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Opt in email marketing is no different than normal direct marketing in that small simple changes will increase your response and success. These tips will help with both plain text and html email:

1. Personalize- "A persons name is still the sweetest sound" Having first name in both the subject of the email, and the body of the message will help your email get read and not just deleted or being mistaken for junk mail.

2. Free- Offer something free: It's an over used word on the Internet, but it still works, but it must 100% free not an item you have to pay postage and packaging for. If you do this your user who checks out your offer will feel cheated.

3. Tracking- Always track any promotion, which means using tools that will allow you to track responses and conversion of visitors to sales. A good service to use is adminder:

http://www.adminder.com

Tracking also allows you to find out what information is most important to your readers

4. Talk- When you write your email copy, write as if you are having a one-to-one conversation with the recipient. This makes your customer feel like a real person and not a number.

5. Short but informative- Provide the information in a short and clear method showing the main information using short paragraphs of 3-4 lines making it easy to read or skim over. Using bullet points and line space between paragraphs to highlight important points.

6. Benefits not features-Show what the item or service can do for your customer, not what its features are.

7. Call to Action- Use a sense of urgency with ease of contact with a

8. Easy to contact- Use Clickable link such as http://site.com or mailto:you@yoursite.com

This format will create a click on link in most email programs.

If you are marketing internationally you will need a format suitable for American On Line 'The biggest US ISP. Something like this:

[ AOL Users Click Here ]

Always test and target to your market, response rates can be up to 20% with the right message. Trial and error will prove you right or wrong. The power of the promotion to an in-house list is something very over looked. The list must have agreed to receive information (opt-in) from you or you just become junk email.