Some of my most successful copywriting clients amassed their fortunes through email marketing.
  Below I share some of the secrets to a successful email marketing campaign that you can apply to your own business.
1.
    Marketing through email is one of the cheapest and most effective means of online marketing because email is economical, immediate and involves a direct response.
  Some email campaigns have seen as much as 30% response rate while websites are still struggling to deliver 5% response from website traffic.
2.
    Use the 'from' line to indicate to the recipient the name of the person the email is coming from.
  Avoid using generic company terms such as 'support', 'admin' and 'marketing'.
3.
    The subject line is like the headline of your sales letter and can make or break an email campaign.
  This is where the subscriber will scan and decide whether your email is worth opening.
  Your subject line should be friendly, build curiosity and promise a benefit for reading the rest of the email.
4.
    If possible, personalize the subject line using the recipients' name.
  Most people will quickly pick out their names out of a body of text.
  This allows your message to get the attention of the reader among all the email box clutter.
  You can also indicate the name of your newsletter publication here so that you can develop a brand in there person's mind-make your future emails easy to identify.
5.
    Different email clients such as Outlook and Hotmail will allow different character lengths for your subject line and 'from' text.
  If possible, you should set up different test email addresses that cover the demographics of your list and do a 'test mailing' to see exactly how your email will appear.
  You may find that some clients, such as AOL, will truncate your subject line at 51 characters and so longer subject will suffer as a result.
  If you don't perform this simple test you may be surprised to see how your perfectly-formatted email messages appear to different readers.
  This formatting also applies to the body of your email.
6.
    Write in a friendly conversational tone and avoid the rigid language of the business world.
  Emails are meant to be friendly and you should aim for this tone.
  The tips as applied to a sales letter will work here except on a more compact scale.
7.
    To get your emails read completely you should try and build curiosity upfront.
  A great way of doing this is to start by relating a story and then breaking, promising to return to the subject further down in the email.
  This builds the attention level of the readers as they try to resolve the unanswered questions that you have planted in their mind.
  For example, you may start by saying, "I just couldn't believe that I was getting so much sales with this new method.
  I just had to share this with you.
  But let me tell you this first ...
" It's a very simple tool, but very effective.
8.
    You don't want to reveal too much in your email if you have more details at your website.
  At the same time the longer your email body is the more likely it will get filtered by anti-SPAM filters.
  So a short email promising a strong benefit if the reader goes to your website will be fine here.
  Another option you have is to send the link to a PDF report containing the full length of the email.
9.
    One of the easiest ways to write an effective promotional email is to use the salescopy from your website and include the headline, a few bulleted points showing your main benefits and your strongest testimonials.
  In this way you don't have to brainstorm when writing your emails to promote any website that already has a working sales letter.
  This is a simple but effective model to follow.
10.
       Before sending off your email you should make sure the text body is formatted to between 55 to 65 character length.
  There are many text formatters on the market that will do this for you.
  You can also do this manually by using a hard carriage return at the end of each line (pressing the 'Enter' key on your keyboard) to ensure the line lengths will be preserved when copied and pasted into your email client.
  In this way your email will have a fixed width rather than each line having a different length.
11.
       Don't' be afraid to allow your personality to shine through your email.
  How else would you stand out in the reader's mind?  Some humor and personal happenings in your life won't hurt to bond yourself to your readers either.
12.
       Tell them why you are emailing them.
  Sometimes you may even need to do this upfront if you don't have an ongoing relationship with these subscribers.
  Remind them where they signed up and how long ago if you have that information.
  This will reduce SPAM complaints and jog their memory in case they forgot.
13.
       Check on the link in your email to make sure that they are working before you mail your entire list.
  Also perform a spell-check just to pick up those typos.
  It's just when you decide not to check that you realize that you mistyped a link so that all your subscribers are sent to an error page.
14.
       Use a tracking program to determine the open rate of your emails.
  No use sending out emails blindly and having no idea how many are opened.
  You can therefore determine when it is necessary to do some list cleaning to get rid of the non-responsive subscribers.
15.
       Make sure that your emails are CAN-SPAM compliant.
  16.
       Instead of having one general list, you should have targeted lists so that you can know what promotions to send to which list.
  You may have, for example, a customer list separate from a prospect list.
  You would not want to send the same promotion to a customer who has already bought the product.
On a final note, many online marketers are shying away from email marketing because of a claimed drop in response and deliverability problems.
  But if you use a reputable autoresponder company such as Aweber, this would go a long way in reducing these problems.