Most businesses measure the success of their email marketing or email newsletter in terms of the amount of emails opened and the clicks they generate. If your email marketing isn't going as well as you'd planned, here are some suggestions to help you to improve your email marketing efforts and the success of your email newsletter.

Frequency of emails:

How often are you sending your email campaigns? Are you bombarding your customers with too many emails? This is a common problem. Too often is too much, to infrequent doesn’t encourage communication and maintain interest.

Content of email marketing messages

Regular good quality content will help to keep your readers interested and your open rates up. Are your emails offers and news appealing enough? How does your emails compare to your competition?

Relevancy of your email newsletters

This is the biggest problem with most email. If the emails you send through have nothing relevant for a recipient why would they click-through?

Relevancy can be resolved in a number of ways including: sending to segments of your database each time rather than the whole list, using past email behaviour to determine interest and using tailored content blocks or dynamic content by using a solution such as The Web Bureaus e-mail marketing solution.

Email deliverability

Quite simply if your emails are not getting into the inbox or being labelled as junk it does not take a genius to work out that fewer people will open the email and even fewer will click-through.

Take proactive steps by ensuring your email provider is white listed and not blacklisted and that your email has been scored in a spam checking tool.

Professional Looking Emails

Ensure your email lands in the recipient’s inbox looking professional and tailored to your business look and feel. Ensure by testing the email that it doesn’t look mangled and unprofessional. Ensure it makes for easy reading. Regularly check and test your emails in a variety of browsers and email clients.

What should you Do

In particular what you should look at here would include:

Obvious Call to Action?
Does your message take into account the preview pane?
What does your HTML email look like with image blocking enabled?
These tips are always a good place to start if you use email marketing or are planning on starting your own campaigns. Of course other brainstorming activities such as looking at what your competitors are doing is also a good place to start.

Good news for e-commerce as figures report a dramatic rise in online spending in July, the fastest rate of increase in three years.

The online retail sector has been enjoying continued growth throughout the first half of 2010. But the latest results from the IMRG and Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index indicate that the rise in July was even greater than expected.

Online consumers in the UK spent an estimated £5 billion in July, or approximately £81 per head. That’s an impressive increase of 18% compared to June 2009, when total sales were £4.2 billion. The figures also represent growth of 14% when compared to June 2010, the highest monthly upturn of the year so far.

According to Chris Webster, Head of Retail Consulting and Technology at Capgemini, the figures show a return of customer confidence to pre-recession levels.  Webster welcomed the news suggesting that “although online retail sales survived the recession more convincingly than high street sales, the last two years or so have no doubt been shaky at times.”

What are the reasons for the marked growth in e-retail? Some sources, including the BBC, have suggested the British summer may have encouraged shoppers to stay indoors. Indeed with rainfall at twice its average value for the time of year, hopeful travellers logged on to take advantage of last minute deals on holidays and escape to sunnier climes. As a result, the online travel sector enjoyed a growth of a third compared to July 2009.

For David Smith, Managing Director of IMRG, the new figures are a result of changing consumer behaviour. He stated: “with over half of the UK population online at least once a day it is no surprise that online sales continue to grow impressively year on year.”

Smith asserted that now is not the time for online businesses to rest on their laurels: “The evidence mounts that high street retailers will need to invest more in their online business and put it at the heart of their retail strategy. Online retailers, on the other hand, will need to continue to innovate as they strive to close the growth gap.”