Email marketing is probably one of the oldest online marketing methods to date but it is still a very effective tool if used correctly. I have seen some pretty poorly designed email campaigns and I have seen some really great campaigns as well. Here are some clearly defined don’t for your future email marketing campaigns.

1. Don’t Always Sell: You shouldn’t always be pushing a product to sell in your newsletter. People don’t always want to be hit with a sales ad.

2. Don’t Spam: Don’t just stuff any email address you get your hands on into your email list. make sure they are opt in email otherwise you might get some spam complaints.

3. Don’t Use Graphic heavy Emails: if you start putting flash banners and animated gifs in the email it might send them to people spam filter or even worse, they will open it and it will not look anything like it does on your computer at home. Then you got a branding problem.

4. Don’t Email Everyday: There are companies out there that I really enjoy hearing from but not everyday. A few times per week is fine but when I see an email everyday it really makes me want to unsubscribe.

5. Don’t Assume: Never make assumptions about how your recipient might react to your campaign. Look and analyze the numbers and plan accordingly.

With the way our economy is shaping you can take trends and throw them out the window because patterns don’t really exist right now. Right now most businesses are just trying to figure out exactly how to adapt to what is occurring in the market and those that can figure it out will ride out the storm, those that don’t want to adjust will end up closing their doors. Now is a good time to do some basic house keeping to your entire email marketing campaign.

1. Design: Take a look at your design, if you haven’t changed the design in a few a years or 12 months it might be time to throw a new header onto your email or change the layout of it. It might just trigger some new inquiries from your email list. People don’t want to stare at the same thing every week. make sure your email campaign has the same branding as your company. I know email marketing 101 but you wouldn’t believe how many emails I get where the branding in the email doesn’t even come close to the corporate site or just doesn’t have any branding what so ever.

2. Clean your List: If you haven’t been cleaning your list you might be paying for your emails being sent to email addresses that don’t exist anymore. Cleaning out your dead email addresses will also tighten up your email statistic numbers, if you look at them.

3. Offer Something Fresh: If you have been offering nothing but the same information in your email campaigns for a great deal of time you might just be ready for something new in your email campaign. Change is good, embrace it.

When it comes to email marketing it is difficult to tell someone or a company exactly what the frequency of email distribution should be. Each business and audience will react differently. It is really up to you to figure out what that perfect frequency is.

The only way to really figure this out is to do as many tests as possible for a certain amount of time. keeping track of all statistics on opens and unsubscribes will be important. You will have to keep track of what time your email goes and and then analyze the data. Your best bet is to put all the info in a spreadsheet and do this for either three or six months to be able to make an accurate decision. After you have decided on a time frame to analyze this information make some small changes to your distribution schedule and then analyze the numbers to see what type of significant changes that occurred from the changes that you had made. This type of testing is very important so that your business is not missing out on any opportunities. Before you do this you will need to figure out if you want to send one or two emails out per day. Once you have made this decision then you can start to perform these tests. You could also as part of your test include increasing from one to two emails per week or the other way around.

Email marketing comes in many different shapes and colors and as a business you should really test as much as possible so you know what works and what doesn’t. By using an email survey periodically you can isolate information you are trying to look for.

Email surveys can allow you to find out information regarding your audience that normally would be difficult to dig up. There is a great deal of information you can find out to help clean up your marketing efforts. Just asking your email recipients will not get them to act. You have to offer something in order to get them to stop what they are doing and respond to your survey request. usually a free give away of some sort like a t-shirt, and iPod or Laptop will work, depending on your budget of course. When an email recipient or customer gives you detailed information on how large their family might be or any personal interests they will expect something in return. People in general will not divulge personal information if the chance of something coming there way doesn’t exist.

Here are some items of information that a survey can reveal:

Industry:This could be a very powerful piece of information. If your product spans across many verticals but you find out one is very top heavy that leaves room to either further target that industry or pick up slack in others.

Company Size: With this information you can target products in email campaigns that could isolate specific attributes of specific company sizes

Specific Marketing Efforts? If you can understand what type of marketing efforts your email recipients are currently executing you can target products and services according to those needs.