If you haven’t had a chance yet, you should check out MarketingSherpa’s Marketing Wisdom for 2007, because it has so much great advice, you’ll definitely be setting yourself up for a good year.

As you can probably guess, I perused the “Email Marketing” section, and it’s fantastic. One reoccuring theme is to re-send your email campaigns a week or two later to all who did not open the original campaign. It’s very easy to do, and from the sounds in the report - leads to great ROI! Try it!

The saddest part about being a writer, is EVERYONE thinks they can write. So especially if you are writing for a client, you rarely encounter someone who says
“Well you are the expert, so I’m sure whatever you write is best.”

So where I’m going with this, is I found this great article on the Bad Language blog. “Why good writers (occasionally) produce bad writing.” Sometimes it’s the writer’s fault: tight deadlines, bad working environment etc. and other times it’s dealing with too many editors, corporate speak and so on.

If you’re thinking “What does this have to do with email?” then the answer is EVERYTHING! In email every word is precious and the writing needs to be concise and convincing in order to keep a captive audience. Keep your writing skills sharp!

If you aren’t a subscriber to Expresso, than you sure missed out yesterday!

But lucky for you, I’m feeling the holiday spirit and would like to share our Season’s greetings email.

Get your share of holiday cheer!

A very bright idea I found from a BlueHornet Communications email, at the bottom of the email was a line that read:

You were added to our database on May 24, 2006. Find out how.

So I clicked the link, and it brought me to a page that looks like this, which told me exactly how and when I opted in:

A great idea if you ask me!

I will be on holidays next week, so I wanted to get this off my chest before I go! Since testing, measuring and refining is so important in email.. I thought I’d go over some of the most talked about email trends this year (that I noticed at least)

1. Spam: I think would always top a list like this one - I mean as email marketers, our job heavily revolves around NOT being perceived as spam. And with the rules always changing, it’s always going to be a hot discussion topic.

   Tips for avoiding being spam in the new year:

   • Have an explicit opt-in: The best way to not be perceived as spam is to not be spam! Make sure all your recipients have explicitly opted-in to receive your emails (no pre-checked boxes) And even better - have a double opt-in.
   • Avoid common spam triggers: ALL CAPS, excessive punctuation!! W3!rd $ymb@ls, etc.
   • Code your links with caution: if you want to have a link text as “www.mywebsite.com make sure you turn off the tracking code on that link: or you could not make it to inboxes.
   • Don’t send image-only campaigns - It’s a popular tactic with spammers!

2. Relevancy: Sending emails that are relevant to your recipients will always pay off: higher response rates and less annoyed subscribers. The trick to relevancy is of to find out what your subscribers want - either via survey or testing.

   Relevancy - What to test:

• Subject lines - try different types of subject lines and do some A/B testing to find out which works best with your subscriber. Your subject line is an important determinate for whether or not the email will be opened!
• Content - Do your subscribers like the content they receive? Do they click through? Test your content and call to actions and see what works best!
• Frequency - Maybe your subscribers love your content, but feel they receive the emails too often? Or perhaps you wait too long between emails and they forget about you in between? Try a quick poll in your email to find out how often your subscribers like to be contacted. (If you want to get sophisticated, build it into the preference centre and send emails of different frequencies depending on the subscribers chosen preference!)

3. Deliverability: Because really, what good is your email if it doesn’t get delivered? Always a hot topic, deliverability is extremely important - and not just knowing your email got through to the address, but knowing it landed safely in the recipients inbox. While you can never know for sure if it’s landing in inboxes, there are services that will seed your emails in many major ISPs to test whether it did or not.

Getting your emails Delivered:

• The best way to ensure you are getting delivered is to ask recipients to add your email address to their safe sender list or address book. There’s no guarantee they will or not, but if you don’t ask they probably wont! Tip: provide a page that gives instructions to do this, like this.
• Scrub, scrub, scrub - keep your list clean! Clean out hard bounces after every email, and soft bounces after repeating a few times. The lower your bounce rate, the less likely ISPs will block you (turning into more bounces) thinking you’re a spammer! Remember, a list cluttered with bad addresses only costs you more!
• Like above, avoid spam trigger words, and practices used by spammers. HINT: Go into your spam folder, look at the spam emails, and DON’T do what they are doing!!

Hope these will help with your email program for 2007. Have a safe and happy holiday, and here’s to a new year, filled with legitimate, relevant email marketing landing in the inbox!