If your email campaigns are not getting the results you are hoping for, there are many things you can do to improve your emails and get better results. The key to better results is knowing what to change, which is why carefully monitoring your success throughout is important.

Text:   Maybe you are using too much text or not enough. Maybe the font is not easily readable or large enough. Maybe the text just isn’t interesting or to the point. What you are actually writing in the email is easy to improve and test, and it can be surprising how little changes can make a big difference.

Links: Make sure that your email has enough links to connect to your business. These could include contact links (email, phone numbers, website), social media links, and links to your specific products.

Templates: Templates can make emails attractive and interesting. Play around with new templates and customizing the ones you have to give your emails a fresh facelift.

Frequency: Maybe you are overwhelming your customers with too many emails, or maybe you are not sending out emails enough. Adjust the frequency of your emails and see what kind of results you get.

These are easy areas to start with to see improvements with your email campaigns. If all else fails, consult a professional management company like StreamSend to see what kind of help they can offer.

Although images are great for adding interest to your emails, how your customer may receive and view the email should be considered. Many email carriers, including those like Gmail and Aol Mail, automatically block images unless if the user accepts images from the sender, which makes all the hard work you spent perfecting images and graphics on your template sometimes go by unseen.

Because images do not always appear on emails, you want to make sure that your email still has meaning without images. Images can be great additions to your email, but you do not want to put the bulk of your message or text in the images. Without images, you still want your email to tell your customers what is most important, i.e. the special promotions, deals, or products you are offering.

Of course, a great way to let your images be visible to your readers is to remind them to add you to their address or contact list so that your images will always be visible. A sure-fire way to test to see if the email is clear without images is to send a test email to preview how it looks. Although images can add a lot of visual interest to an email, make sure that your overall message will still shine through.

Flashy graphics, intricate designs, and an email full of content may seem like a good idea, but simplicity can sometimes be the most important tool for an effective email campaign.

Graphics and images are important ways to add interest to your emails, but you do not want to go overboard. In today’s world of sensory overload, your reader may be looking through your email while watching TV, working, waiting in traffic, or doing a million other little things, so you want to make sure that the message of your email is clear. Choose simple images and graphics that add to the text as opposed to take away from it.

Another aspect of simplicity is color choice. Three colors are enough for an interesting palate, especially if you are using graphics or images. More than three colors combined with graphics may create sensory overload for your reader, distracting them from the overall purpose of the message.

Luckily, many templates are already created to appeal to simplicity. Email Template Pro and StreamSend offers multiple templates that let the message of the email triumph over busy graphics or color palate.

Whether you design an Email template yourself or use a template from Email Template Pro or a company like StreamSend, it never hurts to have some inspiration for your email design and campaigns. Letting something inspiring drive your email look and message can help set your email apart from the many others filling up your customers’ inboxes.

Luckily, inspiration is free! A great place to start is to consider the season. If springtime flowers are blooming, why not choose a design that celebrates the warmth and bright colors of the season? Meanwhile, as those first flakes of snow start to drift down in the winter, a winter-themed email campaign is timely and engaging.

Other sources of inspiration could be a song, picture, or event. Holidays are also common inspirations that help connect to your customer, in addition to providing an effective platform to advertise products or services. Inspiration could be found anywhere, and if you are filling stuck in an email marketing rut, look around you! You never know what could be right outside your window or on your desk that can provide the inspiration for a great email marketing campaign.

In today’s high productivity, on-the-go life, more people than ever use iPhones, iPods, Smartphones, and other devices to check their email on the go. Unfortunately, something in the email can be lost when the screen shrinks from 17 inches to three.

Even the best email campaign can suffer from the shrinkage when your customers read the email on a mobile device. To avoid your message being unreadable or difficult to load, make sure that your campaigns are mobile-friendly or have mobile-device ready options. Key elements of making it mobile friendly are font size, picture size, and amount of information.

Because the screen is so small, you want to be sure that your font size meets the requirements and is neither too small to be seen or too large to load. In addition, although pictures can be wonderful additions to a campaign, large pictures may take too long to load. In addition, you want to keep your email short and sweet and keep the most important part of the message at the forefront.

Implementing some of these techniques will help your customers read your emails both on and off their computers!

As you send out emails to your list of recipients, its important to effectively construct your email in a way that’s pleasing to the eye. We have several free email templates on our own site that can help you out with this process depending on if you’re selling goods, services or simply need a colorful background to go with your email. If you feel like your skills have improved enough to start creating your own newsletter, it’s important to start slow and not move into the design process too fast. Don’t start from scratch your first time – use a basic HTML template to put you on the right track and customize the template to fit your needs. For some designers, customizable templates are all they desire.

Remember, if the company you work for provides incentives for new users to sign up  for newsletters, it’s important to incorporate this incentive in your ad design to attract new users. For example, if a soda company provides a “buy one get one free” beverage for signing up for a newsletter, make sure you include this message using attention-getting technique, like bright colors or interesting font, and display the message beside or under the main title of your advertisement.

Be bold in your newsletter – use color where it counts, and link your messages directly to the pages of the Web site. Be sure to preview your newsletter before you send it out, and use researching tools and data-gathering tools from sites like StreamSend to get the best results. StreamSend has several customizable templates to browse through and perhaps get a few ideas in coordination with design.

Although you may not be a computer design wizard, there are many easy to use tools out there to make your emails attractive and appealing.

Perhaps the easiest tool of all is a free email template. Email Template Pro offers free template packages, or you may choose to invest in a template package from a provider like StreamSend, which offers dozens of great packages. When using these templates, customize the email to maximize potential. Here are some easy ways to customize the template:

• Use color: Coordinate the colors in the email to correspond to your company’s logo, website, store, or products.
• Add pictures: Use pictures from recent events, of products, of employees, or of your store to add interest to your email.
• Feature the Logo: Many templates have prime placement spots for a logo. Take advantage of this design feature!

On Email Template Pro, easily customizable options include the Professional Newsletter and Monthly Company Newsletter.

For your next email campaign, look beyond using just plain, boring text. Help your message stand out and be memorable by customizing an engaging email template, and you will be sure to see the results of this investment.

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.

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.