Email marketing continues to grow in importance as a cost effective way to generate leads, communicate with our customer base, and most importantly drive sales. Sometimes we let the ease of creating emails cause us to overlook some of the details of email design and execution that are crucial to our success.

This handy checklist is a good reminder sheet for those of us who work with email marketing everyday but also as a great starting place for businesses and marketers just getting started with email marketing. 

9 Great Ideas For Better Email Promotions

1. Make sure you have a sign up option for your email list on every page. Because of organic search’s dominant role in web traffic trends your visitors don’t enter your site only from the home page. Visitors can arrive at almost any page on your site! So, don’t miss the opportunity to offer an email sign up in a visible and prominent place on your pages.
2. Avoid CSS (cascading style sheets) when creating HTML emails. CSS style sheets cause a lot of unforeseen surprises and problems rendering in your recipients in-box. This will give you greater control over how your email appears in the various email readers. Ask your designer to do all the “styling” in-line. Also, avoid floating box style and stick with simple tables that avoid nesting.
3. Use your pre-header (the area above your template). Half your recipients are using a preview pane that give the first sentence of the email received. Use a snippet of your main offer, teaser or offer to call attention to your email. It’s really like getting a second subject line, so use it to your advantage. You may even be able to play off your primiary subject line for some interesting combinatons. Also, include a “click her to view” option in the event your email does not display properly.
4. Pay attention to subject lines. Subject lines are critical to getting our email opened. But, email subject lines are often over looked when creating the content portion of the email.
5. Make your email interactive – ask them to post a review, enter a contest or take a survey.
6. Use both buttons and text for your call-to-aciton. Use warm colors like red or orange for your links.
7. Organize your content for an easy scan. Avoid long paragraphs, use headlines, subheads and bullets.
8. When delivering information give your readers enough to want to know more but that requires they click and visit your site to get the full story.
9. Use segmentation to create subsets of your file for more focused content.