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.

And that leads to slightly more aggressive approaches to garner more names that might grow your list but not positively impact your email marketing ROI due to poor quality names.

MarketingSherpa recently published some email best practices useful for anyone growing their email marketing list using tactics such as sweepstakes, co-registration and email list rentals. The article is definitely a must-read to make sure the names you do add to your list are more prospects than props.

Also included in the email best practice article is a caveat about continuing to qualify those names even after you have them through a series of welcome emails.

Read the article by clicking here, but hurry, it’s only open access until August 20th!

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.

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!

Wouldn’t it be great if potential customers just surfed the Web, looking for email newsletters and campaigns to subscribe to? You could just sit back, put your feet up on the desk, and watch your in-house email list grow and grow and grow.

But we live and work in the real world. That means people aren’t sitting around online signing up for emails from you. In fact, the opposite is true: They’re probably ignoring your requests. You don’t have to be an email solutions provider like ClickMail to know that people are extremely reluctant to give you that precious piece of personal information.

Growing your in-house email list can (and should) be a multi-faceted effort. But at its core, it is probably an option on your Web site, an option that has to work really, really hard. And that makes the wording on your Web site critical.

And what’s in a word? Everything. Keep in mind that different words have different connotations, and choose the word that will both most accurately reflect what you’re offering in exchange for that email address, and will most likely appeal to that Web site visitor. Consider the following possible words and their implications:

• If you ask someone to subscribe, that sounds journalistic, and implies they’ll get an email newsletter or something else wordy and content-oriented.
• If you ask someone to sign up, it begs the question, sign up for what? Are they signing up for specials? News? Spam? Be clear on that.
• If you ask someone to join, that might sound exclusive like you’re letting them into a community or club, but on the other hand, it might set the expectations high and you might not deliver.
• If you ask someone to register, that sounds like a real commitment, like registering for an event. On the other hand, it can have more perceived value.

What word do you use on your Web site to grow your in-house email list and drive your email marketing ROI? Let us know which word and how well it works at blog@clickmailmarketing.com. We’ll blog about it here in our email marketing blog.

This month’s ClickMail Marketer email newsletter offers tips for optimizing your email marketing landing pages based on knowledge gained from Marketing Experiments’ professional certification program.

Your landing page is a critical factor in your email marketing ROI. You might have great open and click through rates, but if your landing page doesn’t convert, none of that matters.

See the ClickMail Marketer for tips on increasing your email marketing ROI via your landing pages by motivating the user, making the value proposition clear, and offering an incentive.

You also increase your conversion rate (and therefore email marketing ROI) when you decrease friction and anxiety.

When it comes to email marketing ROI, any tweak that leads to an improvement matters. And that includes any tweaks to your landing page too. Don’t leave any landing page stone unturned: See this month’s ClickMail Marketer!

The panel presentation is titled “Chicken & The Egg: In a Web 2.0 World, Does Email Drive Social Media or Social Drive Email Marketing?” During it, you’ll hear email marketing and social media experts talk about the push-pull mechanisms that drive real social media success.

Jeanniey Mullen, CMO of Zinio and founder of the Email Experience Council (www.eec.org), will moderate several esteemed panelists:

• Laurie Beasley, Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc
• Jason Gan, Cisco WebEx Sr. Programs Manager
• Christelle Flahaux, Global Field Marketing, Ariba
• Sandra Ponce de Leon, Director of Marketing, BuzzLogic
• Michael Kelly, Director of Business Development, ClickMail Marketing

As an email marketer, it’s easy to feel isolated sometimes from the other marketing done by your organization. On the other hand, it can be easy to feel confused by how your email marketing initiatives might tie into other marketing efforts, like social media. But without learning more, you can’t know if social media might increase your email marketing ROI.

And OMS events are fun! So you’ll enjoy the “social” while you figure out social media’s tie to email marketing. Learn more about OMS San Francisco click here.

• What it takes to make it to the inbox
• How to use the available tools to deliver relevant content
• How to measure and gauge the results to ensure continuous improvement

And the other reason you’re in luck? A discount! As an email solutions provider participating in OMS, we can give you a discount for this informative seminar. OMS events are crammed full of useful tips, innovative ideas and proven best practices. Read more about the Online Marketing Summit in Denver by clicking here.

Then email us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com for a discount code that will get you in the door and full of new online and email marketing ideas for less!

On the 21st, speakers Loren McDonald and Richard Evans of Silverpop present “In Search of the Ideal Email Send Time.” If only you had a crystal ball that could look into your customers’ minds and see when they would be most receptive to your email! Because that’s what it’s really about, as the Silverpop email marketing rock stars will tell you during the webinar.

It’s only an hour out of your day, but will be time well spent as you learn email best practices you can use right away to begin optimizing your email send time. And that will in turn optimize your email marketing results!

Register for this email marketing webinar by clicking here.

And keep watching this email marketing blog for information on other email best practices that will improve your email marketing ROI!