Email marketing newsletters often promise to deliver tons of great, quality content, but rarely deliver. It can be tough to keep writing on the level that you want over a long period of time. Even when you are running out of ideas, there are three types of email newsletter articles that you can write which will enthrall your readers and have them clamoring for more.

Case Studies
Who doesn´t love to hear about how someone else earned a thousand dollars working just a few hours a day or lost 50 lbs in two months? Case studies should focus on something related to your business, of course, but they can be anything from a successful salesperson to a surprised client. Write it in a fun, personal manner, or even interview the person you want to talk about, this will give it a more personal touch.

Money Saving Tips
Even the rich enjoy tips on how to save money, you really can´t go wrong. Just tailor the ideas to your industry and let people know an insider´s secret or two . . . you can bet they´ll be opening upcoming email newsletters to find out more.

Quick and Easy Tutorial
If you get a lot of emails asking you to help people with technical problems, why not write up a tutorial that will help your readers complete the task easier? They´ll appreciate the help and you´ll build your brand . . . the email newsletter might even get passed on to friends and family.

Giving readers something that will keep them interested, even when you are fresh out of ideas, can be as simple as picking one of the article types above. Your email newsletter can still be interesting and even draw in more readers than ever!

No one has a great answer for whether your email content should be in text or HTML, both are well accepted. These days, most people´s inboxes can handle HTML without any problems, but it still takes up more room. If you have images and things that you want to include in your email content, then it is still the best option.

However, providing the option of receiving emails in text format is a good idea . . . even if HTML is your preferred format. There are a number of reasons for this:

Some people want just the meat. They prefer text email marketing content because it´s easier to scan and pick out the important bits.

Text email content takes up less space. For many people this is a major consideration, especially if they don´t have a lot of space in their inbox.

Not all HTML email marketing content comes across well. Some email programs tend to block photos and images and can end up making HTML email content look pretty lousy.

Consider adding a text email content option if you haven´t already. You will see an increase in subscribers and get a far better response rate! Some people just prefer text, so why not give it to them?

Opt-in techniques are important in the world of email marketing and some of the best ones are where you don´t even have to do the grunt work. I´m talking about letting other people do the work for you, promote you and bring new people to your list.

Opt-in techniques that have other people doing all the work are often very effective. They allow you to just sit back and do nothing . . . or focus on really providing great content in your email marketing campaigns.

With February 14th coming up rapidly, it´s time to kick your email marketing into high gear. Any time there is a holiday, you have the opportunity to make more sales simply by slanting things toward the holiday. For this Cupid´s Day, why not turn your email marketing efforts towards love and make your email newsletter Valentine´s themed . . . or anti-Valentine´s, if you prefer.

People are more likely to open email marketing letters if they seem relevant and this time of year, every guy is trying to figure out what he can offer his lady to show his love. Help him out and you´ll be rewarded with super high open rates.

Make sure the email marketing subject line reflects the content. If you´re offering a list of gift ideas, make sure that is in the subject line . . . a lot of people will open the email simply because they are desperate for ideas. Offer them some hope or tell them how to make a huge impression on their loved one this Valentine´s Day and you´ll find that people respond well.

Holidays are a great time to step up your email marketing. Put a special twist on your products, offer last minute rush shipping or personalized gifts and wrapping. This will give your business an extra boost and it doesn´t have to just be at Valentine´s, consider using this technique other times as well.

It can be hard to keep your email marketing going at a steady pace. Things happen, life gets in the way or work piles up and you may find yourself neglecting this vital part of your business. Email marketing is often one of the first things to get left behind when we find ourselves in a time crunch, but it doesn´t have to be that way. Let´s take a look at some of the methods you can use to keep all the balls in the air.

• Write a calendar for the year. Planning your email marketing campaigns in advance can really help. Mark everything on your calendar in a specific color reserved for email. If you have a newsletter, think up your topics now and write them in. For the rest of the year, you´ll only have to glance at the calendar to know what you need to write about.

• Write during slow times. Every business has times when things are slow and this is the ideal time to write ahead in your email marketing emails. Save them for when things get busy again, then you can easily stay on track, sending out emails without having to struggle to write them.

• Hire freelance writers. Often, you´ll be able to find someone who writes far better than you, for a very decent fee. Think about it, which is more productive for you, running your business or writing email marketing copy? If the former, hire someone to do the latter.

• Don´t write too often. Having a daily email marketing newsletter can be extremely stressful. It might be worth it to take a second look at your newsletter and decide if you really need to send it out as often. It may be possible to reduce the frequency, making it easier to stay on top of things.

There´s no reason to make your email marketing more stressful than it has to be. By working smarter, you´ll be able to get things done ahead so busy times don´t affect your email marketing.

Email marketing content has to be appealing in order to get people to actually read it, we all know that. However, personalizing your email content is an excellent method of catching people´s attention and can be very effective. However, while many email marketers use the subscriber´s name in the subject line to make the email stand out from all the junk in their inbox, very few continue the use into the email content.

Where to Use Personalization in Email Marketing Content

• In the greeting. Starting your email content off with a typical greeting such as, “Hi, Alan” or “Dear Chloe” will make your email stand out in the preview pane.

• Whenever you want to make a major point. If you have something important that you want your readers to actually read, make sure you include their name first. We are conditioned to respond to our names and even if the person is just scanning, they will stop and start to read when they see their name in print.

• Before the call to action. Within your email content, you should have a call to action, something to let the reader know what you want them to do. Placing their name ahead of this part will get scanners to stop skimming and actually read your call to action.

Email content can be very powerful and using your subscriber´s name in the content will make it stand out more. Personalization can be used to help boost your clickthrough rates and get higher sales than ever before.

Even if you don´t have your own email marketing newsletter, you can still put the power of an email list to work for you by purchasing ads in other people´s email newsletters. This is actually a very good method of getting your business in front of other people, but there are a few ways to make your email newsletter ads ten times better and have them pull in more clients for you.

Pick top level ads. Email newsletter ads that are at the bottom of the email tend to get less than 50% of the clicks that an ad at the beginning or above the fold will get. It´s often worth the extra cash to make sure that you have the best opportunity to reach clients.

Skip the images. Not only are image ads in email marketing newsletters more expensive, they are not as effective as text ads. Text gets through spam filters and image filters, while image heavy emails tend to get stopped or have the images blocked, rendering your ad useless.

Adjust your offer dates. Popular email newsletters limit the amount of advertising they allow, so you may end up waiting for quite a while before there is a spot for your ad. Make this work better by setting your discounts and sale dates to match the dates that your ad will be running.

Target your market. Each email newsletter goes to a different set of people, so reword your ad´s text if necessary to target the market properly. This can really boost your clickthrough rate.

Email marketing newsletters are a powerful venue for advertising. They are cheaper than offline or print advertising, yet still reach thousands of readers in a few minutes. Improving your email newsletter ads will improve your conversion rates, too.

List rental is something that many email marketers turn to when they need fresh email addresses. While list rental can be a great way to pick up a new group of targeted readers, it isn´t always effective. If you don´t know what you´re looking for, you could end up spending a lot of money on a pretty useless email marketing list. Here are a few ways to make sure that your list rental goes smoothly:

• Look for reputable data merchants. These will be list rental services that have been around for a long time, not some fly-by-night company.

• Make sure the emails and names are up to date. It´s very common for rented email lists to end up being fairly old and you will end up with a lot of bounces.

• Ask for a guarantee. Most decent list rental services will either give you another list or refund part of your money if you get too many hard bounces. While a certain number is normal, a very high percentage could mean the list was no good to begin with.

• Check that the list is targeted. You´ll get no benefit trying to sell luxury cars to a group of people who signed up to get college scholarship information. Talk to the list rental company and find out exactly what kind of information they collect along with the email addresses.

List rental could be a great way to expand your influence and it gives you the chance to reach a customer base that you might never have otherwise had the chance to communicate with. Just make sure the list rental company is legit and that you are getting quality information on your lists before renting the list.

Email marketing content can be a bit tricky, especially once you´ve been writing for a while. You may feel that you have exhausted your topic and have nothing left to say. In that case, it should simply be a matter of finding a new topic, related to previous ones, to write about. There are several ways to go about this.

Discovering New Email Marketing Content Topics

Do a keyword search. Checking Wordtracker or Wordz for new ideas is pretty easy. Just type in the current keywords and you should see a list of potential topics that are compatible with your previous ones.

Answer reader questions. Having Q and A email content is often an easy way to get new content ideas. However, you can also use it for topics. For example, if you receive a lot of technical questions, choose that as a topic and write more on it for your following email newsletters.

Read comments on related blogs. Even if you don´t have a blog, you can pick up topic ideas from reading what others have to say on your industry.

Check with Google News for information. Sometimes a breaking story on your area will stimulate a whole new topic. You can also use sites like Technorati or Google Alerts to help you find new topic ideas.

Email marketing content topics don´t have to be super narrow. Often your readers will enjoy if you branch out a bit into related themes. Try it and ask for feedback, if you want. You´ll probably find that your subscribers are more than happy to see new email content, rather than the same topic rehashed over and over again.

Email marketing is something that you need to stay on top of and transactional emails have a higher open rate than any other type of email. When someone buys something or sends you money, they want to take a look at the records and will often save these emails and open them again in the future. This gives you a distinct advantage if you use your transactional emails to let people know about your newsletter or another product.

When email marketing using transactional records, you really have to be careful. If you add too much promo information, you could be in trouble for spamming. There are a few things to keep in mind when using transactional emails as an email marketing method.

Put the transaction info first. Your email marketing should come after the information that the client is expecting. In the preview pane, they will see their transactional information, which is as it should be.

Keep it short. Your ads should not take up more than three or four lines. One line is even better. You don´t want to annoy people.

Choose one thing to promote. Whether you want to push your newest product or just get people to sign up for your email newsletters, it is a good idea to stick with just one thing. Too many and your transactional email will look like spam.

While this can be an excellent email marketing technique, you do have to be careful. The main focus should be on the transactional information and you should not fill the email up with ads. This could cause a lot of problems, if people think your transactional emails are spam! Also the spam filter will tend to pick up on too much promotion, so keep it short and sweet, just enough to entice the reader to check out more information on your website.

Email newsletters can really be sent as often as you like. For some email marketers that means every day, others send out an email only when they have something important to say. While it´s true that having a set frequency will help subscribers remember and expect you, increasing open rates, there is still the risk of email fatigue if you are sending out too many emails at once.

Email newsletters that go out more than once a week tend not to have very important news in them. Often, the writers get tired and this is when you start seeing short email newsletters with links to other sites or blogs and those infamous “I forgot to include the link” emails.

It can be a dangerous game, sending out all those irrelevant and dull email newsletters. Email fatigue can set in. Your subscribers begin to assume that you are never going to send them anything of consequence and, though they may not unsubscribe, they stop opening your email newsletters. This renders those emails pretty much useless!

To beat email fatigue, try lessening the frequency of your email marketing newsletters. More than once a month is good, people won´t forget you, but daily is probably too much on a long term basis. Offering good, useful information will also help keep your subscribers opening emails. Be interesting and don´t let them slip away just because you have written too many boring emails!

Email marketing requires email addresses that work in order to be effective. However, a huge number of people type their email address in wrong when they are filling out forms, rendering their information useless. Fingers flying over the keyboard are not always accurate and our eyes often miss common mistakes, like leaving out a vowel. While this may not seem like a big deal to most people, email marketing won´t work if your subscribers aren´t giving you a proper email address.

There is a very simple way to correct nearly all problems associated with typos in email sign up forms. An effective email marketing strategy is to have the email form twice on your sign up page. Make sure that the second email address needs to be retyped and cannot simply be copied and pasted, since the majority of people will copy and paste the error without even realizing it!

Requiring the subscriber to type in their email twice may seem redundant, but if you´ve ever looked down your list of bounced emails and realized how many are just typos, you´ll realize that it is necessary. This will drastically reduce the number of bounces you end up with and your subscribers will be getting the information they asked for, something that will help both of you!

Subject lines that actually stand out in today´s inundated email boxes are quite a feat. You really need to know what will make your readers want to open your email as opposed to deleting it along with everyone else who is jamming up their email inbox. It´s not uncommon for the average person to receive around 100 emails a day . . . most of those are not personal, either!

When you realize what a mountain of emails, mostly irrelevant, that your readers have to face on a daily basis, you begin to get an idea of how big a deal it is to make your subject line stand out. But how on earth do you do that?

Which of these would you be more likely to open?

Hey (your name), do you need to earn some cash?

Open now for instant millions $$$!

The first one is more appealing to most because it comes across as personal and friendly. Being personal is a very good start for subject lines. Making your email marketing subject line personal is the best way to grab someone´s attention. You should be asking for first names when you get sign ups, so that you can use them. Most autoresponders have a name insertion function which will make your subject lines look like they were written directly for the person receiving it. More people will tend to open an email if they think it was written specifically for them.

You should also try to hint at a solution inside the email . . . if they have a problem and you have the answer, you can be sure your subscribers will open the newsletter. Just make your subject line something catchy and intriguing. It should also be fairly short since many email programs will cut longer subject lines off and they won´t make much sense to your readers.

Subject lines are a vital part of email marketing. If your subject line doesn´t stand out, you certainly won´t get any clicks!

Email marketing content ideas tend to dry up after you´ve been working on your email newsletter for a while. You´ve written everything interesting that you can think of and now you´re stuck for ideas. The best thing you can do in this case is to simply ask your readers what they want to know more about.

While you may feel that you have covered all the bases, some of your subscribers may have joined your email marketing newsletter later and might not have seen everything you´ve written. Or you may not have covered the topics as well as you thought. Asking readers for feedback will let you know exactly how you are doing and what areas need more information presented. They may also bring up entirely new areas that you haven´t even considered writing about! It could open up a whole lot of new topics to explore in your email content.

Just asking your readers for their feedback doesn´t guarantee that many of them will reply. If you want to get plenty of ideas, enough to keep you writing for weeks, then you need to give them a reason to write you. A good way to do this is to offer a free link back to the website of anyone that gives you feedback you can use. For example:

Joe (hyperlinked) asks: “What about traditional marketin for online business?” You would then add your answer below. The extra publicity is often enough for people to write in with ideas and questions, but it will also prompt very well thought out ones because they will want you to choose them. Take only the high quality questions that you feel will add value to your email content.

The next time you find yourself stuck for email marketing content ideas, ask your readers, they could well be your best resource yet!