So how can you make mail marketing work in this day and age? Here are some quick, useful tips!

• Surprise is the Key – Don’t use the routine headlines, Subject substance or the same mail headers. Instead of automating everything, change things around. Remember, in the war of online marketing, surprise is the key to success. Mail marketing can become a rampaging vehicle into the consumers’ hearts – but only if you play different cards at different times.

• Monetize your USP – Don’t waste your or your clients’ time with unnecessary jargon and riff-raffs on achievements that don’t concern them. Instead, mould your USP in a way that it hits the bull’s eye with the potential clients. For in the Web 2.0 era, you only have a span of 5-10 seconds to grab attention. If you are busy stating your sales statistics when the MRP was enough, you are losing out. Big time!

• Incorporate the Web 2.0 – If you can’t fight the powerful, join hands with them! Use Web 2.0 to help your Email marketing plans – instead of lamenting about how ineffective it can be. Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace etc to spread the word. This prods the market into a receptive stance, which helps create harder ripples when you launch the Email marketing campaign finally!

So if you are a real Email marketer, you must already be standing on your feet raring to go! And if you are still contemplating, a professional push (from Soula, maybe!) is what you need!

However, after sending about 30,000 test emails to my project manager and researching numerous email campaigns that have been conducted by some top agencies I discovered many ways in how to create a successful campaign.

Now I will share with you 3 aspects you should consider when creating an email campaign. Actually you can have 2 as I’m on my lunch and I only have 20minutes left to write.

Keep It Short
Ensure your copy is short and precise. Our findings illustrated that the more copy that related to nothing was simply ignored by the reader and the focus and direction of the email was lost. By entering  copy that relates to the objective of your email and by positioning relative links and buttons that in turn relate to your copy will guarantee the reader will click through to your site and your leads increased.

Use Inline Styles and ignore W3C
Thanks to Microsoft and in particular Outlook 2007, your emails can not be produced following W3C standards. The boffins at Microsoft decided not to use an html editor for their latest email client but to base it on Microsoft Word instead. (nice one!) As a result the following features will not be handled by Outlook 2007:

* Background images
* Floating elements
* Positioning

It is also important on your emails that you use inline styles for every tag in addition to the styles at the top of your html. This is thanks to GMAIL as it will not read any styles above the body tag. Therefore every <p> every <span> and so on will need to be given an inline style so this editor can support your email.

I could go and give you some more invaluable tips, however I am near the end of my subway and the end of my lunch so all that’s left to say is see ya.