One of the best ways to engage your audience, generate sales, and build relationships with customers is through an effective e-mail marketing campaign. Why E-mail marketing?

* It is data driven
* It allows targeting
* It drives direct sales
* It builds loyalty and trust with your audience

Technological innovation has made it easy to develop metrics to measure the effectiveness of e-mail and also help the process by automating e-mails through auto responders, but the magic of having a campaign that your customers responds to still lies in crafting out a good campaign. Here are ten tips to create an engaging successful E-mail Marketing Campaign:

The Subject Line

Capturing the attention of the viewer is key to any marketing effort and is crucial in E-mail marketing campaigns. A good subject line will capture the interest of your reader and increase the open rate of the e-mail. Many times it is good to capture your audience with a witty subject line or by mentioning your company's name.

"From" Who?

It is important to personalize the sender e-mail address that you are using. Don't lose out on potential sales by having a generic automated company "from" address listed. Customers will respond more to a personalized sender address. They will feel better being able to respond to a real person instead of a generic XYZ company.

Mail Merge

Be personable! One of the best ways to make your customer know you care is to personalize the recipients e-mail to their name. Don't let your customer feel like another target of the mass-mailing machine. Let him know you are addressing him or her and make them feel at ease.

Variety

Are you sending the same promotional e-mail every month? Are your customers responding? Are you keeping your recipients 'updated on your company? Have a variety of things to communicate to your audience. Don't just e-mail them every time you have a promotion.

Quality Content

A good e-mail should provide quality content to your audience and seek to have some relevancy to them. The e-mail shouldn't be too short but also not a lengthy novel either. A quality e-mail should be concise and inform your customers while engaging them to read and not just skim through the e-mail.

Respond to Your Audience

Don't forget who you are addressing. Respond to your audience and their needs. Part of successfully communicating to your audience is also being able to listen to them and their suggestions. Learn to differentiate between their likes and dislikes, build that relationship and help turn that customer into a "loyal" customer

Trial Phase

Before any mishaps affect the effectiveness and progress of your e-mail marketing campaign make sure you run a trial phase and test. Make sure to test that the content is well developed, all the links are working, all the images are viewable, and that you are able to convey a call to action in your e-mail.

Split Testing

After you have done a trial phase it is important to do some split testing or A/B testing. What are some of the factors that can help improve your campaign? Is it e-mail frequency, the subject lines, the time you are sending the e-mail? What is the open rate? Test out changes that you do in your e-mail campaign and compare them. Use metrics to your advantage.

Optimize

Use the data you have gathered from different metrics and make sure you optimize your e-mail marketing efforts to their full potential. Don't leave your e-mail campaign to keep running on its own, make sure you are optimizing and making sure it delivers the results you seek.

Don't Spam

The golden rule you should always follow when deploying an e-mail marketing campaign is "not to spam". Bombarding your audience or sending out unrequested e-mails will be ineffective and make your customers and audience not trust you, but it is also completely counter-productive. No one likes a spammer, don't be one.