When creating your next email marketing campaign, make sure you carefully consider these 5 questions:

1. Are you providing value to the recipient?  Before you hit the ‘send’ button, make sure that your email is providing some value to your audience.  Don’t send a campaign just because you haven’t done so in a while.  That would be a waste of both your and your subscribers’ time.
2. What are the specific goals for the campaign?  Don’t implement campaigns just to give the appearance of marketing activity.  You need to know what ultimately defines success.  Is it an online sale, offline sale, having someone forward the email to a friend, traffic to your website, etc.?
3. How are going to measure success?  You need to have tracking in place so that you know if you accomplished your goals.  Open and click-thru rates are important, but you need to know if your campaign ultimately achieved whatever conversion goals you set.  Any decent web analytics application will allow you to set-up campaign tracking to make it easy to track and compare the success of your email marketing campaigns.
4. Is your website ready to receive the traffic?  Have you given thought to where you are sending traffic from your email and did you make sure that the landing page relates specifically to what the user clicked on?  Does the landing page have a clear call to action?
5. Are you testing some variable of your campaign?  Test subject lines, call to actions, landing pages, delivery times and other elements of your campaign.  With each campaign you should learn something new that will help improve the performance of future campaigns.