This is an effective way to moderate one’s comfort via clothing, but an ineffective way to “dress” your email. Your email should be scantily clad, no matter the weather or temperature.

Is your email dressed in layers? Do you have multiple calls to action? Are you trying to cram all your information into one promotional email rather than enticing people to click through to a landing page? Is your email design overly busy? Is your email marketing message unclear?

If your email marketing is all bundled up, strip it down:

• Keep it simple
• Focus on one call to action (included 3 to 5 times)
• Stay clear and concise in your message
• Streamline your design so it complements, not complicates, your message
• Don’t think of your email as the sales vehicle, but the introduction. Your goal is clicks, not cash…yet

Don’t smother your email marketing with turtlenecks and cardigans or else your recipients will only see a bundle of clothes, not the body beneath it. And the body is what drives your email marketing results.

But even if you aren’t sending out those first “think of us for gifts” type email marketing messages, there’s plenty of prep work you can do right now to make your holiday email marketing campaign more effective so you achieve better email marketing results.

Smith Harmon’s Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season has practical suggestions for gearing up, both by collecting more information about what subscribers want to get in their emails from you, and by having excuses to reach out to them, helping you be top of mind without starting the holiday shopping message too early.

Their email marketing suggestions include:

• Having subscriber update their preferences so you can increase your relevancy during the holidays, using a preference center
• Or get the same insight via surveys
• Update your Web site and improve the functionality, then email your list to publicize the improvements
• Request product reviews during the summer and fall so you can use them as part of your holiday email marketing campaign. Hint: You’ll want to offer an incentive too to increase the likelihood that people will contribute reviews
• Encourage subscribers to buy now to earn a discount during the holidays
• Promote your credit card or loyalty program

All of these suggestions are either good ideas or simply email best practices, and none are overly complicated. Too early for holiday email marketing? Maybe, but it’s never too early to prepare for it!

Download the full report here

It’s not a new concept. I once read that the idea of Christmas in July came from Victorian times, when women would start making gifts in July, giving them several months to get their projects done. (Makes you wonder what they’d think of our Christmas shopping these days, on the Internet on December 20th, shelling out an extra $25 for rush shipping charges to guarantee delivery by Christmas Eve!) But it translates wonderfully from needlepoint on a pillowcase to email marketing campaigns because they both take planning and time, and the more you have of both, the better your results.

With that in mind, this email marketing vendor is going to (surprisingly) abstain from dishing out yet more holiday email marketing advice and instead point you to reliable resources as we become aware of them. And who better to guide you through the coming months than Mark Brownlow with his own constantly updated post on this very topic? See Mark’s start by clicking here and check back often for new links to new resources.

Now is the time to be focused on email best practices and your email marketing budget and making sure you’re making the most of both for the best possible email marketing ROI.

It has been an uncertain year for many in email marketing. Let’s get and stay on top of the holiday season, just like those Victorian ladies, only without all the thread and needles.

It’s not an easy question to answer because it depends on your business, industry and more. But eMarketer’s Monday report on email marketing and click-through rates helps, so take a look and maybe even keep a copy so you can benchmark against these industry standards.

The data is drawn from Epsilon’s “Q1 2009 Email Trends and Benchmarks” report. You can see how email delivery, open and click-through rates are faring over time. But more importantly, you can drill down to see open and click-through rates for your industry specifically.

As we’ve mentioned before in this email marketing blog and in our email marketing newsletter, metrics matter but only if you’re measuring the right data the right way. If you’re in the retail apparel business, you’ll only be discouraged to know general financial services has a hefty open rate of 31.4%. But seeing that average email marketing result for your industry is only 14.3% gives you a more realistic metric to benchmark against.

Your email marketing metrics can go through constant refinement, just like your email marketing techniques. This eMarketer report will help.

And if you have questions about your metrics, how to measure better and improve your results, always feel free to contact us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com!

So it’s not that we’re anti-Twitter. It’s just that we want to make sure the walls are up before we start painting the house.

According to eMarketer, only 7.4% of the U.S. population over age 18 is using Twitter. And you only have to use it once a month to count as a “user.”

Compare that to 80% of Americans using email.

That means less than one-tenth of the email users are using Twitter. Knowing that, where do you think you should invest your time and money?

Our advice to you as an email solutions provider: Make sure your email best practices are up to speed before you jump on the Twitterwagon. Below are some resources to help:

• This email marketing blog
• Our email marketing library of whitepapers and reports
• Our email marketing newsletter
• Our email marketing consultants

Tap into these resources and make sure your email best practices are the best. Then you can use Twitter to support your email marketing campaigns!

There’s something about picking up a pen or sitting at a keyboard that brings out another persona, it seems, even in the email marketing world. But in email marketing, we’re not interested in pretty prose or stuffy statements. We want results. Period. And if you’re not careful, your email copywriting can decrease your email marketing results.

It’s email. People don’t need to be impressed. They need to be moved to act. Immediately. They’re don’t need big words or long sentences. They’re not going to pull out the dictionary when they don’t know the meaning of “riparian.” They’re going to open (you hope), scan, and either click through or move on to the next email. You want the click through. And your email copywriting helps to make that click through happen.

Write like you talk. It sounds simple, but isn’t. So here’s a trick: Read it out loud. Even if you didn’t write it as the email marketer, your copywriter did. Simply read it out loud. Does it sound natural? Conversational? Like something you’d really say to an email subscriber? If so, go with it.

Does it sound stuffy? Do you stumble over a word or two? Send it back and ask for the email copywriting to be revised.

Your goal is email marketing results, not email marketing resistance. Your email copywriting is key.

That’s because email marketing serves up plenty of numbers, whether you’re doing a good job or a poor one. And as with politics, these numbers can be skewed if you’re not sure what you’re measuring and why.

For the best email marketing ROI, you must get a handle on the metrics that matter! The latest email newsletter from ClickMail Marketing will help. In it, we have some reminders about why it’s so important to measure accurately, what to measure (hint: there’s more to metrics than open rates!), and the challenges to measuring your email marketing results.

Take a look at the email marketing newsletter, and if you think you could use some help with your company’s email marketing metrics, just give us an email marketing holler at blog@clickmailmarketing.com. We’ll help you make sure your metrics measure up!

That’s not opt in. It’s not even legal. But it’s so very tempting!

But there are plenty of ways to collect email addresses from people that do want to opt in. You might not get the same quantity as the fishbowl at the trade show, but the quality will far surpass those names. And when it comes to in-house email lists, quality beats quantity every time…especially when it means your behavior is legal.

As an email marketing vendor, we’ve seen our email marketing clients use all kinds of different methods for collecting permission-based email addresses that can improve their email marketing results. Here are a few of our favorites, some obvious but maybe overlooked, some not so obvious but a good idea:

• Email signature blocks: Every employee in your company should have a standard, branded email signature that includes a link to your signup page. (Note: Every employee should have a standard, branded email signature even if it doesn’t include a link to your signup page!)
• Facebook: Include a link to your signup page on your company’s Fan page.
• Direct mail: Sure it’s offline, but there’s no reason you can’t encourage people to go online and subscribe. Try using an incentive, like a discount if they do.
• Trade shows: Yes, we were just mocking companies that collect email addresses en masse at trade shows via business cards, but you can legitimately get people to opt in. You can even eliminate the data entry (and possible errors of) by letting people sign up right there on a computer at your booth. This is another great place for an incentive, something you’ll give them right then and there after they do subscribe.
• Landing pages: Include a link to your signup page on any landing pages used with pay-per-click ads or other offers. Even if they don’t convert once at the landing page, they might still say yes to hearing from you in the future by subscribing to your email marketing or email newsletter.

Even if you only get a handful of email addresses via each different method, over time, those handfuls will add up to big numbers. This is where quantity does matter: The more places and ways you can get people to opt in to your email marketing, the faster your in-house email list will grow with quality names!

And remember in each case that people won’t subscribe just because you offer the option. You still have to sell the benefits of signing up in the first place!

• 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.

And some subscribe quite often. The article states 55% of email subscribers in North America unsubscribe occasionally and 14% frequently. Again, another high number.

We as an email solutions provider are tossing these numbers at you for a few reasons, all of which involve improving your email marketing results. Lessons to remember here are:

• Your email marketing content must be relevant to the subscriber. Most unsubscribes are due to irrelevant email marketing content
• Your email marketing must show up in people’s inboxes with a frequency that works for them, not you. Email too often, and they’ll unsubscribe. Email too rarely, and they’ll forget the subscribed in the first place
• Your email marketing must pass the “annoyance” test so you don’t get reported as spam. Many people will report an email as spam rather than unsubscribe when they think your email marketing is irrelevant, too frequent, or both
• Your email marketing must remind people that they did subscribe and asked to hear from you. Use welcome emails to do this, and include a brief line in each email reminding them they subscribed

Also note that these numbers are for permission-based email marketing, meaning these folks subscribed to the emails in the first place.