Here is a Quick Email Tip: Set up a signature line to appear at the bottom of every email you send out (whether in an email newsletter or everyday correspondence).

Include (among other info):

• Your Name
• Company Name
• Phone #
• URL (include http:// to make it a live link they can click on)
• Email Address (yes, even though you are sending out the email – sometimes people cut and paste your contact info to refer you to others, and doing this just makes it easier for everyone)

Other things to consider:

• Links to your social media profiles
• A call to action such as a special offer or: “Contact Me for a Free 1-hr Consultation“
• Your title – if that is important for you to share
• Where you are located – again, depends on what you do, whether that is important to include

Here is an example of what I use – Though I’ve taken out my email address, because I don’t want spam robots to grab it from this public page (that is another tip: If you never put your email address anywhere online – instead link to a contact form – you’ll cut down on spam):

UniqueThink: Building your online presence, on your site and across the web
Bethany Siegler
http://UniqueThink.com
720.771.3271

Also find me on:
FaceBook: http://bit.ly/UniqueThinkonFacebook
Twitter: http://Twitter.com/uniquethink
LinkedIn: http://www.Linkedin.com/in/uniquethink

Get Free Email Marketing with Constant Contact for 60-Days: http://www.ConstantContact.com/index.jsp?pn=uniquethink

This is not only a handy and helpful way to provide your contact info, you can also use it to promote something, if you want.

As I mentioned, you should have this on every email you send out.  Email applications make it easy to set up an automated signature line.  The reason to include it on every email, even if you are responding to folks, is to make it easier for them, if they do need to call you.

Years ago, I used to only include it on the first email I sent to folks.  One day, a client was trying to call me.  She couldn’t find my business card, which she usually used to contact me.  So, she went into her saved emails and had to look through a bunch of them, until she found my phone #.

Let’s make it easy for folks to contact us.  So, just have it automatically add, if that is easiest for you.

Do you have any tips for what to include in a signature line?  If so, comment below to share it with all of us.

The Wild Divine Project, creators of The Journey to Wild Divine (a computer adventure using biofeedback technology as an entertaining way to combat stress) requested UniqueThink to create an informative monthly newsletter, with articles and tips. The newsletter effectively increased sales, while growing the subscription base through successfully implemented marketing campaigns. It also established an avenue for joint venture promotions with companies who shared a similar vision and business ethic.

Journey to Wild Divine was a new type of product – a video game designed to help remove stress from your daily life. When most video games were designed to induce stress, this one was created with biofeedback technology to help you understand your body’s response. Now, the goal was to find a venue to communicate with those interested.

The answer: Create a monthly newsletter to reach out and build an online community for the international attention they were receiving.

The process: Incorporate various articles, tips and support topics into the layout, while keeping the visual integrity of the game in mind. The graphics were an important aspect of the game, but the process of how you could learn stress reduction in this virtual world and then tap into it in real life situations maked this game unique. Since it was a game that taught you how to calm your body down in stressful situations, we did a series of introductory articles from the creator, Corwin Bell, as well as sharing news about the involvement of such luminaries as Dr. Deepak Chopra.

The newsletter provided areas to feature other related projects to encourage sales, as well as provide venues for joint partnership opportunities.

We created an Exclusive Offer section, featuring a special promotional offer and a contest (to meet Deepak Chopra).

To view how these elements worked, click on the image of the Wild Divine Newsletter and you will be taken to the page where it remains archived. This will allow you to see how the intended audience perceived it.

The results: Wild Divine began to build a community following, increasing their list by 78% over the first few months. They created a venue to begin successful joint ventures with prominent companies and individuals throughout the Wellness industry. And, since the newsletter was archived online, it has evergreen stories that continue to increase their search engine rankings years later.

We also did email blasts:

Special limited time promotional emails, featuring a specific product, either from Wild Divine or from a relevant industry partner.

In this example, its main focus was for a joint venture partnership, yet there are reminders of 3 other offers from the newsletter, at the bottom.

MarketingSherpa has an Open Access article about the large percent of subject lines that are arriving in your clients’ inbox with “broken code”:

Jun 12, 2007

How To #:

Exclusive: New Research Shows 53% of Email Subject Lines Broken + How to Fix Yours

The #1 culprit for the broken code, once again, is Microsoft Word. Seems lots of you out there like writing things first in Word, then cutting and pasting into the email.

I personally recommend never writing anything in Word that is meant for another program, especially HMTL! See what people don’t know is that Word has its own rendering engine. (To understand a little more about Rendering Engines visit wikipedia’s page on the subject).

If you really want to write an email subject line or the entire body of the email, not to mention a blog entry or content for a web page, please use a program like NotePad or TextEdit.

Now, getting back to the subject line of this blog entry, when you are sending out email campaigns make sure you do two things:

1. Type (do not cut and paste) into the subject line

2. Test the email first, before sending it out to the world

I always test on both Mac and PC, in as many email clients as possible (Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL), on as many browsers as possible (Internet Explore, Safari, and my favorite Firefox).

Yep, that is a lot of extra work, but it helps to be sure that most people are going to see your email campaign the way you intended – subject line and all!