Today email marketing is one of the primary ways that businesses stay in touch with customers and partners. However, managing your own email marketing can be cumbersome and time consuming. Trying to stay on top of the constant changes in an email marketing address list can be a full time job. Then there are the challenges involved in composing and sending out effective emails. How do you ensure that people will read it? How do you get them to respond? How do you know how many recipients have responded? Fortunately you don’t have to do all of this alone. A cloud-based firm that specializes in business to business communications can make your job a lot easier – and your campaigns a lot more effective.

Elements of a Successful Email:

• Subject Line: This may seem like only a small part of your email marketing project, but it’s one of the most important. 40% of a recipient’s decision to open a given piece of email is based on the subject and send-from address. If they don’t open the email, it’s not going to do you much good. So, it’s important to spend some time on the subject line and make sure it’s effective and accurate.
• Call to Action: Another 40% of the response to your email marketing campaign is driven by how interesting and compelling recipients find your call to action. A call to action is an offer you’re making to the recipient – or an opportunity for them to respond in some way. It might be a white paper or the chance to register for a free webinar. Or it might be “please call me at…” or “please email me at….” Or “register for our conference at….” However, the best calls to action in email marketing are the ones with links right in the email. This allows you to automatically track the response to the email and see how well your call to action works.
• Content: The text and images in your email need to be informative and useful to your recipients. The email marketing texts must be well-written and concise. While recipients expect an emailed newsletter to be fairly long, they would expect other kinds of emails to get to the point quickly. If the email marketing piece is too long, your reader will simply stop reading – maybe before getting to the important information.
• Visual Appeal: Any pictures you include in your email marketing piece might seem like a non-essential element, but they are a vital component of making your email visually interesting. And, captions of pictures are one of the first things people read in an email, so they pack a lot of punch. You also want your emails to be well-laid out, visually appealing, and attractive. You need to be able to create beautiful emails in either html or plain text – since some recipients will only accept emails in one format or another. Good email marketing companies will have templates and tools to help you create beautiful emails.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6175306