Emails with images in them perform better than those without. As a rule of thumb, avoid sending massive images, and strive for a healthy balance of moderately-sized graphics and text.

3. Don't rely on pictures

Some users may only receive your email in plaintext format, which means that some of the pictures you include may not be viewed. To allow for that possibility, make sure your campaign still makes sense - and makes its point - even if the graphics aren't displayed.

4. Get your branding right

Making sure that your branding is clear and consistent is one of the most important factors in producing effective email marketing.

Ensure that your company logo is clearly visible and that all communications are branded with your name, address and contact details, so people can get in touch with you. If you trade under various different names, make sure that this is clear. For consistency, choose one of your brands and stick to it.

5. Focus above the fold

It is important when laying out your email's content to pay a lot of attention to the top four inches, as this is the first thing people will see. Make sure your logo is there and that you've introduced your email's topic or theme.

If there is an important link or action in the body of your email don't hide it in the middle, put it near the top for your audience to see straight away. This is your opportunity to sell yourself, so don't waste it with a bland opening!

6. Personalise your emails

Making sure that your emails feel personal is a great way of marketing your products effectively. It illustrates that you have taken the time and effort to think about what you send. After all, showing that you know someone's name is great, showing them you really know, respect and care about them is even better.

7. Be aware of your audience

Having a good knowledge and understanding of your audience is the path to effective email marketing. By using segmented data, you can see exactly what your audience likes or dislikes and what interests them. In doing so, you can put the most relevant products and services in front of the people who are most likely to buy them.

8. Send well-timed, targeted follow-ups

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9. Make the most of landing pages

Think of your emails as a front door to open up other things, such as landing pages. This is the relevant information on your website to your products and services. This provides a great opportunity not only to reinforce your branding, but also to take advantage of the moment of undivided attention you have once someone takes the trouble of clicking one of your links.

10. Experiment!

The great thing about email marketing is that you can track and review the effectiveness of your campaigns. You can use this to learn what your audience likes, and doesn't and then experiment to see how changes affect your response numbers.

At the end of the day, the only way to learn what works and what doesn't is to experiment and email marketing gives you the opportunity to do this.

There’s a lot to consider when writing articles and press releases on behalf of our clients and one such consideration is keyword density. It is frequently said in many marketing forums and SEO blog posts that the ideal keyword density for an article or press release is between 3% and 7%. However the reality of sticking to this ‘ideal’ percentage range can have a detrimental effect on the quality and readability of the content we create.

When one considers that the average length of an article is around 500 words, maintaining the presumed lower limit of 3% means a keyword should appear 15 times in every 500 words. This probably doesn’t sound like a lot of occurrences, however, when one does place a keyword 15 times into a 500 word article you’ll quickly realise just how repetitive a keyword in an article can become.

For test purposes I’ve chosen three of the most common words in English, being ‘the’, ‘and’ & ‘to’, and checked their density in a variety of texts such as web pages, song lyrics, news articles, wikipedia pages etc. and found that even the most common word, being ‘the’ seldom surpasses the 6% mark and ‘to’ & ‘and’ more often than not lurks around the 2-4% mark.

If the other two very common words such as ‘to’ & ‘and’ naturally take up around 3% of an average piece of text, you’ll then realise why it’s often so hard to achieve even a 3% density for a less common keyword in an article whilst maintaining its readability.  This is also the reason why many of my articles seldom reach a density of 3% for its main keyword.

Personally, I feel that quality should always come before quantity and providing well written copy is what we do best. I’m sure everybody who reads this will agree and the many clients who pay good money for our services would much rather us concentrate on well researched and well written articles and press releases.

If we aimed for the higher keyword density of 7% would mean we’d have to include a keyword 35 times in a 500 word article, to which most people would read something like this; “If you like keyword spam than we’ve got the keyword spam for you. Our team of copy writers provide keyword spam, spammy keywords or if you prefer, plain old spam. Bore your readers senseless with endless spam and just when they think they’ve seen enough spam, we’ll give thi some more… spam.”  You get the idea!

Many websites do achieve the desired keyword density of three to seven percent; however, this is often due to keywords appearing elsewhere on the page and not within the main body of text, such as in the page title, the meta tags, the navigation and other snippets of text such as customer testimonials or mini product reviews. Also, the main body text of such pages is often short and sweet.

The less text there is makes it easier to get a keyword density between three and seven percent without it reading too much like spam, however, when it comes to writing a factual, well informed article on any given subject, short and sweet doesn’t cut the mustard.

When writing articles on behalf of our clients we tend to focus on three or four keywords and phrases and use thi where possible in the body of text. Once finished, we reread the text and riove the occurrences of keyword repetition and add the keywords where we feel they’ve been omitted, yet always ensuring the readers experience is a pleasant one.

And just in case you’re wondering, the keyword density of the above article is

 “keyword” = 2.6% and “density” = 1.4%