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Since my last post, I’ve heard from many people about their take on effective email messages. Feel free to send me your thoughts.

Never before have people been more interested in getting more information, but it must be relevant. According to the Wall Street Journal, 81% of U.S. executives subscribe to industry email newsletters for product information and business intelligence. And 35% of email users open messages because of what’s contained in the subject line (Jupiter Research).

This week’s strategy — keep it relevant — is critical to long-term messaging success.

If your messages are relevant, your recipients will pay attention to what you are trying to say.

If your messaging is not relevant, however, you’re quickly going to find that your messages are filed in the “I’ll get to these later” pile.

If you send email that isn’t relevant — they will quickly stop paying attention to your messages.

Let me repeat that, and make it stand out …

If you send email that isn’t relevant — they will quickly stop paying attention to your messages.

It’s easy to get into a mentality where you want to send everything to everyone. And with email newsletters or mass broadcasts, it’s not that expensive to do. However, once someone feels your messages aren’t that important, they will simply stop reading themNext Post, I will talk about replying early and replying often.

A day in my life:

• The phone rings off the hook.

• While I am on the phone, my cell phone rings.

• I have other people that instant message me.

• Unexpected visitors come to my office to “chat”.

• My cell phone rings some more!

• I receive dozens of emails … many of which are spam!

Sometimes it drives me insane!

I have read that our collective attention spans are very short. Plus we simply have too many distractions to wade through a really long email.

You might think they need all of the information, but when people are faced with dense blocks of text, many people’s eyes glaze over. And then they ignore the entire message.

For that reason, the most effective email messages are short. Two or three short sentences in length. Perhaps a couple of bullet points. And perhaps the short message is followed by supporting material, an attachment or a link to more information on a website.

Enough said. I’ll try to keep this section short.

Have you found that shorter emails are more successful? Let me know.

For years I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing email messages for our clients, and measuring and tracking their effectiveness. During all these years, I have performed tons of research and surveys.

The most important thing I learned is that most people do not send effective email messages!

Whether you send large email newsletters or just use email to communicate with friends, colleagues and customers, following twelve strategies will make your email more effective. These strategies have been developed over years of experience and quantitative analysis of tens of millions of messages we’ve sent out for our clients.

So, during the next few weeks I will share these twelve strategies one at a time in this blog.

Here is number 1:

1. One Main Message Per Email

The most effective email messages and the one that get the most positive respnses have one main idea or concept. Over the years I have found that the strongest messages are ones that don’t distract people with too much information.

I’m sure you’ve received a message from someone that has eleven different ideas and thoughts that ramble from paragraph to paragraph.

If you’re like me, most people will just leave this complicated message for later, and focus on another email or task that’s much easier to accomplish.

Before you start writing a message, write down what you’re trying to communicate. Or at least think about your message before you start writing.

The most effective messages are ones that are crisp, clear and concise.

I’ll be listing these strategies, one tip at a time, over the next several weeks. Let me know if you find them helpful.

And let me know if we can help you with your next email campaign or web project.

A: As I mentioned before, submitting your Web site to Google and Yahoo and other search engines is a good way to start. You can also submit your Web site to directories, which contain human-edited links to related Web sites in a hierarchical structure. Not all directories are free, but two of the best-known directories are Yahoo (separate from submitting your site) and dmoz.com.

Prepare your site through “organic” means to be clean, easy-to-use and optimized for search engines. If you aren’t familiar with search engine marketing, I recommend you use the many resources available from Global Marketing Plus.