Email is a brilliant marketing and advertising tool. Useful for product or service oriented businesses alike, email marketing is “green”, cost-effective, and easy to implement. In addition, e-mail is the primary form of business communication (not social media). Email marketing and advertising is also very effective, netting almost $45 ROI per every dollar spent.

However, it is also very easy to get wrong. The average person receives 110 promotion messages weekly in his email inbox (so, not counting junk mail or messages that end up in the spam folder). Out of those emails, the average consumer will only open about 33 of them and will only actually “click-through” on three offers.

In order to make your email marketing and advertising stand out and up to the challenge, keep these seven simple tricks in mind.

- Service E-mail marketing and advertising isn’t expensive and it does require many resources to implement. As such, use it to add valuable information and services rather than push a sale. A good example of this is when banks send balance alerts or when travel websites send fare alerts to people.

- Customize Customize your content as much as possible to your prospect. Spend some time researching your demographic and studying trends and preferences. Different programs even offer the ability to segregate specific recipients on the basis of their IP location - allowing a national or international company to send emails tailored to locations, such as making sure that the email ad that announces 20% off winter coats only reaches those people that live in cold weather climates.

- Control As much as possible, let the e-mail recipient have the reigns on what he receives. When people can customize their own content, you can be sure that they will receive information that appeals to them, that info will be read, and you can gain helpful insight on what your consumers are looking for.

- Value E-mail promotion can add value and it needs to if you want your sales message to stand out and be effective. For instance, consider offering ideas on how a product can be used instead of simply including a button to “click for more information”.

- Transparency Never try to hide or conceal your identity or your purpose. E-mail recipients are twice as likely to open an email from a name they recognize than from one they do not. Regarding your objective, the important part is to be specific. You should never have an subject line that reads “refinance today”; instead, it should read “interest rates are now under 4% for qualified consumers”.

- Brevity Keep it short and sweet. Your email should be smaller than 55k and readable on a small screen in its entirety. The ad should have value and substance, not your whole product line. Offer links but keep it brief.

- Engaging By using “click here” buttons or including surveys & other engaging elements, you have the ability to engage your consumer dynamically. This makes it more convenient for the customer to act on your sales message. If you forget to include this, you force your customer to enter your website URL or perform a search, which could lead them to the competition.

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