Here are 6 best practices to consider when developing an email marketing strategy:

1. Deliverability is Key
Even if your customer has agreed to receive email from you, you may find it difficult for your email to get to their inbox. Most large ISPs now use thorough spam protection systems to filter any email it thinks may be unsolicited, before it gets into the customers’ inboxes.

To avoid being flagged as spam, and therefore go unseen by your subscribers, avoid using spam-trigger words like “sale”, “free” and “offer”, etc in both the subject line and the body of your email.

2. One-Click Unsubscribe – Make it Easy
It may sound counterintuitive, but if you want your email marketing campaign to succeed, you must have an easy way for customers to unsubscribe. If you make it difficult, you run the risk of the recipient marking your email as spam. That will make deliverability in the future even more difficult.

It’s actually mandated by law that your emails contain an unsubscribe link. The link should lead the recipient right to a page where they can immediately be removed from your list.

3. The Power of Personalization
When it makes sense for your specific email creative, we suggest taking steps to personalize them. It’s as simple as starting your email with “Hi [first_name]“. By doing this, you increase both your reading and click-thru rates. Why? By addressing them by their first name, your subscribers feel like they already have a relationship with you.

4. Subject Line in Under a Second
You have less than a second to catch your recipient’s attention with your email’s subject line. In this very short amount of time they will either choose to read, delete, or simply ignore your email. As mentioned before, you should avoid “spam words” and consider using the customer’s first name. We suggest you avoid using promotional phrases, ALL CAPS, or punctuation in your subject lines. Make sure your subject line is straightforward.

5. Above the Scroll
Whenever possible, place the more interesting content at the top of your email. Once your recipient starts reading the email, they’ll continue reading and even take action, but only if they find it interesting. Some popular email clients show a preview of an email in the inbox, even before a user opens it.

6. Don’t Over Sell
The goal of an email creative is to get buyers to take action by clicking on a button, signifying that they want to know more. It is only once they’ve clicked and are directed to your website that they can begin the buying process. Therefore, don’t overload them with product information or market data in the email. Give them just the right amount of info that, with a strong call to action, they’re intrigued enough to click.

By following these best practices, doing some of your own homework, and obeying the spam laws, you’ll be on your way to a winning email marketing campaign.

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What do you think? What else contributes to a successful email campaign?

Initial Sketch - 2000

Twitter's First Homepage - 2006

2007

2008

Current Home Page - 2009

But how could we forget:

Being the forward thinking father, I registered (within just a week of his birth) his very own domain name:  CarsonLyall.com – Don’t go there, it’s a GoDaddy parked domain. It will probably remained parked until he masters HTML (we’re thinking about teaching him English first).

Why did I register a domain name (and gmail address) for my newborn? Two words: personal branding.

Tom Peters wrote in Fast Company in ‘07:

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.

Thanks to his crazy dad, my son will have a head start on creating his own personal brand.

As we all know, employees used to work for one company all the way until retirement. Decades ago this began to change. My generation job hops. My son’s generation will see another radical shift: the era of the free agent.

He may not have one business that he calls his “job.” He’ll more likely freelance, consulting for many companies. I may be going way out on a limb, but I see value in preparing for this cultural change.

Whatever profession he enters into, he’ll have to compete with other “mini-brands”. He’ll need to stand apart from the crowd (again, this is after he learns to stand period).

This may be totally unnecessary. The Lyall last name isn’t extremely popular. He may go his whole life without another Carson Lyall popping up. But you never know. I now compete in search engine rankings with a female photographer in Canada. Hi Jordan!

In 20 years we may shift from domain names entirely (Even now, the shift from the .com TLD continues). But until then, we’ll continue to encourage him to keep his head up.

A recent study as reported by MediaPost brought up some interesting stats (emphasis mine):

Successful deliverability to consumers’ inboxes varies by ISP. Gmail, Google’s email service, is the most stringent US-based ISP for permission-based marketers to reach, according to the report, as 23% of emails that marketers sent to Gmail addresses did not reach the inbox.

So what’s the solution? Do we all switch to RSS-based communication? RSS is virtually spam-free. It fits the definition of permission-based marketing to a T. Yes, it’s got its drawbacks, but nothing that a few years and a few genius engineers can’t solve. Right? It’s a topic for another time. As we all know, email’s not going anywhere.

The problem? Your email sucks! As CopyBlogger puts it: “Many people will just mark you as a spammer for the crime of being boring.”

To be honest, I’ve clicked “Mark as Spam” on a newsletter where I could have easily spent the extra few seconds to unsubscribe the proper way. Google realizes this and has just created an auto-unsubscribe feature in Gmail. But by doing so you must report it as spam.

Solution = Write Better Content.

The DMA still claims that the ROI on email still beats search and other marketing channels.

Call Gmail’s tactics extreme, but it should prompt us marketers to create a better email. Let’s be smarter about this. Let’s do our own R&D.

Keep reading this blog as we discuss how to improve email deliverability and learn to further expand our reach online.

From ClickZ.com:

In this post-Michael Jackson era, the media onslaught borne from Jackson’s demise is one that deserves the intense picking over it has received. First is the notion that the news itself was broken by a blog (tmz.com), which is good for digital media’s future. Then there are the curious and still not necessarily authenticated stories as to how Jackson’s death very nearly broke the Internet, which may be not so good for digital media’s future.

Perhaps more interesting to those in the online world, Jackson’s death suggests how radically the consumption paradigm has shifted. A not-so-random survey of friends and colleagues showed that most people discovered the news through Facebook or Twitter, despite the fact that the break-it-down-so-you-can-mourn-effectively coverage emanated from television at the same time. So though you heard about it online, you turned to the tube for your “real” news. Score one for TV.