Your customers’ inboxes are bulging with email - much of it spam. They have less and less time for email that wastes their time. They’re more discerning than ever. So, how do get your message in front of them? Here are our top five tips that will tip the balance in your favor.

Define your value proposition Before you put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, ask yourself what will give them reason to open this newsletter – and the next one. Will it educate? Update? Entertain? Most businesses have no real NEED to send e-newsletters to their customers (some exceptions might include safety recalls or changes in regulations). They do it to build brand recognition and generate leads – both perfectly legitimate purposes. However, readers can smell a pitch a mile away and before you know it, you’ve been DELETEed. Customers want to be educated (how something works, why one solution is better than another), informed (sales, upcoming events, important deadlines), even entertained (joke of the day, cartoon, info on personal interests or hobbies). So in shaping the contents of your message, you need to decide how you want to provide value to your readers – as you get your marketing message across.Invest in the subject line Your subject line will make or break you. As readers scan their inboxes, they look for things familiar and things of interest. The “from” address will usually dictate familiarity; your subject line will determine interest – so it must grab attention and/or pique curiosity, all in less than 50 characters. Compelling subject lines are specific and creative, and convey what’s in it for the reader. Compare these: “Sail into summer with 5 proven anchoring techniques” to “Anchoring safety tips”. Or “Outfit now for next year’s adventure and save” to “End of season clearance sale”. Put some time into your subject line – create several and ask colleagues for feedback. The open-rate of your e-communication depends on it. Finally, your subject line should accurately reflect the contents of your email – lest you run afoul of anti-spam laws.

Make it personal To attract and hold your readers’ attention, your message must be relevant to their needs, interests, or experiences. If your product line or customer base is diverse, you may want to segment your email list and send a different message to each major customer group, for example engineers vs. purchasing agents, or urban vs. rural customers. Another option is to divide your e-newsletter into segments that focus on the different groups – just make sure customers know exactly where they fit in. If you regularly hear certain questions from customers, chances are that other customers would be interested in those topics. Ask yourself what problems you could help your customers solve, and you’ve got a great collection of topics that will keep your readers reading. Learn to e-write Because people read computer screens differently than they read printed pages, you need to write differently for e-communications. Here are some basic rules for e-writing:

· Economize – people are busy and won’t take the time to plow through huge amounts of text. One rule of thumb is that e-writing should use half as many words as conventional writing.

· Make it scannable - people scan Web pages and e-newsletters –they rarely read them word-by-word, so bold the important points, use topic headings to organize and break up material, and bulletize information wherever possible.

· Use images –pictures, charts, or other graphics draw the eye and help break up text into more manageable blocks. Images can be simply decorative, but the more meaningful, the better.

· Shorten lines – the eye tracks across a short line of text and “returns” to the next line more easily and accurately that it does with a long line. Use formatting and images to help keep lines shorter.

· Hyperlink - use hyperlinks to save space, but still allow interested readers to dig into subjects in more detail. Hyperlink to your website, and build your reputation as a resource by linking to other sites or sources of information.

For an in-depth look into research on how to make e-newsletters more usable, visit http://www.useit.com/alertbox/newsletters.html .

Call to action Any e-communication is a marketing tool. It could serve other uses as well, but its purpose is to help you build your business. Call on readers to take action – visit your website, email the newsletter to a friend, ask questions. Also, don’t hesitate ask readers what they want to read about. When you respond to their interests and needs, you build loyalty – and that’s good for business.