E-mail marketing is one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways of advertising and expanding the market nowadays. For companies, e-mail marketing eliminates the expenses of regular advertising such as printing, snail-mailing and paying printing publications to display their ads in their next issue.

An effective market over the e-mail would require genuine and creative design and clarity of product information just as a regular advertisement would. However in e-mail marketing, this can be achieved through quite a different means.

Unlike regular marketing, in e-mail marketing, what you see is not necessarily what you get. The company or online advertisers should make sure to take note of the following in composing their e-mail messages.

1. Keep your catchy phrases short and concise, but informative.

While you may think that your online advertisement is fine with the way you made it, this may not be how your recipient receives it. E-mail advertisements can be made through different e-mail programs such as Netscape or Microsoft Outlook, but users may be using a different program. The problem arises when for example, in Outlook the company’s ad looks fine, but when the user reads it through Netscape, the phrases get cut and in turn do not make sense.

The only guarantee for all users to get your message is if your message is short. Not more than 60 to 65 characters would do it.

2. Use fixed fonts for making your messages.

Again this is based on the problem that the programs the recipients use to read your online advertisements are different from the programs the companies use to make their advertisement. Font size have differ in width specifications for each program. Especially for fonts that are customizable in width, they may appear different when the user reads it. Tendency then is that your messages may appear longer or shorter than originally made and you can say goodbye to the user’s good impression of your advertisement. Because of this, it is best to use fonts with fixed sizes such as Times New Roman or Arial.

3. Send your messages in plain text documents such as notepad.

For long emails especially, there is a high possibility that glitches will show up in the e-mail message when made in a word processing program or when sent out in HTML format. The problem with these programs is that it uses several formatting codes, that if not compatible with the e-mail, may show up as pure text in the actual e-mail message. Thus, the recipient may end up seeing a lot of text codes that are not part of the e-mail message such as:

“=30″ or <b>

This problem can be avoided if the company can make sure that their computers are capable of reading HTML-formatted or word-processing-formatted e-mails. However, this is technically impossible as user computers will always have different capabilities. Thus, it is best to send the text part of your e-mail advertisements in the format of plain text. This can be done by typing out the message in pure text programs such as Notepad.

Tina L. Douglas is a skilled writer from California. With numerous experiences in the field of writing for several financial institutions, she is greatly qualified across a variety of economic issues. Her notable pieces of writing involve email marketing.