Key Tune-up Tips to Keep Your Email Campaigns Humming

Rendering and deliverability are the yin and yang of email marketing. Rendering is the grabber, the creative spark that moves recipients into taking action on our requests. Deliverability is the art and science of getting into people's inboxes.

But how many marketers make the effort to periodically evaluate the email itself for these two critical elements, and not just analyze the results it generates?

Beyond the concrete statistics of rendering and deliverability is the amorphous cloud of best practices (some technical, some not) that go into making an email marketing campaign successful. Although daunting, creating an email message to increase brand awareness, or initiate an action from the subscriber, is often viewed as a one-shot deal—in other words, once you have designed the template, you can subsequently use it for all future mailings.

But in this era of blocked images, preview panes, new ISP deliverability rules, and the constant flux in rendering issues associated with Web-based and desktop email clients, a one-size-fits-all email design just won't cut it.

Each email template needs to be "tuned-up"—that is, assessed and configured optimally for each campaign for it to truly deliver.

Look at the engine

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Lena Waters is director of marketing for EmailLabs (www.emaillabs.com), a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey Corporation (www.jlhalsey.com). She received the Stevie Award for "Best Marketer" from the American Business Awards in 2006.