I recently attended the  HTSA Marketing Summit in Chicago, and I was surprised to learn how trendy email marketing has become. According to the conference presenters, many businesses are turning away from traditional forms of marketing –  direct mail and print advertisements to focus time and money on email marketing. These businesses are more willing to embrace what’s new and hot in marketing in the hopes of reaching their target audience.

In a study by DM, Return Path and MarketingPath, 42% of respondents prefer to get offers via email and 60% say the marketing emails they receive are of “value” to them. Any marketing professional will tell you that a balanced approach is ideal with your marketing and too great of a focus on any one tactic usually is not effective. We typically tell our clients it is not ideal to put all your marketing eggs into one basket. However, with email taking a more prominent role in the marketing mix, here are eight expert pieces of advice for what has become the hottest marketing trend:

1. Be consistent. Three weeks is the ideal amount of time between communications. It’s important to stick between three and six weeks. If your timing is more than six weeks, you might lose your audiences interest.
2. Send email from company name or employee. This makes the email feel more personal and leaves a better impression on the reader.
3. Choose one to five articles.  On average, most companies choose to share three articles. You want to be mindful of the length of the email. If it is too long, many people  will disengage.
4. Test and send. Test links and check for spelling. This step is self-explanatorily, but more times than not, emails are sent without checking links, which could lead to sending out dead links.
5. Try different subject lines. Subject lines should be 30 characters or less, have a city name, ask a question or use a symbol Subject lines need to TELL and not SELL. Your audience feels like they are learning about something versus being sold.
6. Make changes. Try sending out emails on different days of the week and at different times to see what works best for your company. Tuesdays and Thursdays are typically the best days of the week, but test it and see what works for you.
7. One goal per message. Don’t overwhelm the reader with too many details, be sure to stick with one goal per message.
8. Make newsletter easy to find. Put the newsletter on your homepage or contact page to make it easy to find and subscribe. If they have to search for it, they are less likely to subscribe.