According to eMarketer, estimated spending on email marketing in 2009 should reach nearly $500 million. Needless to say, the growth of email doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. Many companies are sophisticated in their use of email; others are not.

Here are 5 basic tips to help improve your email effectiveness without spending a lot of time or money.

1. Have a clear call to action – before you begin a campaign or design a new communication, ask yourself what the purpose is, and what you want the recipient to do. Whatever the action you’re hoping to spur – be it contacting your sales team, buying your product, filling out a form – make sure it’s obvious. You’ll see better performance as a result.
2. Use images strategically – how many times have you received an email that was unreadable because your email client blocked images? You’d be surprised at how often this occurs – even with email from well-known brands. Make sure to strategically use both images and text so if a reader can’t see images, they’ll still be able to read the key points of your message. While images certainly make an email look snappy, without proper balance, they can also render your email useless to many.
3. Check your deliverability – with so many companies vying for inbox attention, the demand on recipients is constant. That’s why many ISPs limit your ability to deliver mail directly to the inbox – usually because you’re not conforming to their sending guidelines. While sophisticated services and tools exist to help combat this growing problem, you can also quickly check if you have an issue – for free. Simply create seed email accounts at the major ISPs (Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc.) and send a test email to those addresses using the same settings as you would for a normal campaign. Log into the accounts and see where the email ended up. Did it go to the inbox? Is it in the spam/bulk folder? Is it missing completely? Once you identify any issues, you can look for ways to correct them.
4. Optimize the time of day to send - research is abundant about what day of the week to send email — and the answer seems to change all the time – but one aspect that’s often overlooked is the time of day. Take a look at your email list – if you’re an east coast company but the majority of your list is on the west coast, sending email at 9am EST probably isn’t the best idea. Test, measure, refine – there’s no one answer that’s right for everyone.
5. Add value – yes, an ‘obvious’ concept – but one that’s often overlooked. Whatever you’re sending to your customers – prospective or current – make sure it adds value to them. Don’t just send email to send it: have a clear reason that helps the recipient. Does it save them money on a new product? Provide valuable information? Request action from them? Whatever it is, if there’s value in the eyes of the recipient, it will ultimately be good for your business.