The Message: Not enough people ask this question: ‘what’s the message?’ At your next marketing meeting when you’re discussing the next big campaign, ask this question and see if you get a uniform answer. Hopefully, you will. Often though, what you say and how you say it strays from the original intent of what you’re trying to accomplish, otherwise known as a fantastic bi-product of being so busy you forget where you live.

As a marketing tool, emails are no different than any other form of advertising in that the message needs to be clear and get whatever point you’re trying to make across. Some companies try to jam a lot into an email, treating it like a junk drawer of sorts. Others keep it very simple with a direct intent that is kept very brief. Ask yourself what you’re trying to gain out of an email and that’ll lead you toward the right answer.

The List: So, you’re ready to hit ‘send’. Do you know who you’re sending to? Does the message (remember that?) fit that audience? Try this method: push away from your desk, stand up, spin around three times and then sit back down. Sounds ridiculous, right? To me, that’s no more ridiculous than not having an understanding of who you’re sending your emails to. The technology is there, the mindset is there, so why aren’t you doing it? (You can stop spinning around now.)

List cleansing is something that should be a must-do for your email marketing operations. Don’t buy lists and don’t use lists that are so outdated that dust blows off them. You risk getting sucked into spam traps and getting blacklisted from ISP’s. If the thought of a simple review of email collection methods and database maintenance makes you sigh or smack your head in frustration, we’re here to help.

The Look: What’s your email look like? The answer will elicit different responses from different people as some people like a nice, big ol’ graphic while others prefer a couple lines of text telling them the message. The only right answer is whatever brings in more revenue, click-throughs and whatever, as my old boss used to say, moves the ticker.

However, if you’re using graphics in emails, email me at josh@sendlabs.com for a case study we did that will blow your mind. Seriously. I won’t even charge you as I’m in a June kinda mood today.

The method: Whenever I’m talking to a potential client and they say, “Yeah, I think we use something” or “We use Outlook right now” as a response to email marketing deployment, a Michigan-sized red flag goes up. Despite the recent Forrester Report findings that 95% of companies use or are planning to use email as a marketing tool this year, not all of those 95% are going to do things the right way. With ISP’s more determined than ever to crack down on SPAM, the amount of marketers out there that fail to understand the ramifications of mass emailing through Outlook is astounding.

Point blank: use an email solution that’s reputable. There are enough good ones out there that there’s no excuse to not be using something. Will using a company like SendLabs cost some money? Of course. But there’s money to be made from getting your emails to the source. In the final quarter of 2005, DoubleClick did a trend report that found an average of .25 of revenue per email delivered. I think one of the biggest misnomers in email marketing is that you can’t make back your investment on email marketing.

Yes, you can. Don’t think so? Challenge me at josh@sendlabs.com and I’ll show you how.

Josh Nason is in his first year of new business development and marketing for SendLabs.com, an online leader in hosted self-service email marketing solutions. He likes people to challenge him...a lot.