3 Tactics for Email: Promote, Personalize and Be Relevant

2. Personalize your emails. You know the subscriber’s name; simply use it in the text of your emails. Williams-Sonoma tested personalized images and saw conversions increase 50 percent. Golfsmith saw revenue jump 167 percent when it used personalization.

3. Use promotions in your transactional emails. The problem with most commercial email is that about 80 percent of it doesn't get opened. That’s not the case with transactional emails (e.g., “Your product was shipped today”), however, which are opened and read at about double the rate of promotional emails. While customers are reading about the transaction, HTML can promote a related product below the fold.