As figures below show, email marketing remains a vital element of modern B2B and B2C marketing programs. More than four out of five internet users check their email first when they go online for business each day, and nearly three-quarters check email six or more times per day. Email messages generate 15 to 20 times the response rate of traditional paper direct mail—while costing much less and being more environmentally friendly.

Email and social media play well together. 81% of marketers are now using social media to expand the reach of their email content, as businesses that combine their email and social media efforts see faster list growth and higher click-through rates than those using email alone.

With that in mind, what are the best practices for combining email with social media marketing? What are the most effective tactics for growing a relevant opt-in subscriber list? How can marketers determine the best frequency for their email campaigns? Write subject lines that increase open rates? Avoid common mistakes that make their messages less impactful?

Find the answers to these questions and many more here in some of the best email marketing guides, articles and blog posts of the past year.

Email Marketing Tips & Tactics

How Uncoordinated Emails Can Kill Off B2B Prospects by MarketingProfs

Frequent best-of honoree Ardath Albee explains how email programs can go wrong when a customer or prospect receives email messages from multiple departments for different purposes, and the efforts are improperly (or not at all) coordinated–and how to avoid losing subscribers as a result.

Common HTML Email Design Mistakes by In The Box

Noting that “While HTML emails may appear to be miniature web pages, they possess a unique set of quirks and limitations,” Chelsea Rio details six common email html mistakes (e.g. over-reliance on images, particularly large images) and how to avoid them–assuring that what you intend is what your readers actually see.

20 Tips for developing a Successful Email Marketing Campaign by Web SEO Analytics

Dimitris Zotos provides 20 helpful email marketing tips here, from using A/B testing (to test styles, colors and fonts in order to optimize your subscription page) to having clear policies about privacy and sending frequency to adding sharing buttons to make it easy for readers to share your content.

5 cardinal rules of email etiquette by iMedia Connection

Writing that “businesses need to be mindful of a few best practices before engaging via email, as it is a very personal channel and one misstep can cause a customer to hit the unsubscribe button,” Craig Fitzgerald presents a few simple email etiquette rules such as respecting frequency: “You don’t want to over-saturate email inboxes, but you also don’t want consumers to forget about you.”

6 Tactics to Determine B2B Email Frequency by Mass Transit

Adam Q. Holden-Bache passes along six methods for determining the right email frequency for your audience, so that you maximize potential returns without over-communicating and alienating your subscribers. For example, check your metrics: “If you see open/click rate drop-off and lowering conversation metrics, that will tell you that recipients aren’t responding to your campaigns. If you see steady or increased activity from your emails, then its likely you’re campaign schedule is at worst at an acceptable level.”

5 Tips To Dive Into Email Metrics by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Reporting that “when trying to communicate with prospects, organizations are using e-newsletters most (72%) vs. social networks (48%) and blogs (46%),” Nathaniel Cramer advises email marketers on how to take action based on common email metrics list open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates.

The State of Email Marketing (Infographic) by Constant Contact
***** 5 STARS

Discover why email marketing remains popular, based on hard data: 74% of online adults say email is their preferred form of commercial communication. 83% report that email is the “first tool they check when going online for their business each day.” 72% say they check their email six or more times per day. And “even Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said that email is the first thing she checks in the morning and the last thing at night.”

How to Write Effective Email Subject Lines

How to Write Better Email Subject Lines by The Lunch Pail

Pointing out that “Email marketing is only as strong as its open rates,” Patti Renner explains the “5 C’s” or great email subject lines and throws in some additional tips, such as keeping it short, avoiding redundancy (e.g., “If your From line includes your business name, your subject line doesn’t need to repeat it”) and using acronyms and jargon carefully.

The 4 Words That Will Get Your Email Opened by Copyblogger

Sean Platt reveals what these four words are, what kind of results they can generate, why they are so effective, and how to support those words in the body of your email message, no matter what type of product or service you sell.

Best Practices for Integrating Email and Social Media Marketing

5 Email Marketing & Social Media Musts For 2011 by iMedia Connection

Curt Keller offers some outstanding guidance on how to integrate email and social media marketing activities, such as “Run through your social media presences with a magnet, grab every comment that praises your brand to the high heavens, and stuff them in your next email: either as a section or as the focus of an entire newsletter.”

Email Plus Facebook Marketing: Fresh ideas from FreshPair by MarketingSherpa Blog

Daniel Burstein interviews Lindsay Massey, Marketing Director at Freshpair about integrating Facebook and email marketing activities, because as Lindsay notes, “We look at email and social as great complements to each other, and we definitely don’t see email as ‘dead.’ After all, how does Facebook notify you that you have new comments or messages? Email!”

How to Grow and Manage an Opt-In Email Subscriber List

10 Effective Ways to Get More Email List Subscribers by KISSmetrics

Sherice Jacob provides 10 tips to maximize the quality of subscribers on your email list, not just the quantity. Included on her list: make your submit button interactive, encourage readers to forward your newsletter, and offer special deals to new subscribers. Not included (thankfully)–displaying an annoying pop-up box to new site visitors.

21 Awesome Ideas to Grow Your Email List by HubSpot Blog

Michael Redbord lists almost two dozen “ideas for offers that can help dramatically increase the size of your email list and lead conversion volume,” such as education (eBooks, whitepapers, buyer’s guides), free stuff, and online tools (e.g. ROI calculators, “grader” apps).

You Bought a List… Now What? by iMedia Connection

Gary Halliwell shares five tips for effectively using and managing a purchased list for B2B marketing purposes, starting with effective planning: “List buying should be part of a larger strategic plan. Lay out the full plan on a whiteboard, and include everything from initial touch-point, to sales accepted lead, to closed deal. Define the metrics that help you track success of your campaign over a reasonable amount of time.”

The 7 High-Converting Places to Add Email Sign-Up Forms to Build Your List by Social Triggers

Derek Halpern identifies seven places (well, six places plus, in Derek’s own words, “The Dreaded Lightbox Pop-up…The Lightbox sign up form is a GREAT way to grab emails. However, depending on your niche, it may not work. In some niches, the light box pop-up can KILL your conversions because it’s annoying.” Pop-up boxes suck.) to add an email signup form in order to maximize subscriptions.

Mobile Email Marketing Tips

Mobile Email Marketing – What You Need To Know by Modern B2B Blogs

Contending that “Originally thought to be more effective for B2C markets, mobile email marketing is fast becoming an effective way to communicate with B2B prospects and boost lead generation,” Maria Pergolino outlines four key best-practice areas for mobile email marketing, including formatting (it’s “best to send critical email marketing messages as text instead of html allowing the email to be readable on any mobile email client”) and design considerations.

How to Create Mobile Friendly Emails by Site Reference

Misti Sandefur reports that “31% of people view their personal emails on their mobile phones,” and that figure is increasing. She then provides seven tips for creating mobile-friendly emails, from creating a mobile-specific template and keeping subject lines short to sticking with single-column, left-aligned text.

The downsized economy has made everyone who’s still working busier than ever. Everyone is asked to “do more with less,” and that includes time and attention. At the same time, email marketing volume continue to grow, with 68% of b2b marketers planning to increase spending on email marketing this year. Effective email newsletters, focused on the needs of readers, remain a powerful tool for communicating with your customers and nurturing sales leads.

This means your email newsletter has only a matter of seconds to either engage the reader or make them hit the “delete” button–or worse, mark it as spam. Here are six best practices for making your email newsletter engaging and reader-friendly, and optimize it for viewing under different recipient email settings. These are illustrated using the popular iMedia Connection newsletter, one of the leading sources of marketing news and guidance. That’s not to say you should copy their template necessarily, just the techniques they use for engagement and readability.

1. Keep your masthead or any graphics near the top of the newsletter shallow vertically, so that readers using the preview pane with images turned off don’t see just a blank box. Make sure at least part of your text content is visible without scrolling.
2. Use white space on both sides, or at least on the right side of the template, to improve readability and make the newsletter seem less “heavy.” This enhances the appearance of the newsletter whether images are turned on or off, and gives it a blog-like look and feel.
3. For each content item, combine a small graphic, compelling headline, and 1-2 sentence summary to entice the reader to click through to your site to read more. Keep the graphic small so that the link and summary are easily readable even with images turned off.
4. Incorporate a “share by email” or “forward to a friend” button to encourage readers to pass along your content. Also include a “view this newsletter online” option, with social sharing buttons on the online version, to encourage social sharing of your content. Posting your newsletters online also provides SEO benefits and encourages readers to subscribe.
5. Include buttons for your social network accounts in the newsletter to build your following on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social sites.
6. Make use of the footer to provide links to supplemental or less important content: upcoming events, popular past articles, additional newsletters you offer, etc.

Utilizing these best practices in your newsletter design helps increase reader engagement with your content and extends the reach of your content.

What’s the best web content management system (CMS) for your small business? Should you look at something beyond a CMS—a web marketing system (WMS), that provides additional functions like customer relationship management (CRM) and email? There’s no shortage of options, and the decision is an important one: you’ll be “married” to the platform you choose for as long as your current site is up.

Content management systems are valuable tools for small businesses that 1) don’t want to make a big investment in IT infrastructure, 2) don’t have web development (HTML, CSS etc.) expertise on staff, and 3) want to be able to maintain their own web content (adding new pages, text and images) over time, without needing to learn web coding skills.

“Free” CMS options such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal have an obvious appeal (price) to small businesses, but none are cost-free. All require some level of technical expertise, and Joomla and Drupal particularly have steep learning curves. Low-cost, fee-based tools are generally more user-friendly, provide more features, and most importantly come bundled with support. For businesses looking beyond “free” tools, here are six CMS and WMS options that can help you get more sales and marketing productivity out of your website, while being easy on your web content contributors.

Keep in mind that all of these tools impose some design limitations; if you need a truly custom look and feel like these sites, your only option is to hire a professional web design and development firm. But if you can live within a template (and most of these tools do offer a respectable array of options), you can save thousands of dollars on design and coding costs.

CMS Only

These platforms offer website building and content management tools with hosting, but no “extras.” If you are just looking to get a site up on the web and already have systems in place for CRM and marketing automation, these tools are worthy of consideration.

Squarespace

Pricing: $150-$600 per year ($12-$50 per month)

Squarespace is a generally well-regarded tool with reasonable design functionality for building natively search-optimized websites and blogs. It offers a solid set of features including site search, multiple permission levels for different types of contributors, a form-builder, and  built-in analytics. The learning curve is far less daunting than most free CMS alternatives, and a strength of the tool is its mobile support. For anyone looking for an inexpensive, easy-to-use, basic website building and management tool, Squarespace is definitely worth consideration.

UPDATE: After closer examination, SquareSpace is not worthy of consideration, due to weaknesses in search engine optimization, specifically:

• • Custom meta title tags for high-level pages are limited to 50 characters (even the most conservative SEOs recommend 65 characters for the title tag).
• • Meta title tags inside a section (e.g., “blog”) will always begin with the section name. You can customize the section name, but you can’t override the fact the all-important first few characters of every page title in that section will contain it.
• • You can’t create custom meta description tags (!) which are essential in “selling the click.”
• • The people behind SquareSpace seem to lack understanding of how SEO works. True, manipulative tactics don’t work, but solid, white hat SEO is essential to getting a website ranked highly. Their information is both inaccurate and offensive to legitimate SEO professionals.

LightCMS

$240-$1200/year ($20-$100 per month)

Like the other tools listed here, LightCMS is low-cost, easy to use, search-optimized and provides tools like a forms builder. What sets it apart is better design flexibility than most of the alternatives, calendar tools and built-in ecommerce functionality. For developers and agencies, LightCMS also offers one of the most attractive partner programs. Considering all of its features, LightCMS is another shortlist-worthy tool for basic website creation, particularly for smaller B2C companies who want an easy-to-manage online store.

Solution Toolbox

$300 per year ($25 per month)

Another website building option that includes extras like ecommerce functionality with credit card processing, and nightly backups. The site is a bit cheesy, but the functionality of the tool is solid. Solution Toolbox provides their own comparison of their system to Squarespace and LightCMS, but take it with a grain of salt; it’s biased in their favor of course and some of the specifics are out of date (for example, Squarespace now includes a forms-builder). Still, for smaller consumer marketers who want to run an online store in addition to their basic website, this is worth a look.

Web Marketing Platforms

These suites combine CMS functionality with additional web marketing applications to provide more than just a website, but a complete online marketing software system.

Business Catalyst

$480 per year ($40 per month)

Business Catalyst combines the features of the products above—a CMS, forms builder, and ecommerce tools—with email marketing functionality and a basic CRM system. It provides respectable design flexibility and support for mobile devices. Though the product had issues in its original incarnation, Adobe has fixed many of these issues since acquiring it in late 2009 and continues to invest in product development. The catch? Business Catalyst isn’t sold directly to users, only through web developers and agencies (though there are ways around this).

Genoo

$2,400/year ($200 per month)

Genoo is a solid, easy to use tool, very strong on email marketing / marketing automation. It offers some of the best built-in SEO tools of any of these packages. Genoo doesn’t provide native CRM functionality, but does have a pre-built integration to Salesforce.com. This is ideal for midsized companies with at least moderately sophisticated internal marketing resources who are already using a separate CRM system and are ready to graduate from hosted email marketing services. Genoo’s offering includes training on how to use its lead-nurturing capabilities.

ePROneur

$1,800/year ($150 per month)

This is a complete web marketing package for smaller, non-ecommerce businesses. It provides a robust CMS for a website and blog along with native CRM, email marketing, and forms-building tools, as well as comprehensive strategy guidance for making all of the pieces work together. The ePROneur package uniquely combines hosting, software, services and strategy to help companies with limited resources effectively generate leads and revenue online. The web marketing resources section of the company’s website also offers a wealth of free strategic and tactical web marketing information.

Any of the alternatives above can help small to midsize companies cost-effectively build and manage their web presence with no IT infrastructure and limited technical expertise. The key from there is to choose a platform whose strengths match up with your business type and needs. And also to investigate multiple options to determine which tool, and company, you are most comfortable working with.

FTC Disclosure: Webbiquity has no affiliate relationships with any of the vendors in this review.

While social media is the flashy show horse of online marketing, email remains the solid workhorse. According to recent research, 92% of marketers consider email to be one of their “most important marketing tools” and 54% plan increased spending on it in the coming year. Email marketing remains one of the top spending priorities for online, after search and display advertising.

Why? Well, unlike social media, email is virtually universal. While many corporations still ban or limit social media use within their walls, none ban email (they filter it for spam, but don’t block it completely). It’s direct, cost-efficient, and, done properly, still an effective channel for lead generation, nurturing and sales. And as some of the posts below show, when integrated with social media tools, email becomes even more powerful. For example, Helen Leggatt reports that “the inclusion of social media sharing buttons in email generated click-through rates around 30% higher than email sent with no sharing options.”

One key concern among email marketers is open rates; how can you craft subject lines that increase the odds recipients will open your email messages? How can you use email marketing most effectively and avoid overloading your recipients with information? How can you grow the size of your email marketing list? Avoid mistakes that will cost you readers? Integrate your email and social media marketing efforts to improve results through both channels? Find the answers to those questions and others here in more than two dozen of the best email marketing guides of the past year.

Email Marketing Tips and Tactics

3 items that should be in your 2010 email budget by BtoB Magazine

Karen J. Bannan reports that more than half of marketers plan increases in their email marketing budgets, while nearly two-thirds plan to spend more on digital marketing generally, and identifies three key spending areas to consider when allocating those budgets.

Use e-mail for what e-mail is best at! And therefore reduce the e-mail overload by ad tech Email

Pierre Khwanad laments that “we tend to use (email) all the time. E-mail is easy. It is quick. It costs virtually nothing (if we are only looking at the hard costs). In addition, we can say whatever we want in an e-mail and not get interrupted by someone else’s point of view,” and suggests using other communications methods such as instant messaging, phone calls, live meetings, web conferences, blogs and wikis in situations where those tools are really more appropriate and effective.

7 brands with bad-ass email programs by iMedia Connection

Though acknowledging that “There’s no global best practice that makes your campaign stats jump, no design layout that wins every time. It takes constant trying, tweaking, analyzing, and risk-taking,” Dylan Boyd highlights seven brands that he thinks do email right, such as National Geographic, Banana Republic and The Wall Street Journal.

10 E-Mail Commandments by iMedia Connection

Daniel Flamberg presents his ten commandments to make your brand and message stand out in the in box, like maintaining a clean list, limiting response options, and my favorite: “send less better.”

Add Google Analytics to Emails and Gain B2B Lead Generation Intelligence by Industrial Marketing Today

Achinta Mitra provides step-by-step instructions for integrating Google Analytics with standard ESP email tracking, which produces much richer data to help optimize conversion rates.

7 emails you should never send by iMedia Connection
***** 5 Stars
Carissa Newton brilliantly highlights several all-too-common email mistakes to avoid, including the “one size fits all” newsletter (just as with clothing, this usually, in reality, means “one size that fits none”), image-only emails, excessively long messages, and emails with no social media links.

30 Beautiful Email Newsletters Design For your Inspiration by Tripwire Magazine

Dustin Betonio shares 30 designs that are undeniably beautiful, though most rely too heavily on graphics (see the post above). A better approach may be a simpler newsletter design with a compelling hook to get the reader to click through to a more graphically-rich web page with similar but augmented content.

3 keys to optimizing the email experience by iMedia Connection

Brian Deagan identifies three key components for email marketing success, starting with picking an email service provider that incorporates device detection, can deliver messages in mobile-friendly format, and provides actionable analytics.

How to Grow Your Email Opt-In Subscriber List

3 Steps to Grow Your B2B E-mail List More Effectively by ClickZ

Noting that “B2B marketers say that their internal e-mail lists are seven times more effective at generating quality sales leads than third-party lists. However, most also say that their e-mail lists aren’t large enough to drive the volume of leads their sales organization needs,” Mike Hotz details three strategies—such as organic list building through trade shows, social media, QR codes and offline venues—for building a large and relevant house email list.

Internet Marketing for Beginners: Email marketing optimization 101 by MarketingSherpa Blog

David Kirkpatrick walks through a scientific formula for addressing the most challenging aspect of email marketing: building a qualified list. The key is to optimize the relevance and value of the incentive offered while minimizing friction (your target audience’s concerns about subscribing).

One Change, 73% More Subscribers by AWeber Communications

Amanda Gagnon explains how Walden University dramatically increased email subscriptions by simplifying its signup process and reduced the number of clicks required.

How to Increase Email Open Rates

10 Words That Will Make People Open Your Email by Freelance Copywriter’s Blog
***** 5 Stars
“The first thing your recipient will see (in your email message) is the sender’s name and subject line. So how do you make sure you pique his curiosity sufficiently to click on your email and open it?” Sally Ormond answers this question with 10 opening words and phrases to help grab your reader’s attention within a 40-character subject line.

290 Email Spam Trigger Words to Avoid by Mirna Bard
***** 5 Stars
Your emails can’t produce results if they never reach your recipients, and while there any many factors involved in deliverability, avoiding the use of “spam” trigger words is one key way to help your messages reach the inbox rather than the junk folder. This list of 290 spam trigger words to avoid contains both obvious (e.g., $$$, income from home, MLM) terms as well as less obvious words and phrases (cost, discount, compare, and trial).

New rules for sexy subject lines by iMedia Connection

Dylan Boyd (again) lays out the six key elements of a “sexy” email subject line (e.g., it sets the tone and aligns expectations), demonstrates his points with several very good real-world examples (and a few bad ones), and concludes with guidance on common subject-line mistakes to avoid.

How can marketers craft email subject lines that work? by BtoB Magazine

Noting that “as much as 40% of a recipient’s decision to open an email is based on the subject as well as the sender,” Craig Stouffer contends that copywriters need to spend considerable time and effort in tuning the subject line—and provides six questions to ask before starting to write that will help in crafting a compelling email message and subject line.

Email Marketing Research and Stats

2009 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study by XDXY eMarketing Tips

An interesting collection of email stats from a report by email marketing service provider Silverpop. The median open rate for marketing emails is 19.4%; the median click-through rate is 2.4%; and the average bounce rate is 5.5%. In all cases, however, email from senders in the top quintile (those using the best practices) significantly outperformed those in the bottom quintile.

Email Marketing Benchmarks for Small Business by MailChimp

Email marketing can be used in any industry of course, but the results can vary considerably. This excellent summary details how common email metrics vary across industries, for example: emails related to food (36.62%), photography (34.17%), video production (33.09%) or church (32.95%) have the highest open rates, while some of the lowest rates are found in subjects like entertainment (15.42%), arts/music (16.22%) and software (18.22%).

What Are the Benefits of Email-Social Media Integration? by eMarketer

In a recent study from Lyris, 34% of respondents “rated social media as the online marketing channel with the greatest positive effect when integrated with email, selected by 34%, compared with 29% who said web analytics and just 3% who said mobile marketing.” 54% said that integrating social media and email efforts made the overall results at least somewhat better. Facebook and Twitter are the social tools most commonly integrated with email campaigns.

Email and Social Media Integration Tips

The real definition of “social” email by iMedia Connection

Ben Ardito identifies the characteristics of social email and then explains how to capitalize on it by using email to share social content and encourage your recipients to pass it along.

Email + social media buttons = increased CTRs by BizReport

Helen Leggatt reports on research showing that “the inclusion of social media sharing buttons in email generated click-through rates around 30% higher than email sent with no sharing options.” A Twitter button is the single most effective sharing option, but including multiple buttons generates the highest sharing rates.

What social media can teach us about email marketing by iMedia Connection

Ajay Goel believes email and social media will increasingly be used in an integrated, mutually supportive fashion, and offers five tips on how to use social media attributes to make email marketing more personable and effective.

Easy Ways to Socialize Your Email by Direct Magazine

Sherry Chiger offers seven suggestions for how to “leverage social media with email to increase audience reach, customer engagement and retention, and of course, revenue,” among them offering email subscribers coupons and discounts in exchange for following you on Facebook or other social media.

5 Ways To Combine Social Media And E-Mail Marketing To Double Your Online Impact by Business Insider

Gail Goodman notes that social media is timely and interactive, but also fleeting, while email is more intimate and archivable. She then details five considerations to keep in mind in order to maximize the impact of both channels, along with tactics like repurposing newsletter content in short snippets as social media messages.

7 tricks email can steal from social media by iMedia Connection

Ben Ardito offers seven tips for integrating email with social media (such as including customer reviews, and highlighting your people) “beyond simply adding links to your social media profiles or sending an email asking your subscribers to follow you on Twitter.”

Ten Lessons Social Media Marketers Can Learn from Email Marketers by Social Marketing Forum

J-P De Clerck details 10 characteristics shared by skilled email and social media marketers, such as relationship building, content sharing, trust earning and engagement.

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.”