet in terms of producing effective, meaningful marketing. In this way, you are able to keep things simple on a level that will ensure your message successfully reaches nearly every recipient while still being able to add zest and personal style.

For practical tools that can help you further increase the effectiveness of using email templates, we recommend that you visit StreamSend. With StreamSend, you will find professional help organizing your email marketing projects and are provided with a private IP address to ensure that keeping it simple will also keep it effective.

Every so often, you’ll check your email and find a plain text sales promotion. It’s not eye-catching, interesting, or easily understood. What do you do? Delete it. That’s right, you delete this perfectly good email.

The reason most people delete emails such as the one from the example is because they don’t have the time, nor do they want to spend the time, to read the copy. They want headlines and pictures so they can look at it and instantly know what the email is about. So if you’re not using things like pictures and headlines,  your missing out. Big time!

The easiest way to grab a reader’s attention is with a picture. Most successful emails have one near the top of their email. The purpose is to draw the reader in, and it almost always works. The catch-22 is that  you have to be very careful about the pictures you use. For example, for a car dealership to include a picture of a puppy doesn’t make a lot of sense. But if that puppy is riding in the newest model of their top-selling car, that picture will be much more effective.

You also have to customize the photos to suite the audience the email is being sent to. For example, clothing manufacturers that target teens and young adults would not benefit from using pictures in which the models are in their 40s. The same is true on the flip side. If you’re targeting and older audience, don’t use pictures of 20-somethings.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and with a little thoughtful preparation you can make those thousand words count!

Every time you send a newsletter, announcement, or promotional email you try everything you can think of to draw your reader in. Once you’ve got them, the body of the email gives them the information you’re trying to get a cross. So, how do you get them to that point?

One option is a snappy, attention-getter opening. It may work and it may not. A far more effective technique is called a banner ad. Banner ads sit at the top of the email and draw your audience into the body of the email. The ad could also lead them directly to the landing page where you want them to go. A banner ad can be instrumental in effectively motivating your audience. Here are a few tips to create the best possible ad:

1.K.I.S.S. That saying you used as a kid can be very helpful in this situation. Keep it simple, silly. The banner ad has only a few seconds to catch the reader’s eye before they move on so the ad has to be simple and to the point. Don’t bother with flash or pizazz because your reader will look right over the ad if they can’t immediately see the point.

2.Call for action with words that raise emotion or attention. Words like ‘free’ and ‘limited time offer’ are always popular. Keywords like this will grab the reader’s attention and make them curious. At this point, including a keyword such as ‘Click Now’ is always a good idea. You’ve got them curious and you need to tell them what to do to get more information.

3.Emphasize what your product can do for your customer. People are always looking for ways to make their life easier or better, so tell them how your product or service can do that! For example, we offer free email templates so a great banner ad for our email blasts would highlight that downloading our templates saves you the time you’d spend designing your own (making life easier) as opposed to ‘we offer free templates’.

4. Remember that you are a business! Keep your ads with the tone of the email it is attached to and don’t forget that this ad is the first impression for your email! Remember to keep it professional. Also, you never know what will grab people’s attention best. Try to create several banner ads and test them over a period of time. Keep the most successful ads and use them in the future. If you ever need new banner ads, model them after the ones you know work.

It is always best to design your own ads because you can tailor them to suite your company and your audience; but let’s face it, sometimes you just don’t have the time. There are several options. You can always hire someone to do it for you, or you can search the Internet for free options.

If the ‘Net is seeming like a good idea, check out AdDesigner.com. Once you sign up to be a member, you’ll have access to all kinds of tips, sample ads, and free stuff. Not to mention you can design your banner ad on their site!

Effective marketing is the key to any successful business. Therefore, the question on every company’s mind is “How do we increase the effectiveness of our marketing?” There are several things you can do, but the quickest, easiest, and cheapest is sending out email newsletters.

If your a company just beginning to explore the idea of email blasts or email marketing, the idea can be daunting. Do  not fret. There are so many ways to get started. If your company has access to a creative team that can tailor your email templates to suit your company that is the best option. However, not every company has the time or resources to devote to this task. If that is the case, there is another option.

Your company can always use pre-made email templates. That’s were we come in. By signing up as a member of this site, you and your company gain access to everything you need to create effective email newsletters. The best part is they are pre-made, tested for optimal efficiency and FREE! It’s your one-stop-shop for email marketing.

Added 16 brand new opt-in templates

Click Here to Download Templates

Professionally designed, just drop right into your website to start grabbing your visitors names and email addresses. These high quality opt-in email templates have been tested and optimized for high subscriber conversion rates.

Attention grabbing opt-in templates like these are by far the fastest and easiest way to get visitors to give you their name and email address so you can start building a targeted list of buyers that you can send offers to for as long as you’d like! Just drop these “interactive magnets” into your website to start your email harvest!

These high quality email templates are designed by me, and available for immediate download. Included are all necessary HTML and graphics files. I’ve tested all for compatibility issues in the most popular email clients & programs.

All templates are modified for maximum deliverability results.

Download Free Email Templates

If your message isn’t ending up in your recipient’s inbox, what’s the point of the email? Deliverability is essential in every email marketing campaign. If you’re ending up in the spam folder every time, something needs to change. Deliverability can be affected by many different variables not limited to just your email service provider.

There are hundreds of email service providers out there which give you the capability to “check for spam” in your outgoing email messages. So what is your provider doing when it’s checking your email templates for spam? I’ve put together a list of tips for optimizing your email messages for maximum deliverability.

Think like an email marketer, not a spammer

The most obvious rule of all deliverability tricks is to create your email from a business and marketing standpoint, rather than a spammer’s standpoint. Spammers are looking for little backdoor nuances to sneak their email into your inbox. Such a tactic is the manipulation and misspelling words which are generally flagged as spammer words (ie: v^i^c^o^d^i^n…look familiar?) It may seem sly, but trust me it will only hurt your campaign. Why? Spammers send out millions of emails in very short periods of time to low quality purchased and harvested lists.

To get a better idea of what I’m talking about, try this; for the next few days don’t delete the spam that comes into your inbox. Carefully analyze these emails and take notes on which tactics you think they used to get into your inbox. Also make note of whether the unsolicited email was in HTML or plain text format. Once you have a good list of 10 different messages, review and post this list near your desk. This will help you to not do what spammers do every time you blast out your email campaign!

Template Optimization

The biggest mistake I see when I watch the spam accumulate in my inbox is poor HTML email template optimization. Of all of the mistakes you could make when designing and coding an HTML email is poor slicing techniques. We’ve all seen the emails that are just one big graphic with small text at the bottom. Although these are not always necessarily spam, they will almost always end up in the spam folder your client’s email program.

I am by no means discouraging the heavy use of graphics in emails, in fact I am a big advocate of eye-catching email designs. However it must be done properly so you don’t waste your time and money blasting out useless email templates. The best peice of advice I can give regarding graphics in emails….Slice away! Your graphical HTML email should consist of at least 5 separate graphics, but don’t stop there.

Add inline CSS so that when you’re email images are blocked automatically (ie: yahoo, gmail, hotmail), your recipient is still seeing a shell of colors of what the email looks like. Rather than a completely blank white screen with opt-out text at the bottom. Clever use of inline CSS in your email designs can convince your recipient to unblock those images, and view your message.

When should you send a designer made email, and when should you send a good ol’ fashioned plain text email? This question has aroused a massive debate in forums and blogs all over the ‘net in recent years. I’ll give my personal experiences when dealing with both types…

Use an HTML template with…

• Auto-Responders: Payment notifications, email verifications, and account confirmations all fall under this category. Branding is very important when sending out these types of emails. This could just mean placing your company logo somewhere in the message, accompanied by a simple graphic to separate the heading from the content. But don’t forget to include a footer bar to separate your content from the can-spam compliance information. I’d recommend always using an HTML email template in your automatic response messages.

• Product Promotions:  When sending out product announcements, promotions, and sales notifications always use a nicely designed HTML email template. These emails should immediately grab the attention of your recipient, hopefully converting into a sale. When you walk in to Best Buy, you don’t see a bunch of plain text ads hanging from the ceilings and pasted to the walls. You see big text with pictures and bright colors. The same rules apply for email marketing. If you’re still using plain old text emails to sell your products you’re missing the boat, big time.

• Newsletters: In my experience, a well designed HTML email newsletter can be a very profitible marketing tool. Have you ever read a plain text email newsletter? Probably on your email enabled phone, but with the advent of the iPhone your emails can now look just as great on mobile devices as they do on your computer screen. I can’t stress enough how profitable a carefully crafted newsletter can be to your email marketing campaign.

Use plain text with…

• Sensitive Information: This mainly applies to companies dealing with money, and other sensitive information such as banks, and stock traders. Always leave these emails as plain text as there is less of a risk it will be flagged as spam. When I receive my weekly bank statement via email, I’d be discouraged to see bright colors and graphics next to my sensitive account information.

• Internal Business Communications: If you think that pretty background with colorful text is going to impress your fellow co workers in an important email, well, think again! Always send plain text emails when communicating with co-workers internally via company email. This practice is normally frowned upon, and many companies even have policies on proper email usage and mailbox disk space usage. Play it safe with this one, keep it simple so you can keep your job.

• External Business Communications: Unless you’re a business to business email marketer, you should not be sending HTML emails to your company’s business partners. This could potentially hinder important business relationships, and make your company look less professional. Again please refer to your specific company policies, and if it is not mentioned in the policies, always play it safe and just send it plain text.

Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas about these, or any category I may have missed via comments.

Here is a topic troubling email marketers, template designers, and business owners since its pitiful release. Outlook 2007 is beyond frustrating for all of us, why? If you’re asking why, allow me to introduce you to the most unpredictable aspect of email marketing:

Email Rending Problems.

Outlook 2007 has essentially gone back in time to the year 2000, crippled with multiple email rendering issues and stripped of its credibility among email marketing professionals.

When an upgrade is released for a software program, it is supposed to be a step up from the previous version…hence the word “upgrade”,…Right?! Many people claim Outlook 2007 is anything but an upgrade. Apart from it’s painstakingly slow loading time, and bulky user interface, Outlook ‘07 is destroying beautiful HTML emails worldwide! As a direct result, Outlook 2007 is rapidly driving up email template prices. I wouldn’t blame the template price increase on sheer frustration, but rather on of the extra time it takes an email designer/developer to get their email to render properly in Microsoft’s  Outlook 2007

As an email marketer/template designer you need to be constantly ‘digging’ for email compatibility issues and solutions.

3 Must Haves For All Email Marketers:

Outlook 2007 Email Validator

This goes out to Microsoft: Please release an HTML email rending PATCH for Outlook 2007!

Wishful thinking but hey, who knows? In the mean time, Microsoft has created this HTML and CSS validation tool which will “validate” your HTML email template for use in Outlook 2007.

Although it doesn’t correct all rendering issues this tool is great for email code validation.

Conditional Comments

What an awesome discovery. Sitepoint has hit the nail right on the head with this article on conditional comments. Conditional comments essentially tell Outlook 2007 “well, since you are completely unable to render my beautiful email template, follow this alternate set of instructions so you render properly”.

eCommerce Times

An introduction to the differences between Outlook 2003 and 2007. This detailed article boasts an excellent case study. It shows the same email in Outlook 2003, then in 2007 and explains the differences between the two.

If you know of any other tips or tricks that aren’t listed, feel free to add your comments.