(Your Email/Customer Relationship, that is.)

When you’re creating your company’s email campaigns, it’s crucial that your branding stays consistent. Your customers will immediately recognize your company and what you stand for when you incorporate your logo, colors, and typefaces throughout your email campaigns, which will allow them to jump to the meat of the message.

As with anything that’s repetitive though, it’s easy to get boring. An example? Not to point fingers, but I signed up last month for the retail store Ann Taylor’s newsletters, and I’m already deleting them from my inbox without opening. I harbor no grudge; it’s just that I know what I’ll see when I open the email, and they give away everything in their subject line. Below are three emails where the company uses the exact same layout (one large picture with some text) – there’s no fire! My relationship with Taylor’s emails has fizzled like a bad marriage, and I’m looking elsewhere for my eye candy.

So how do you add the spunk back to your emails? Using multiple templates is a great way to spice up your campaigns, because it’ll switch things up. Try one large picture one week, and then add multiple columns the next. Use different fonts, and at least change the color or weight occasionally. It’s easy to have fun when you create your emails, and your newly-found energy for the campaigns will transfer to your customers. They will appreciate the effort, and your relationship will regain that old spark.

Getting the most bang for your email buck can happen a few ways, but having a quality list is key, and probably the most important. Although having a well-designed email with tons of clickable links and buttons is great for getting people to convert, what if your email is promoting highchairs and you’re sending it to 20-something bachelors?

First off, you have the bachelors’ emails because you probably sell something other than highchairs. That’s great! A variety of products is the perfect springboard for segmenting your email lists. On your website or at your store, or however you’re getting your mailing list, give options for people to tell you what they’re interested in. You can provide these options with checkboxes that automatically populate a list in the back-end of your site: the magazine Real Simple is a perfect example. When you click on ‘Free Newsletters’, it offers 8 different kinds of emails to subscribe to AND you can customize it even more with the 7 ‘Areas of Interest’.

Immediately, you’ll see your click-throughs skyrocket, and your unsubscribes will dwindle. Wunderbar! Now you can take it a step further. In your email marketing provider (who you send your emails through), you’ll have an option to create segmentation or suppression lists, which you’ll be able to grow by defining your customer’s actions. If nancy@beans.com clicked on a link for bean-bag chairs, you can add her action (Click-Through to Bean-Bag Chairs) to a segmentation mailing list for that action alone. Now you’re sending bean-bag driven emails to Nancy, instead of Joe who only sits on bar stools. Nancy will be thrilled that you ‘know’ her, and she will respond with love, affection, and her credit card.

Although email marketing segmentation might sound like math class, most providers like Mail Chimp or Publicaster make it simple and provide tons of ‘action’ customization. Take a second to play around with it, and you’ll save yourself the loss of valuable customers.

Using mathematical or scientific methods to craft your business’ email subject lines is obviously better than sitting at your desk and thinking to yourself “..kittens. Everybody loves kittens. Kittens will be my subject line!” Not only will kittens be misleading (unless of course you deal in the kitten trade), people will be so disappointed that there are no kittens in the email that they’ll immediately unsubscribe and mark you as SPAM.

So if your brain can’t create the catchy titles, how do you grab your customer’s attention when sending emails? A couple of blogs have already mentioned this Google gadget, so I decided to check it out for myself: Google’s Wonder Wheel! It’s hidden under the ‘Web + Show Options’ tab and helps you create a map of key words.

To see how it could help me when I make our client’s emails, I first Googled ‘filing cabinets’ (because how can you make that exciting?), which gave me an array of other options such as ‘lateral filing cabinets’ and ‘discount filing cabinets’. I decided to go with the ‘discount’ which gave me even more closely related subjects.

So now what? Now you take it into Google’s other nifty tool AdWords. Once you type in your word or phrase, you’ll get a whole list with a green bar next to each related word. The ones with the most green, or biggest numbers for Local Search and Global Search, are the most searched-for phrases. This is where it comes together – those key words are what you’ll want to populate your email subject lines with. If I was designing an email to draw in people that may be interested in filing cabinets, I could try “Office Furniture at Discount Prices” or “Office Furniture Coupon”. Those subject lines don’t exclude customers that may already own a great filing cabinet, but need a new office chair, and who doesn’t love discounts (of course you need to actually have a discount or a coupon offering in your email, otherwise you won’t be CAN-SPAM compliant, but you get the idea).

Try out a few with an A/B test to see what works best. Now you have a catchy email subject line that people will want to open! Even if you aren’t offering kittens.

To keep ahead of the pack, you need to stay fresh and honor new trends. The latest up-and-coming email layout breaks every width-requirement known to email marketing and asks people to scroll to the right instead of down. In theory it is just the same: you’re moving and clicking your mouse, but the act of pressing the ‘Right’ arrow instead of the ‘Down’ takes some getting used to. As it’s unconventional, it feel’s a little ‘wrong’, but at the same time it catches you by surprise and therefore demands your attention. Below are some great examples of the possibilities available through the ‘Scroll Right’.

– Hint visually that there’s more if you scroll – LA Times is great because the ink blotch trails out from the right side, catches your eye, and asks you to look at the whole thing.

- After you visually hint, you need to make sure you give a reward. LA Times’ reward is the news, Hollister’s is the heavily textured photo of the jeans, EEC gives a $100 off their subscription

In my recent email marketing research, I stumbled upon a group that’s trying to change the way email clients (ie Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook) display HTML emails. It’s a huge undertaking that requires everyone to work together to create a set of web standards that email designers can work with.

Currently, those designers are forced to use ‘90s technologies to create the attention-grabbing emails we all know and love, but they are also forced to deal with 12+ different email clients that all display their lovely message differently. As one of these designers, it’s hard not to pull my hair out every time I layout an email.

The Email Standards Project is still in its infancy and needs people to spread the word about web standards. Their mission is “…that some time in the future web designers will be able to rely on a solid, consistent level of web standards support when designing and building HTML emails.” On their site, http://www.email-standards.org/, you can view screen shots from every major email client to see exactly how different the same HTML email is displayed, and why, in our tech-heavy society, this is such an important thing to fix.

The Email Standards Project may not be saving children in the Sudan, however it’s trying to make the online world a nicer place to design for and interact with. Please pass their website on to other designers or email connoisseurs that would be interested in a standard future.