All successful e-mail campaigns use content in the email message that causes a dialogue to take place between the advertiser and the subscriber. Email marketing programs that find ways to discover peoples’ interests and individual product and services needs have an edge where others do not. E-mail advertising personnel can find out what people need or want by studying their previous buying habits or by directly asking them. People will be much more inclined to pay attention to an e-mail campaign when they have the sense that the business has made the effort to understand something about who they are and what they need.

Keep in mind when planning e-mail campaigns that people have a tendency to be off line or away from the internet during holidays. When they do eventually get back onto their computers, it is common for them to get a ton of email messages all at once, especially from email marketing programs. At times like this, e-mail advertising efforts are wasted because people will simply have too many messages to read and most of them will end up in the trash file. So it is recommended to stay away from major e-mail campaigns during the months of December, January, July and August. If your email marketing is meant to target people while they are at work, time the campaign so that they will get the message on Wednesday or Thursday. If the e-mail campaign is meant to reach people at home, send it out to them on the weekend.

When designing the content of the messages in an e-mail campaign, be very concise about the action you desire the recipient to take, and word the message in a way that they will clearly know what to do. Email marketing works best when the recipients know exactly what they are being asked to do and are given a set of clear instructions to do it. State the central benefits in the message sent through the e-mail campaign, but keep it brief and to the point.