Social media marketing may be all the rage right now, but if you’re a small business owner and you’re not thinking strategically about using email to market your company, you’re missing the boat. It’s inexpensive, can result in great returns if executed wisely, and it’s measurable.

More than 1.5 billion people worldwide use email. If you run a business — and particularly a small business — that stat should have huge implications for your marketing strategy. But the reality is, for most small businesses it still doesn’t. A recent Citibank poll found that out of 552 small businesses, 62 percent said word of mouth was the most effective way to market their goods and services and find new customers. And yet 81 percent of them don’t use social media and 62 percent don’t use email to promote their businesses.

Everyone is crunched for time and facing a bulging inbox. Marketers can respond to this challenge by being concise and compelling in their email marketing design. There are three ways to do this:

Spam-filters calculate “spam score” to detect junk mail.
To determine whether a given e-mail is spam or not most spam filters consider a number of different attributes, such as content, length, percentage of text, use of images, number of recipients, headers etc. Usually they calculate the so-called “spam score” for every e-mail which passes the server.

If I get a bulk email, it feels much less bulky if it greets me with my name. I feel more like myself, less like a number — and I'm more likely to read the message, maybe risk a click or two.

Personalize is key.

If at all possible, you should personalize your marketing mails to greet and address recipients individually with their name. Often, you will use the first name only, but for some campaigns the last name will be more appropriate.

Most people don't like spam. And a lot of spam contains "$$$" somewhere in the subject or the body. That's why you should avoid it in your email marketing campaigns.

Many email users have filters in place — through an anti-spam tool, at their ISP, in their email program, or in their perceptive mind — that move anything containing "$$$" to the trash immediately.

During the holidays, people tend to be away from their computers and not check their email regularly.

This means they may get your message when they return together with a ton of other mail that has piled up during the holidays. Chances are all but the most important messages will be deleted in a rush without a second look.

This is why you should avoid sending your email marketing campaign during the months of December, January, July and August.

The first decision a prospect makes when looking at an e-mail is whether to delete it. This is where the "From" name comes in. If the e-mail comes from an unfamiliar source, the recipient is much more likely to delete it. Of course, you still need to optimize the subject line to make sure the e-mail gets opened, but it's the "From" that starts the process.