E-mail: Improve Your E-mail Program in Three Easy Steps

Challenge: People spend an average of only 15 to 20 seconds with opened e-mails that get clickthroughs.
Solution: Strip down your e-mails to the bare minimum. Employ fewer graphics, less text and a single call-to-action to help recipients focus and take action. Bring a critical eye to your e-mail campaigns, and look for anything extraneous to your campaign goal that can be removed to place more emphasis on your selling/branding message. If applicable, Holland suggests alternating graphic-heavy e-mail with some HTML e-mails designed to look like they’re text-only (you still can track open rates by embedding a small, almost invisible graphic in the HTML) to see if this helps improve response.