Valentine’s Day is rapidly approaching, and whether you personally view it as the most romantic day of the year, filled with love and hope, or an annual ordeal splashed with tacky red and pink décor, there’s no question it can have a positive effect on many small businesses.

One of the best ways to take advantage of this potential bump in profitability is through email marketing. Email is a very effective way to bring highly tailored messages to specific audiences. And since many people are prone to read into the gifts they receive from significant or semisignificant others, it gives you an opportunity to use Cupid’s arrow to target your customers and prospects in order to move them to action.

Even the best of us take for granted the simple things you need to include in your email marketing campaigns we send out on a regular basis. So here is a list of things you must have that will help you grow your list, get more opens and clicks for your emails, and have a super successful campaign.

As the end of the year nears, here are four predictions for 2010:

Inactivation campaigns will become more important, thanks to ISPs giving weight to engagement metrics when determining whether to deliver to the inbox or junk folder or to block email. Marketers with 50% or more of their list inactive will have to start devising strategies to deal with reducing that level. It will start with each company defining what "inactive" is for them, then progress to segmentation tactics to message inactives differently, and possibly culminate with reactivation campaigns that give subscribers a chance to reaffirm their interest or be dropped from the list.

Most messages sent by email marketers seek to entice recipients to click on a link, and increasing click rates is one of the most common goals of our Strategic engagements. There are many factors that can affect click rates, but in this article we'll focus on the links themselves and some tactics to employ--and avoid

So, you’ve decided to do some email marketing. That’s great! Email is quickly becoming one of the most effective tools for generating interest and sales for your business. It provides a wonderful opportunity for your company to speak to an audience who is actually listening (they’ve opted-in to receive emails from you, essentially saying, please send me information!).

But, how do you create email communications that succeed?

There are many variables that affect email deliverability, but one that’s often overlooked is the email’s HTML code. Seemingly innocuous things can severely impact whether your email will get to the inbox or be seen as spam. In this light, we’ve assembled simple tips you can use to improve your email templates and increase deliverability.

How do you get recipients to open your emails? Are they adding you to their ‘safe’ senders list? Andy Thorpe, one of Pure360's email experts, gives us a quick guide to using 'Trust Earning Text'.

Tweets. Pokes. Tags. It's as if anything that reads more than 140 characters in length (spaces included) these days is deemed Tolstoyesque. (This opening line comes in at 139, btw.)

We're living in a time when microscopic attention spans are the norm. And the need for bold, meaningful email headers has never been more important for engaging your recipient base. So don't let your header be a last-minute design consideration.

Not every email marketing best practice is an obvious one. In fact, in our experience at ClickMail Marketing, there are quite a few best practices that companies seem to look over or deliberately ignore. The result? The opposite of best practices, or what we kindly call “common email marketing mistakes” rather than worst practices.

A recent survey of more than 180 marketers from around Europe found that many don’t understand if their email is really making into the inbox or if it is being junked or lost in space. Email marketing firm Return Path shows that marketers have not been quite diligent in making good on the definition of delivered.