Email marketing may seem boring and old-fashioned compared to social media but it is still one of the more efficient ways to communicate with your clients and for increasing your client base.

Follow these tips to ensure a favorable outcome for your email marketing campaign.

Avoid using ALL CAPS. Interesting subject line with sufficient details to entice the recipients to read further. The key is to have it long enough to be informative but short enough to not annoy the reader. Don’t forget to describe what you are promoting to incite curiosity and excitement, this will help to improve the click to open rates.

Spare a thought for your mobile readers and serve them contents in easily readable chunks on their mobile devices. The email body should have a responsive design so that it displays nicely in devices of all sizes. This enhances the experience for the reader so that the email content can be viewed in a well presented format. Nothing puts off a reader faster than a malformed email where nothing makes sense.

Make your content relevant and concise enough that anyone with a couple of minutes to spare could just scan the various sections to get the main points. With this in mind, use descriptive headings to let busy readers scan the sections that are important to them. While having a HTML email with tons of eye-catching graphics and colors may generate high response rates, attention should also be paid to the plain-text version so that people who prefer plain-text emails will not be left out.

Have social media elements in the email so that readers can share any interesting contents, thus increasing brand awareness as the social connections will bridge the digital divide between existing clients and future prospects.

Make sure the recipients of your mailing list have undergone double opt-in to receive your emails. This will reduce bounce and there will be less chances for you to be classified as a spammer. It is also helpful to have a message in the email content to ask the recipients to add your email address into their contact list as a form of white-listing to avoid being blocked.

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 has clear guidelines for email marketers to adhere to. Along with the above mentioned double opt-in, you must also provide a way out whenever a recipient no longer wishes to receive your emails. A simple unsubscribe link at bottom of the email which is clearly visible to the reader is sufficient for this purpose.

Cleaning your email list regularly with a service like MailboxValidator is also a very good idea. This will weed out stale emails and inactive emails BEFORE sending any emails. High chances of conversion with less effort on your email sending part.