• A top tier ESP, such as BlueHornet, Silverpop or ExactTarget
• A subject line test tool
• A rendering test tool like Pivotal Veracity’s eDesign Optimizer
• An email designer or email design team that can design emails effective even with image blockers on, who know email HTML vs. HTML used for the Web, and the limitations of email clients such as Outlook 2007
• An email copywriter or email copywriting team that understands best practices for copywriting emails and landing pages
• Web analytics
• An email marketing consultant or vendor/partner like ClickMail Marketing, to help you stay compliant, aware of best practices, and current with email marketing trends
• An email testing strategy to learn, over time, what your audience responds to (e.g. subject line, email copywriting, email design layout, timing, etc.)

If your email marketing toolbox is missing any of these items, start looking around now to make your toolbox as complete as can be. Because the better your tools and the more complete your toolbox, the higher your email marketing ROI. And in the end, isn’t the ROI what you’re striving to create?

Last month we offered a dozen practical ways to grow your in-house email list. This month, we’ll share one of our favorite campaigns with you. But then we want you to come up with a few other interesting ways and either post them as comments here or email them to us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com. We’ll share them in this email marketing blog.

This favorite example was spotted last spring by a friendly freelance email copywriter. Tully’s Coffee and Pemco Insurance teamed up for a fun campaign that also raised money for charity and collected email addresses to boot. All they did was offer small pieces of paper where people could write extremely long, fictional coffee orders. You, as the consumer, got your name entered into a drawing. Tully’s got the goodwill created when you laughingly made up your order. Pemco got the goodwill created when they donated money to charity…and somebody collected email addresses, because each slip of paper offered a place to enter your email address at the bottom.

You can read more about the campaign by clicking here.

Then send us your clever, out-of-the-box ideas for growing your in-house email marketing list!