By: Marketing Pilgrim

This post comes from our Email Marketing channel sponsor, AWeber.

You probably know Jay Baer from his award-winning blog,ConvinceandConvert.com. (And if you don’t, be sure to visit and bookmark the site today.)

After attending Jay’s “12 Imperative Must Dos for the Serious Blogger” session at Blog World NYC, I caught up with him about several takeaway ideas for marketers and bloggers.

Later on, while reviewing my session notes, I noticed a number of Jay’s ideas applied just as well to email. So with all due credit to Jay, here’s my remixed version – “Six Crucial Criteria for Email Marketers” – drawn fromhis 12 imperatives.

1. Be Specific

Just like blogging, email is an overcrowded field. The novelty factor wore off years ago, email has reputation issues thanks to years of spam, and let’s face it, our tastes evolve rapidly, so the emails we wanted two years or nine months ago aren’t always relevant today.

Which is more valuable, a smaller but more passionate audience, or a large list of indifferent subscribers? To increase engagement rates and enthusiasm, you need to have a clear sense of who your audience is and what resonates with them. And a broad-brush approach of trying to please everyone won’t cultivate die-hard fans.

Instead, brainstorm 50 subject lines based on common questions and challenges your readers face, then use those to create profiles and back stories of your target readers. This will help keep your emails laser-focused on those people and their needs.

2. Embrace Variety

It’s easy to fall into a rut with publishing. We use certain frameworks to create our emails, then we rarely stray from them. And while that familiarity is good for setting expectations among our readers, without mixing things up now and then, it can get stale and repetitive.

Take a fresh look at your recent email content. Is it all text and images, or have you started to incorporate video? How about podcasts or other multimedia? If it’s a newsletter, do the same content slots get filled with the same style of piece, in the same slots, over and over?

Here’s a tip: If putting together your newsletter feels like a chore, test some significant changes. More audience interaction – polls, contests, awards, reader interviews, links to Twitter chats – is a great place to start if it’s not a regular feature. Another option: altering the tone and voice; for instance, if the same person writes every email, bring on a special guest author for an issue or two and see how your readers respond.

Profile:  After 13 years of email marketing, this website is my personal way of giving back to a noisy, fragmented industry driven by commoditized CPM rates. If you are a part of the email marketing industry or an email marketer at heart, I invite you to participate in this project and become a contributor/author to The Email Guide Blog. Website:  http://www.theemailguide.com Twitter:   http://www.twitter.com/theemailguide LinkedIn:   http://ca.linkedin.com/in/chiefemailofficer

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