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.

You may have the perfect product, the perfect sales pitch and an endless list of eager buyers’ e-mails, but if your message isn’t reaching its base your potential customers will be nothing more than lost sales. This is the exact scenario that many online entrepreneurs are finding themselves in, often times having to get out of the game long before they ever have a chance. Thankfully, there is a service in place to help easily organize even the most daunting of email lists, ensure that marketing emails actually make it to customers’ inboxes, and provide a wealth of features that will allow you to present your message in a professional manner. That service is StreamSend.

How Can StreamSend Help Me?

Simply put, if you need to send out bulk e-mail in a timely, organized fashion and need to be guaranteed that those emails are actually being received, StreamSend can help you. You’ll find countless tools to organize and maintain an updated list, though organization is only the beginning. StreamSend can also help polish your sales pitch with a wealth of professional HTML e-mail templates and even tweak the look of your e-mail with HTML editing features. However, one of StreamSend’s most enticing features is that every client receives a private IP address. This ensures that your e-mails will never get blocked due to the marketing infractions of someone else using the same IP address.

StreamSend May Work, But is it Worth the Cost?

Find out for yourself! StreamSend offers a free 30-day trial to let you get a feel for if the system can help with your individual needs. After the free trail, they have standard plans starting as low as $19.90 per month and Large Volume Plans beginning at $209.90 per month. It should also be noted that there are no contracts to sign, so if you find 5 months into your campaign that you’re not getting the results you feel you deserve you can easily change course.

StreamSend Sounds Great, But My Business Isn’t That Big

It’s true that StreamSend works with some of our nation’s most iconic brand names including Jelly Belly, MTV and UPS, but that’s not to say that StreamSend can only benefit the big guy. From small businesses looking to make the leap into the big leagues to home businesses simply trying to stay a float, if you have a product that needs online exposure StreamSend can help.

Building and growing a responsive, quality mailing list can require a dreadful amount of work. Furthermore, once you have built your list, you must nurture and grow it. Whatever you do, do not flood your recipients with advertisements and pointless emails constantly. This is a great way to destroy your precious opt-in list. Honestly, acquiring all of those email address is minuscule part of the email marketing process. It is extremely important to know that you’re building an individual relationship with every person who gives you their email address. If you mess up in the beginning, you are hindering your chances on building a lucrative relationship with your subscribers. On the other hand, do it right and prove your company’s worthiness, and you will both have smiles on your faces for years to come.

There are 3 key elements involved in list building:

• Acquiring The Email Address

This is the easiest task in building a list. The rule here is that you must have the explicit permission from the subscriber to send them emails. Place a check box on your sign-up page or include this in your terms of service. Remember, it’s all about building trust. It is also illegal not to include this statement if you intend on emailing your subscriber according to the CAN-SPAM act in the United States.

• Welcoming Your New Subscriber

We all receive the pointless, and endless flood of emails filling up our inboxes called SPAM. Because of this, it can be difficult to make a person read your email. A well thought out welcome message with good content, will build the foundation for a good email marketing relationship between you and the subscriber. The welcome message will not only build trust, but will verify the validity of each email address, further weeding out the bad seeds. It also acts as a 2nd screening process since 90% of your opt-outs will come in after you send this email, so make it pretty, and make it good!

• Customer Relationship Management

This is the most important element of maintaining a quality opt-in list. It is unfortunate that this is the most overlooked step of list building. I can understand why, as this is by far the most time consuming aspect of nurturing your opt-in list. You must honor all of your subscriber’s personal email preferences. If you have an email marketing service provider or some good server-side software, take advantage of the tracking features. Many will allow you to track bounces, unsubscribing, clicks, and inactivity. This is very useful data and should be analyzed and archived regularly.

Always make sure that you’re holding the interest of your subscribers. If they seem to be fading away and your statistics are declining, send out promotions, special offers, and even surveys to pull them back in.

Most importantly; never give up on your list!

It can take a lot of time and energy to build a great opt-in list. In the end, when you’re staring at page after page of your opt-in subscribers, you will surely look at it as time well spent.

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It is very important for all businesses to have a regular newsletter for effective email marketing. It is with email newsletters that it is possible to keep in contact with customers, announce the release of new products and get-togethers and help build a good rapport with potential customers. However, it is not sufficient to create just any email newsletter; it has to be effective and interesting enough to rake in sales leads and added revenue. For an effective email newsletter, make sure that it is a quick read as readers don’t usually have the time or patience to read long newsletters. The most time they will spend in reading a newsletter is four to five minutes.

Use short and interesting content in the newsletter

This means that the articles in the newsletter should be short and interesting so that it will immediately capture the interest of the reader. In addition to creating short articles, it is important that you use headlines to summarise the important points of the article. Also add some graphics in the newsletter design that are easily printable.

It is also possible to create a more interesting email newsletter by adding some attention-grabbing photographs and art work to the email template design. However in the process, don’t use too many graphics as too many graphics only lead to a cluttered newsletter design.

The email newsletter you create should be physically readable with fonts of a minimum of 12 points in size. There are many fancy fonts available for you to use in your email template design; however not all fonts look good when printed. Some of them are also difficult to read after printing; so try out different fonts before deciding on the best one for your email newsletter.

Choose your font and backgrounds wisely

The email newsletter should have consistent headings and text fonts. It is always better to use black or dark coloured fonts in the email newsletter and avoid using colored ones for the email newsletter’s text printing. You also have to pay attention to the colour of the background of the email newsletter. Don’t use dark colours; backgrounds in white, grey, beige, off-white, etc are easy to read, especially after printing.

It is important to hire a competent writer and editor for your email newsletter. This is because circulating an email newsletter with numerous errors only leads to creating a negative image to the readers. Just a spell checker will not suffice in creating the perfect newsletter; have it manually edited for grammar, readability and content.

Be consistent in the publishing of the email newsletter

It is not enough to only create an effective email newsletter; an email newsletter works in email marketing only if you publish it on schedule. It is up to you to decide if you have sufficient content, man power and money to publish the email newsletter weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually and once you decide the frequency, you have to stick to it.
All these efforts will lead to the production of an effective email newsletter that can be sent to all your present customers and to the new customers who sign in to the email newsletter.

Thousands of companies use email as a key marketing tool, sending out promotions, newsletters, and coupons to increase sales. This is a very cost effective method of marketing. Companies who have caught on to the obvious success rate in these campaign can easily send out 500,000 emails in one day.

	E-mail marketing is not as simple as it may seem. It is more complex than just writing an article on a website or just posting on a forum, because for any email marketer to succeed, your emails must really reach out to your targeted audience. Therefore it is very important that you build, or obtain a quality, targeted opt-in list.
There are many brokers available in the market who provide quality email lists, however the best and most effective way of reaching out to your target audience is to build your own list. These opt-in lists contains email addresses of people who are your target leads i.e. those people who may be interested in buying your product/service.

I have received a ton of questions on the best methods to grow your site’s subscriber list, which is by far the most important factor in a successful campaign. There are many ways to build a quality list, you can start by building trust with your clients. Assure them that you won’t be selling their email to third parties, and do not spam your clients. Next, you will want a well placed opt-in area on your site, this should be in a highly visible area. Many companies will offer exlusive deals or incentives as a reason to subscribe. After you have these two important items in place, work on generating more traffic to your site and watch your list grow.

When talking about email marketing, it doesn’t take long for words like “opt-in” to appear. Yet I still receive numerous emails every month asking, “What is opt-in email marketing?”

It’s easiest to think in terms of mailing lists when dealing with email marketing. Email marketing is nothing but a good mailing list in the end. The list of an opt-in marketing campaign obviously starts empty. The only way to grow this list of email addresses is to get viewers of your site to “opt-in”. All you can do as a webmaster is assist an individual in the subscription request submission process.

This request must always be for a specific list, there can be no grey areas when dealing with opt-ins. For example, if a customer submits a form that says “Yes, please send me a copy of your monthly newsletter” you have permission to add them to the list of customers who will receive a copy of the monthly newsletter, use the list for the newsletter and nothing else. To continue sending them your monthly newsletter, you need their permission to do so (along the lines of “Yes, keep me up to date by adding me to your list of monthly newsletter recipients”).

“Permission-based” basically means the same thing. Marketing material is sent only with permission, and is often customized to the subscribers personal interests and preferences.

When presidential candidate Barack Obama relies on email marketing for one of the most important announcements in his candidacy, it really shows the awesome power of an effective email marketing campaign. “Be the First to Know”, a catchy phrase that says it all. This massive email marketing campaign went off without a hitch, and boy would I love to see that golden opt-in list he’s accumulated since it’s launch.

This well crafted email marketing campaign goes to show that building a targeted opt-in list, is actually very simple. In essence, it all comes down to one thing; you have to have something that they want. Of course a well designed landing page, auto-responder, and a great email service provider are also required. Put these 4 items together and you’ll be well on your way to email marketing success!

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.