Guest post by Ajay Goel.

It’s that time again – the dog days of summer for email marketers when recipients are eager to trade in the cold blue hue of their computers for some warm summer rays. When more emails will go unopened, because chances are, recipients are either away on vacation, preparing for vacation, or simply wanting to be on vacation!

So how can you make your email marketing messages matter to office workers counting the minutes before happy hour on sidewalk patios? Or busy moms and dads whisking their kids from one outdoor activity to the next? Email marketing service JangoMail came up with some tips you may find helpful.

• • Tap into how your products will make summer activities even more fun. Barbeques, campfires, hiking trips—each presents an opportunity to reach out to recipients with deals on food, apparel, cookery and other products your recipients already want.

• • Keep your messages breezy and brief. Emphasize warm and cheerful photos and images over text. Make your text large and colorful. Papyrus’ photo of a small girl stretching on a pristine beach immediately draws one in, reminding us to celebrate life—and buy cards for those birthdays, weddings, and showers!

• • Hook into the viral effect of email by offer up great summer deals. Include built-in incentives for recipients to share your coupons as Six Flags Great Adventure did for its “buy one, get one free” campaign.

• • You don’t need to be Coppertone to reach people during the summer months. Even B2B companies can “summer-up” as Alcatel-Lucent did when touting application enablement, with one image featuring the words “open has value” floating over a woman relaxing on a green, inviting field.

• • If possible, emphasize events recipients can go to. Whether it’s a sale or trade show, hone in on the social elements – create a visual picture of the food, drink, service and good times with others they can expect. They want to get out of the house or office anyway. Show them why they should come to you when they do.

• • And don’t forget! Take advantage of your reporting and analytics to track how your recipient behaviors are changing with the season. Are they opening your messages earlier in the day? Are they opening them at all? Capturing the essence of the summer also means adjusting to the season’s pace. Your recipients will show you how.

Ajay Goel is CEO of JangoMail, an email marketing company that helps businesses reach customers and prospects in a highly reliable and personalized way.

While social media marketing gets the headlines, email marketing remains an effective and increasingly used tool in marketer’s toolboxes. After nearly 20 years, it may not seem as sexy as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but used properly, it’s a proven medium that generates cost-effective results. How has email marketing changed in the last few years? What tactics should email marketers be using today to grow subscriber lists, maximize deliverability and generate click-throughs and conversions? How can email and social media marketing be combined to increase the effectiveness of both?

Get the answers to these questions and more here in the best blog posts and articles on email marketing from the past year.

Email’s new role in digital marketing by iMedia Connection

Simms Jenkins outlines five shifts in email marketing fundamentals and how these developments should influence new campaigns.

7 Tips For Responsible Direct Email Marketing by 7th Dimension Sites

Scott T. Smith prsents a helpful list of tactics for using email marketing the one “right way.”

3 steps to stellar welcome emails by iMedia Connection

Chris Marriott offers guidance on capitalizing on new email subscribers based on common plotlines of 1980s teen coming-of-age movies.

Make Email and Social Media Work Together: Interview with Sergio Balegno by MarketingSherpa

Sean Donahue interviews senior analyst Sergio Balegno about tips for combining social media with email marketing to help “one message exponentially, virally grow to reach a very large audience.”

Email, Social Media Merged To Create Marketing Channel by MediaPost Online Media Daily

On the same theme as the post above, the brilliant Laurie Sullivan demonstrates how to combine email marketing services with tools like Facebook, Bebo and Digg to extend the reach of email messages through social channels.

10 Ways to Get More Clicks in Your Email Campaigns by VerticalResponse

Janine Popick offers helpful tips for increasing email click-throughs including image liks, headline links, free gifts, expiration dates and personalization.

Best practices for recruiting email subscribers by iMedia Connection

Spencer Kollas supplies advice on boosting email subscriptions by using other common processes to attract subscribers and offering customers clear incentives for signing up.

How to Get Your Mail Past the Inbox Bouncers by ClickZ

Noting that “getting your e-mail opened and read by your recipients is like trying to get into the most exclusive club in town,” Stefan Pollard explains how to use authentication and better branding “to move (your) e-mail past all the wannabe guests and into the club.”

11 email design best practices by iMedia Connection

Ryan Buchanan details design tips and tricks for organizing your key messages, crafting compelling subject lines, and capitalizing on common reading patterns and use of preview panes.

MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Awards Gallery: Get Inspired by These Exceptional Campaigns by MarketingSherpa

Get inspired by MarketingSherpa’s annual gallery of winning email designs that reflect both creativity and effectiveness in delivering exceptional results.

Closing the Click: Eight Tips for Creating Landing Pages that Sell by iMedia Connection

Robert Boman advises using a set of basic techniques for capitalizing on email clicks to convert readers, such as carrying through with consistent imagery, repeating the call to action that drew in the reader, keeping your message relevant and not making readers hunt for the next step to take.

Why do email marketing? by Email Marketing Reports

Mark Brownlow answers objections to email marketing based on concerns about spam and social media using compellig statistics such as “email marketing generated an ROI of $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009″ and “a November 2009 survey of B2B marketers found that email marketing was likely to see more spending increase than any other form of online marketing bar website development.”

7 fixes for terrible subject lines by iMedia Connection

Wendy Roth recommends clear language and calls to action, personalization, time-sensitive offers and other techniques for maximizing the impact of this critical element in email campaigns.

Forrester Wave Report Cites Email Marketing Service Provider Leaders by Demand Gen Report

Noting that “Forrester’s March 2009 US Interactive Marketing Forecast Online Survey found that 92% of respondents are currently using email marketing and spending is expected to balloon to $2 billion dollars by 2014,” Forrester ranks the best providers based on their research; ExactTarget, Yesmail and Experian’s CheetahMail are among the top picks.  (Keep in mind however that Forrester’s primary audience is large enterprises; for small to midsize firms, ESPs like Constant Contact and VerticalResponse should definitely be in the consideration set.)

How to protect your email reputation by iMedia Connection

David Fowler shares tips for increasing deliverability using double opt-in, careful list selection and working with email service providers on feedback loops.

Note: This post was originally published on the WebMarketCentral blog.

A few years ago, I was tasked with reviving a declining company newsletter. In the previous six months, subscriptions had declined by 50%, and unsubscribes were significantly outpacing new subscriptions. Over the next six months, subscription increased by more than 400% and the rate of unsubscribes was reduced by 90%. How did that happen?

First, the newsletter was split into two separate publications. One went only to customers, and focused on topics customers cared about: new product releases, patches, usage tips, changes in support offerings or hours, customer events and the like. The other version – the prospect newsletter – was designed primarily to appeal to prospects, although existing customers were welcome to sign up. It was completely reoriented from an all-about-us format (“Our new product is the greatest thing since boneless chicken, yada yada…”) to more an industry newsletter that just happened to be sponsored by the company.

Next, the newsletters were promoted separately, with the customer version promoted only through communications to existing customers, and the prospect version promoted using a variety of other marketing methods. After testing several programs, the most successful turned out to be promoting a white paper in popular trade publication newsletters (such as IndustryWeek) and promoting newsletter opt-in on the white paper download registration page. It was also promoted on the company’s home page—which is long gone now, but you can see how the newsletter was promoted in the upper right of this page (click on the icon that looks like a newspaper, next to the pop cans) from the Wayback Machine.

The key to retaining readers, however, and getting them to encourage others to subscribe, was to revamp the content — to change it from dull to dynamic, from insipid to interesting, from stuffy to stimulating. For instructions on how to accomplish that task, check out the new How to Write Effective Email Newsletters page on WebMarketCentral.com.

Despite the increasing ubiquity of newsletters, they can still be an effective marketing tool—if written from the perspective of the reader rather than the sponsor.

How can you increase open rates for your email newsletters? Which common email marketing mistakes should you make sure to avoid? What are the secrets to writing killer subject lines? What campaign elements should make sure to check, and double-check, before clicking the “send” button on that big email blast?

Discover the answers to all of these questions plus email marketing strategy, tips and interesting statistics in these blog posts and articles, some of the best from the last 12 months on the topic of email marketing.

7 Tips for Increasing Your Open Rates and Site Traffic by Web Worker Daily

Dian Schaffhauser offers practical guidance for maximizing the value of email newsletters, such as making your newsletter and website complementary, and crafting headlines that are short, direct and honest.

Profit Week: E-Mail Marketing by MineThatData

Kevin Hillstrom provides a thought-provoking look at the current state of email marketing, where “we celebrate a 0.15% response rate” and concludes that the model is broken. He then suggests an entirely new approach focused around indirect value generation. Hillstrom acknowledges that his ideas may not work, but as he concludes, with only “one in seven hundred customers buying what we have to sell today, what do we have to lose?”

Email is STILL the most effective online marketing tool by Marketing Tips Blog

Mike Alvero reports on a pair of studies showing that email marketing to house lists is the most cost-effective marketing tool available. SEO is #2. Neither of these findings is particularly shocking, but sometimes it can be helpful to have the data to back up your gut instincts.

Learning a Little About Email Marketing by SEOmoz

Though claiming with what I suspect is false modesty to “not know a whole lot about email marketing,” Rebecca Kelley nevertheless manages to pack a lot of information into this post. She shares some SEOmoz experience with email marketing, industry statistics (e.g., “80% of marketers say that email is the strongest performing media buy and that it has a higher ROI than search”), her mother’s resistance to using the Internet (I can totally relate; my mother is the same way), the most important elements of the CAN-SPAM law, and a few helpful tips for improving email marketing success (e.g., “Don’t use (or limit the use of) SPAM filter catch words, like Free Viagra Sex Guaranteed with Credit Card! Though I must admit, that sounds like one hell of a deal…”).

Email marketing’s 8 deadly don’ts by iMedia Connection

Chris Marriott advises email marketers to avoid several common mistakes. Though aimed at retailers, his points apply equally well to brand and b2b marketers: don’t overmail, don’t forget to use segmentation, don’t assume that creative design that’s effective for other types of collateral will work well in an email message—and don’t miss Chris’ post for more tips on email marketing practices to avoid.

How to craft irresistible subject lines by iMedia Connection

Leah Messinger offers practical advice backed up by real-world email success stories from a variety of sources. Among her tips: be direct; highlight a benefit; beware of spam filters; consider mobile devices; and, if appropriate for your audience, use alluring keywords such as “tips,” “tricks” or “secrets.”

31 content tips and ideas for your B2B email newsletter by Email Marketing Reports

Email marketer Mark Brownlow delivers a huge list of tips on both how to generate content ideas (top tips, case studies, reviews, predictions, “best of” lists…hmm, that sounds oddly familiar) and how to manage content (keep a folder, develop reserve content, etc.). A great post to keep handy for when your muse is slacking off.

Are You Scared to Click the “Launch” Button for Your Email Campaigns? by VerticalResponse Marketing Blog

The brilliant Janine Popick provides a vital resource for evert email marketing—a checklist of all the details to walk through before actually launching a big email campaign. Did you remember to remove the word “test” from your subject line? Add alt text for all images? Double-check your links? She’s even left space at the bottom to add a couple of your own checklist items; mine would be “get it proofed” and “make sure HTML and plain text versions are in sync.”