But the next step is to get your email marketing opened and acted upon. For tips, tricks and expert advice on increasing your email marketing ROI after you get to the inbox, download our popular email marketing whitepaper titled, “You’ve made it to the inbox. Now what? Driving ROI once your email is delivered” available here.

Pulled together by top email marketing consultants, this whitepaper is even more helpful now as subscriber engagement becomes a key factor in how ISPs look at your email marketing: as spam or not.

Make all of these email best practices part of your email marketing process today by downloading the whitepaper here.

But what is relevant? Relevant to me could be ridiculous to you.

Regardless of varying interpretations of the word’s meaning, the concept remains critical to your email marketing success. So let’s clarify.

Relevant email marketing means your email marketing subscriber gets emails from you when she wants, how she wants and with information she wants.

Notice I said subscriber singular? In the ideal world, one-to-one is how marketers communicate, and technology is making that level of individual targeting easier and easier. If I as an email subscriber am getting exactly what I as an individual want, what could be more relevant?

Do you give subscribers the option to choose how often and when they hear from you? Frequency and timing are part of relevance. Your email marketing is more relevant when it shows up at a frequency and timing of my choosing.

Can your subscribers choose between html and text? Deliver email marketing messages how they want and you’ll increase your relevancy score another notch.

What about the type of information you serve up? Does your preference center let subscribers choose topics or categories or types of email marketing messages? It should in order to be relevant to each subscriber.

Sometimes we as email marketers get caught up in what’s relevant to us: growing our in-house email lists, improving our email delivery rate, tweaking our email subject lines. But when it comes to email marketing ROI, what’s relevant to you is, well, irrelevant.

But it occurred to us lately that maybe we’ve focused too much on making sure they’re similar to avoid a disconnect between your email and your landing page. Maybe we haven’t done a good job of spelling out the differences between the email someone gets and the landing page that email drives them to.

Why should this matter? A landing page is a Web page and that gives you much more flexibility. With email marketing, you have to worry about rendering and email delivery and open rates and calls to action and click throughs. And you have a limited toolbox as a result.

But your landing page isn’t limited by sender ID or ISPs or spam complaints. Your landing page is independent of the constraints on your email marketing. And that means you can and should use that to your advantage to try and drive that conversion.

Consider what you can do with in a landing page compared to an email:

• Images: They will show, unlike in email where they’ll likely be blocked. Use them to your advantage!
• Calls to action: You can have more than one! Yes, you drove the prospect to that landing page for one particular offer, but you can below or next to that offer either lead them to other places on your Web site, or offer them other products or services.
• Loads of info: You don’t want your email to overwhelm, but your landing page can be wordier. You’d likely want to do this below the fold, and below your call to action, but you can make it available…or offer links to more information.
• Flash and video: Although these are easier to offer in email than they used to be, that doesn’t yet mean they work in email marketing. But you can use them on your landing page without worry.

Yes make the email to landing page transition a smooth one. Make sure the design and message are in alignment. But then take advantage of the potential of your landing page to do much more than your email could ever do.

• How to avoid email marketing spam filters
• The most recent laws and email best practices to keep your email marketing legal
• Making sure your email marketing gets delivered to your intended recipients
• An examination of the email delivery landscape, including email best practices to use and pitfalls to avoid
• Real-world examples of what works and what doesn’t work in email delivery

Moderated by Dianna Dilworth, Associate Editor, DMNews, the panelists are:

• Michael Kelly, Director, Strategic Alliances, ClickMail Marketing
• Craig Spiezle, Chairman & Founder, Online Trust Alliance (OTA), Managing Director, AgeLight LLC
• David Fowler, Director of Email Strategy, Deliverability and Privacy Compliance, Lyris Technologies

Make sure you maximize your email delivery and therefore your email marketing results by joining us on Tuesday, July 14 starting at 1:00 p.m. ET (10:00 a.m. PT). To register click here.

Email can also be pretty, flashy and showy, but it’s the words that drive the action. And the whole reason you do email marketing is to get email marketing results! So driving action, i.e. conversions, is critical. Making your email copywriting critical, even on your buttons.

As a follow up to our recent blog post on which words will encourage the most sign ups  to your email marketing or email newsletter campaign, let’s tackle the words on your buttons next.

“Buttons? We don’t need no stinkin’ buttons.”

Yes you do. For those email recipients with images turned on, the button can offer a strong call to action. But not if you’re email marketing ingenuity is lacking and your buttons say only “Click Here” or “Submit.”

Your button text can be a strong motivator by being urgent, relevant and/or specific. Consider these possible word choices:

• Start saving now
• Get the latest issue
• Join the club
• Don’t miss the discount
• Sign me up

But two caveats about using buttons in your email marketing:
1.    Don’t rely on buttons alone. Remember that most people have images turned off in their emails, meaning your button won’t even show up, no matter how snazzy your email design.
2.    Include more than one call to action. Usually a mix of buttons and text works. You can include text calls to action within the body text of the email, and in other places as standalone text.

Have you used button text that outperformed boring words and brought better email marketing results? If so, let us know at blog@clickmailmarketing.com! As an email solutions provider, we love to learn from and share your success stories.

As an email marketing advisor, we at ClickMail are firm believers in doing everything you can to improve your email delivery rate. As we’ve pointed out before in an earlier email marketing blog post, even a slight change in your email delivery rate can add up to significantly more email marketing ROI. That’s why we encourage our email marketing clients to do everything they can to improve their email delivery, even if that means switching their email service provider (ESP).

This new email marketing whitepaper offers one more way to tweak your email delivery rate and therefore your email marketing ROI. It’s simple. It’s common. And apparently it’s working. It’s that line of text at the top of each email asking the recipient to add you to their address book (so you don’t end up in the junkmail folder).

This is common practice, and easy to do, and according to the whitepaper, consumers do it: “It appears that this messaging has succeeded in influencing behavior, as 53% of permission email recipients have added at least one company to their address book.”

Of these 53%, “On average, the consumers in this group estimate that they add 25% of all the companies sending permission email to their address book.” That’s a one in four chance that your company will get added to the address book, and therefore into the inbox.

And what’s one way to make sure yours gets added? Relevant content that subscribers want to get.

As an email marketing advisor, we at ClickMail are firm believers in doing everything you can to improve your email delivery rate. As we’ve pointed out before in an earlier email marketing blog post, even a slight change in your email delivery rate can add up to significantly more email marketing ROI. That’s why we encourage our email marketing clients to do everything they can to improve their email delivery, even if that means switching their email service provider (ESP).

This new email marketing whitepaper offers one more way to tweak your email delivery rate and therefore your email marketing ROI. It’s simple. It’s common. And apparently it’s working. It’s that line of text at the top of each email asking the recipient to add you to their address book (so you don’t end up in the junkmail folder).

This is common practice, and easy to do, and according to the whitepaper, consumers do it: “It appears that this messaging has succeeded in influencing behavior, as 53% of permission email recipients have added at least one company to their address book.”

Of these 53%, “On average, the consumers in this group estimate that they add 25% of all the companies sending permission email to their address book.” That’s a one in four chance that your company will get added to the address book, and therefore into the inbox.

And what’s one way to make sure yours gets added? Relevant content that subscribers want to get.

In November, AOL announced plans to start using DKIM in early 2009, and they were true to their word. That means they join Yahoo and Google in using DKIM to measure sender reputations…including yours.

If you have AOL recipients, and chances are you do, make sure to get your DKIM in place. You can learn more about DKIM by clicking here.

Implementing it won’t automatically improve your email delivery rate, but it authenticates that the mail is from the domain it’s saying it’s from and that helps your sender reputation. Other ways to improve and maintain your sender reputation can be found in the February issue of the ClickMail Marketer email newsletter.

You also need to authenticate with DKIM in order to benefit from Yahoo’s feedback loop now. The feedback loop means Yahoo will let you know if anyone reports your email as spam. But you only get that feedback when authenticating with DKIM. Don’t think you can live without the feedback. Subscribers marking your emails as spam usually indicates a problem you need to and can deal with, such as irrelevant content, or emailing too often.

One more important note: make sure your ESP supports DKIM. And feel free to contact us with any questions about email delivery, DKIM or ESPs. As an email marketing vendor, it’s our job to keep up with all these moving parts so you don’t have to!

As the webinar pointed out and we covered in our last email marketing blog post, email delivery is a huge concern among email marketers, and reputation is the key to deliverability.

To take that to another level,it is important to realize that opt in is the most important thing you can do to protect your reputation and therefore your deliverability. Permission-based email marketing will always result in a better sender reputation, meaning it’s imperative that you put the effort into growing your number of opt ins, not just your number of emails. Remember that a quality email list will serve you better than a quantity email list. The list will be smaller but more receptive to your offers, resulting in more conversions. And less likely to report you as spam, which will protect your reputation.

For more information on protecting and managing your sender reputation, see this month’s ClickMail Marketer.

The webinar pointed out that as concerned as email marketers are with maximizing their email delivery rates, they still aren’t paying enough attention to reputation.

According to the webinar, actions taken by email marketers to improve email delivery in 2008 included:

·    Modifying the email design template
·    Use of a third-party accreditation/reputation service
·    Adopting authentication (SPF, SenderID, DomainKeys)
·    Switching from a shared to a dedicated IP address
·    13% switched from in-house to an email service provider (ESP)
·    Another 13% switched ESPs

All of these can help improve your email delivery, but reputation is king in the world of email marketing. And that makes the webinar a preview to our February ClickMail Marketer newsletter on taking care of your sender reputation to increase your email delivery rate .

Keeping your reputation clean will increase the likelihood that ISPs will let your email through. But managing that reputation can be complicated. There are several critical factors that ISPs consider when determining your sender reputation. This month’s newsletter goes over some of those factors and what you can do about each to make sure you look good to the ISPs.

Read the latest ClickMail Marketer by clicking here.