Email is the best way to reach your customers and prospects alike. If you can managed them correctly, your email campaigns will really perform. You will get greater visibility, maintain and even improve your image, and substantially increase your email lists so your next campaign will have even greater success.

Your email's content is of course, hugely important, and the structure of your email makes a big difference. By following these 8 steps, people will not be able to help themselves; they will want to open your emails and act on them (translation: they will read then buy).

1. The more you know

The more you understand your target audience, the better you can determine what the best message is to convey to them. Your message must be customized to suit your objective and your audience all at once.

2. Don't make it too long

It is not the time to fight with your inner author. If you want to get overly descriptive and drawn out, go write a book. For email, you must to keep your messages simple and sweet. One or two short paragraphs with short sentences should be enough to get your point out. People do not want to think too much, and you literally have seconds to impress the reader enough to click and take an action within your message. Try being clever, or bring in some humor to the mix. Think about the way you act when you get a great email offer that engages you, and actually has something you actually want. Something you just have to have. The response you are trying to achieve is almost caveman basic: "Offer good. Me want to buy."

3. Be remarkable

Make sure you spell out the offer at the beginning. Be sure your customers lose interest in your message before you even hit them with the offer of a lifetime. Call out the top reasons the offer is a must have and emphasize the valid time frame for the offer right away. This sense of urgency will be a nagging inner voice, reminding your list about this amazing opportunity. Example: "Limited time offer – 25% off Pool Repair when you buy a deluxe pool cleaning kit by April 3rd, 2009!"

4. Ask

Always have call to action links to make it easy for a customer to take the next step. Include links right at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of your email to make it easy for the customer to move forward. In addition to the offer itself, provide supporting documents, a free download, and a link to your website for even more data to help them make the decision. They are going to hop, skip and jump around your message. Get ready for them and collect their contact information when possible.

5. Grammar is still important

You need to make sure your content is easy to process. Read it out loud. Seriously – find a quiet space, and let it roll. If your content reads poorly, or seems like you're stumbling trying to spit out the words, it is not going to be a quick read for the email recipient. It is time to rewrite. When you're confident in your work of art, ask a coworker to review it, they might have some awesome suggestions that you didn't even think of, or catch some grammatical errors that you skipped right over.

6. Effective design

A simple design is the most effective for email marketing. Do not get overly complicated with format. Too many graphics put the brain on sensory overload. However, you need to shoot for the perfect balance. Have a picture of your product or offering? Add it in. Offering a service of sorts? Add in a nice graphic to illustrate. The right balance of pictures and text are the most effective for email marketing.
Always make sure you are consistent with your style and image for follow on email campaigns, it helps the customer remember you, and respond accordingly.

7. The perfect subject line

The subject line is the main thing folks will read when your email flies to their inbox, so you need to make sure your subject line relates to the topic of your email. After your email is finished, it is time to develop a killer subject line that will entice folks to open it up.

8. Continuous improvement

Record and measure your email campaigns. Note how many emails bounce, get trashed without being opened, and note how many visits you get to your website. After a time, you can compare the effectiveness of your campaigns and learn why one did better than another. This will allow you to learn from past mistakes, and tweak what you think necessary for the next round. Your email marketing campaigns will certainly evolve as you fine tune your offerings with lessons learned from past campaigns. Give these proven and sound best practices a try. You have got nothing to lose, and many sales to gain.

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