When publishing an email newsletter, readership is key. But if you use a boring subject line, you will lose to the competition in your recipient’s inbox.

If you are sending a newsletter about insurance, don’t make the subject line “March 2012 Newsletter”, but make it spicy and relevant to what your newsletter about. Something like “How a disaster can help you get all new electronics,” may be something that sparks the imagination and gets your email newsletter opened and read.

Make the subject line reflect your brand to a certain extent. If you are emailing to a list of doctors, keep it to the point, but if you are emailing football fans, make it  humorous or controversial. Anything can make for a good subject line if you just use your personality.

A/B split testing is also a good way to test subject lines. Send 2 different subject lines to 2 small samples of your list and track your open rates. Then use the subject line that gets the most reads and send to the rest of the list. After a little practice, you will be able to target your subject lines to your list.

Until next time.. Keep it relevant!

Resizing images is extremely important for email marketing and the web in general. Let’s say you have a concrete business and want to include images from your camera on your newsletter or website. Problem is, with today’s cameras, images are very large (both in size and data) so you need to make them smaller. Here are some tips to make images smaller for web use.

The meaning of “image size”

Image size can refer to 2 different things. Pixel width refers to how wide an image is. So an image that is 600 pixels wide will fill 600 pixels across your monitor. Depending on resolution, that would fill about half of a normal screen. This image is 400 pixels wide…

Now as far as physical size goes, this is pretty straightforward. But the other “hidden” size that this picture has is the size of its data.

If this image had not been optimized for the web or email marketing, it could have taken a lot longer to load, and made readers of your newsletter upset that it took so long to download. Images that come from cameras to be printed can contain data for 300 dpi (dots per inch) resolution. But monitors can only render 72 dpi, meaning that anything over 72 dots will not look any better, sometimes will look worse, and will slow your website down, and can get your emails blocked before they are even delivered.

Tools to make images smaller for email marketing and web use

If you don’t have a professional image editing tool such as Adobe Fireworks or Photoshop, there are some great free online tools that can help you get your images in tip top shape and ready for prime time web use.

Web Resizer (http://www.webresizer.com/) lets you upload an image from your computer and resize it to the number of pixels you need to fit your newsletter as well as add a border and tint. This great free tool is easy to use and will do 95% of what most people need when resizing images for the web or email newsletters.

We look forward to bringing you the latest info in the world of email marketing as well as all other effective web related marketing tools and techniques.