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.

If you guessed subject line and email body, you’re right…or maybe you already got a peek at this month’s ClickMail Marketer.

Although there are other ways to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing, email marketers still do need to pay attention to open rates and click throughs. And the two factors which will influence those metrics the most are 1) email subject lines and 2) email copywriting in the body of the email.

For some email best practices on improving your email subject lines and the email copywriting in the body of your emails, see the latest ClickMail Marketer by clicking here.

There you’ll find five email best practices to consider when writing your email subject lines, and four to consider for the email copywriting of the body of the email.

Even if you only tweak one, you can improve your email marketing ROI, so take a look!

The author’s point was, be careful about these types of headlines because they often lead you to articles that lack substance. The articles are usually just recycled information, he claimed.

What the author failed to mention is: Numbers in titles work. And in headlines and email subject lines too. They work. That’s why we use them.

Perusing a bunch of unopened emails just now, we noticed two—one on top of the other—that both had subject lines starting with 5. One started “5 Ways…” and the other started “5 Must-Have…” imagine looking in your inbox and seeing two bolded subject lines, one on top of the other, both starting with the number 5. Odd, right? Not really. Numbers work.

Writing email subject lines is a tricky business, and an important one. After all, the email subject line is one of two factors recipients consider when deciding whether or not to open your email (the other is the From address). Ironically, in the world of email copywriting, it’s probably the part of most email marketing campaigns that gets the least attention, but arguably has the most impact.

It might seem trite. It might seem overdone and overused. It might seem too easy. But numbers in email subject lines work.

Not to say that author might have been right! It could be that the bulk of articles headlined with numbers are recycled, irrelevant information. But in the email marketing world, numbers work in email subject lines.

But it’s still up to us to make sure our email marketing content is relevant, timely and useful, even if with a killer email subject line.

The “From” line might be.

Email subject lines are researched, debated and tested, but how many email marketers are putting enough thought into whom the email is really “from”? In our never-ceasing quest to be the email marketing vendor who keeps you in the know on all the various ways to improve your email marketing ROI, we’ve put a lot of thought into the From line. Here are three tips to help you do a better job with that critical piece of your next email marketing campaign:

1. Don’t use personal name unless it’s a name the recipient will know. An email from Barack Obama would likely get opened due to name recognition. But not one from Ted Smith.

2. Instead, use your company name like ClickMail Marketing. Or if you have a product or brand name that’s better known than your company name, use that. The point is: Use the name that your recipients will recognize.

3. Note that some email clients show the actual email address in the From line. Just like you shouldn’t use a person’s name if it won’t be recognize, don’t use an email address that won’t be recognized either. Instead of marco@clickmailmarketing.com, make it something that hints at what the email is about like sales@, support@, newsletter@ or greatdeals@.

Now the next time you’re schmoozing at a marketing cocktail party, rather than rehashing the email subject line debate, you can bring up the From line and see if anyone knows as much as you do!

…including email design.

With a list like that, you can see why we as an email marketing vendor keep talking about all the moving parts. Even your email design has loads of parts to pay attention to and modify for best email marketing results. The challenge is, marketers are often at the mercy of their designers to do the email design, and it might look great, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work great, i.e. translate into email marketing ROI.

Now Lyris has a guide that can help. The paper called “Email Design No-No’s Guide for Non-Designers” includes the top 10 things both you and your designer need to know about email design. Don’t worry, it’s not complicated information. It will help you and your designer avoid the all-too-common trap of approaching email design like print design.

And don’t think it’s going to be blue works better than green. This guide goes into just enough depth to help you get what you need from your designer, and even gives you some input into the parts you control, like the email address and From line.

Download this guide to email best practices in design.

Chances are, with all the moving parts that make up email marketing, there are some moving parts of your own email marketing campaign that can use some refinement. Rather than look outside of your existing email marketing program to try to up your open rates, click throughs and conversions, like adding video or a link to Facebook or something like that, first look inside to see where you can tweak and improve…and increase your email marketing ROI.

As an email marketing vendor, we at ClickMail help clients figure out where and how to improve their email marketing campaigns by improving parts of them. Below is by no means a comprehensive list, but here are some major parts to analyze first, within your email marketing program, before looking outside of it for some quick fixes:

1.    From address
2.    Email subject lines
3.    Email design
4.    Email copywriting
5.    Call to action
6.    Landing page
7.    Transactional emails and welcome emails

Remember as an email marketer you have one huge advantage over other direct marketers: the ability to quickly and easily test! Any of these seven parts above can be tested, and testing should be a regular part of your email marketing process.

ClickMail strives to be an email marketing vendor that offers plenty of useful information to help. We offer tips on improving these email marketing pieces in a variety of ways, including:

·    In the resources section of the ClickMail Web site, you’ll find links to a variety of useful email marketing whitepapers
·    Our monthly email marketing newsletter offers succinct tips for improving email marketing ROI
·    This email marketing blog continually serves up useful tidbits that are short and actionable. Read through past posts and be sure to subscribe

And as an email marketing vendor, ClickMail Marketing can help by analyzing all your email marketing parts to help you figure out where to improve. Working with an email marketing vendor means improving your email marketing ROI faster so you can feel free to dive into the cool new shiny stuff everyone’s talking about. With one major difference: You’ll be way ahead of your competitors on the email side before you dip your toes into the social media side.

Studies are showing that although shorter subject lines (often it’s less 35 characters or seven words) work best for increasing your open rates. But guess what? Longer subject lines are better for increasing your click through rates! And possibly your conversions.

What happens is this: A longer subject line can be more specific and therefore more relevant to a smaller segment of your audience. As a result, fewer people open the email, but those that do are more interested in your offer, and therefore more likely to convert.

I doubt we’ll ever have a guaranteed email subject line length but there’s one thing I can guarantee: The way to know what works is to test, test, test, test. Remember, email marketers, in your world, testing is much more doable than in the print marketer’s world. Take advantage of that ability to boost your email marketing ROI.

For more on how to write an email subject line, see the useful guide from Lyris: “Email Subject Lines: 15 Rules to Write Them Right.” It’s available on the ClickMail Web site at http://www.clickmailmarketing.com/pdfs/Lyris_15Rules_for_Subject_Lines.pdf.