Sending a welcome email? Many great marketers fall down on their email marketing by not managing their recipient’s expectations correctly from the moment they hand over their details. So here's some pointers about how to open your arms... in the best possible way!

Here’s a great little formula you should apply to every single sales message you send out, long or short, email marketing or conventional print – even advertisements.

It’s been used by direct marketers for decades for the simple reason that it works. It also makes constructing your sales message easy. Just fill in the blanks and go!

We’ve gathered for you the TOP 15 Articles of 2008, highlighting what you the readers have been most interested in this year when it comes to email marketing matters.

Ranked by order of clicks through received, they are in effect the reader’s choice, the most visited and most read articles released through the Email Marketing Manual newsletter this year.

So in case you’ve missed out on these top tips, insights and guides on email marketing over the last 12 months, or perhaps are new to our subscription service, here is 2008’s best of the best.

When designing emails, electronic marketing teams should be aware that email design differs from webpage design.

This two-part article will highlight the main differences between design and coding for the web and for use with email services. This should provide a useful insight into avoiding the most common pitfalls when writing HTML for emails.

An 'opt-out' is an opt-out. The recipient just clicks on the link, PureResponse handles it, end of story ...right? Not necessarily.

Firstly, there two ways a recipient can opt out of a mass email marketing campaign. The obvious one is where they click the link in the email and PureResponse records the result. The not so obvious one is where they click the 'junk' button or complain to one of the spam monitoring organisations.

Understanding individuals: advanced email campaign analytics

In the previous article we looked at how integrating email marketing with web or email campaign analytics helps define a better picture of your customer base.  Tools like WebTrends allow you to analyse click through behaviour so you can optimise and get maximum return from your email campaign.

Analytics installed; what’s the next step?  Well, email reporting solutions can help you to understand the individual and even automate a response dependent upon their specific behaviour pattern.

The first line says it all

Why are pre-headers becoming a must for email marketers?

Now that all images are blocked in inboxes (unless the sender email address has been specifically marked as safe) it can be difficult for a recipient to read the email without going through the motions of loading the images, especially with certain mail clients such as Microsoft's Outlook 2007 which do not render the images alternative text either.

When it comes to targeted marketing, getting a complete view of your customer base is often the key to improving results and response rates. Integrating email marketing with web analytics allows you to do just that.

There are quite a few web analytics solutions available in the market place and amongst the most popular is WebTrends. It is used across the UK by hundreds of organisations in all sectors – you may even already have it in place and ready to use.

Since the beginning of email, as we know it, spam filters and spammers have been battling it out to gain control over our inboxes.

For those who are unsure spammers send out mass unsolicited mailings which flood inboxes and, if sent in the thousands or more, cause a slow down in data flow for ISPs. In an attempt to overcome this spam filters were put in place to restrict spam emails from arriving in users' inboxes.