In order to truly give your program an extreme makeover, both marketing and creative need to work together. Here are a few tips on how both crews can work side by side to give emails an overhaul.

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.

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?

I have an explanation for why people click the spam button on so-called "legitimate" email: the "Forgot I Signed Up for Email" (FISUE) Syndrome.

This often happens when people sign up for Webinars, free trials or buy something online. They either forgot they signed up or didn't realize that being added to your regular email program came with their transaction. You must make a clear case to your subscribers that your email is in their inboxes at their invitation. If not, FISUE Syndrome will claim another victim.

We’ve assembled 10 best practices every email marketer should follow to get the most out of there email marketing initiatives. Tested with thousands of clients, these guidelines have proven effective at maximizing email’s value to drive new business and help create profitable customer relationships.

Preheader text is HTML text that appears before or sometimes within the header of an email. It's important and growing in popularity because of the prevalence of image blocking by email subscribers and the increasing use of image-unfriendly mobile devices to view email. Those two trends make preheader text vital as both a promotional and functional tactic.

There is so much clutter in the adsphere these days, sometimes it takes some ingenuity to get heard. You not only want people opening and reading your email marketing campaigns, you even want them to look forward to it. One way to do this is to give your email some personality.

E-newsletters are a great and inexpensive tool for communicating with many different audiences, which makes them popular for communicating with current and prospective customers. E-newsletters and promotional emails alone make up about 62 percent of all emails sent, and e-newsletters specifically are projected to grow another 58 percent by 2013.* Amidst growing e-newsletter competition, you want to make sure to create and maintain a solid newsletter strategy to achieve long-term results.

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.