Are the people on your list actually opening and reading your emails?

First, if you don't know the answer to that question, you're not tracking well enough. All the major autoresponder services have open rate tracking, although usually only on HTML messages, and most of them also have click tracking.

Or you can set up your own click tracking script if you don't want the weird looking URLs that the autoresponders use to track.

If you do know how many are opening and reading your emails, are you happy with the number?

I'm willing to bet that even if you're happy with it, you would still like to get more. A 100% open rate is practically impossible, so no matter how good it is, chances are it can be improved.

When you're writing your emails, you need to look at it from your readers' point of view.

Imagine that they get 100 emails on any given day. Yours is just one of those hundred.

What are you doing to make sure that your message stands out from the bunch, to grab your reader's attention and get them to open your message?

Think about what they want - why they signed up for your email in the first place. Chances are they have a problem they want solved, or else they wouldn't have given you their contact information.

Your subject line should be compelling, making a clear offer of what they're going to read if they open your message - and more importantly, how it's going to help them fix their problem.

The content is what's going to grab them, not when you send it, the name it's coming from, or any other trick.

If you schedule the email to go out at 12:01 am, it might be one of the first in their inbox that day. But lots of people work from newest to oldest when sorted through their email.

If yours is number 95 in the list, how much energy do you think the reader is going to have left for reading mediocre messages that are just trying to sell her something?

The most effective way to get your emails opened and read is to write them from the perspective of what your reader wants and needs.

If you can hit their hot button, it won't matter if you're number 999 out of 1000 emails for that day, they're going to open it and read it.

I'm going to give you a tip for how you can know what your readers' hot buttons are in my next post, so if you want to be notified when I post it, sign up for the blog announcement emails over on the right (or add my RSS feed to your newsreader).