A super overview of a great email newsletter example from Kayak. Justin from aweber.com highlights the building a relationship approach over the hard sell so often seen. Kayak also uses basic segmentation and personalisation very well.

Email marketing case studies from the Hotel and travel industry from Email marketing reports.

Where we went last year: Dopplr Raumzeitgeist 2007

Techcrunch lowdown on tripr.tv - hotel video guide where users are rewarded for their contributions.

“The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email”.

For anyone involved in email marketing and the challenges in ensuring your creations render consistently across clients this initiative will be much appreciated and gladly supported.

Launched late last year the project is already working, with Yahoo promising to support all of their recommendations.

On another note, we recommend Litmus to painlessly test your designs - we use it every week for all our email marketing campaigns.

Oh, and the BBC is reporting this morning that Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for £22.4bn.

The importance of email subject lines

When a new email drops in your inbox how do you decide whether to open it?

Deciding factors usually include recognition and reputation. Do you know the sender and have you had a good experience with them?

Another is subject lines. Whatever the aim of your email marketing message, you won’t succeed if it isn’t opened. Yesterday evening I received an email from the ‘TravelMole Press Zone’ with the subject line ‘WTM 2007 Press Release’. Pretty dull.

A finely tuned subject line is perhaps the simplest short-term way to help improve your email marketing results but so often overlooked in preference for the copy within. In this case it was about developments in Dubai.

Why is it so important to get right? Along with the ‘From’ column it’s the only bit of information that users see when they scan their crammed inbox - even more so as WTM approaches!

There is no one best method, keep testing and adapting. Here are some links for writing successful subject lines.

- The Art of Writing E-Mail Subject Lines
- Optimizing Your Subject & From Lines for Email Clients
- Email Subject Lines that actually work