With emails flooding inboxes, the pressure is on to deliver highly compelling and creative communications that rise above the clutter. Yet some marketers are still clinging stubbornly to the same stale email campaigns they've had for years. The good news is there are new innovations and proven tactics for better engaging customers and driving revenue. Here are five...

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.

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.

by Martin Lieberman - When people are first introduced to email marketing, they are thrilled to find that they can get detailed reporting that tells them who is (or isn't) opening their emails and what they're clicking on. But then they take a look at the open rate report and it brings up more questions than it answers.