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Watch this video and then ask yourself how we can make the mundane parts of your business more fun? How can we use FUN to modify people’s behavior and deliver the unexpected? How can we use fun to be remarkable?

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Please comment below on what your business is and some ideas that you came up with – even if they are crazy.

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Here’s one of ours: We ask for a birth date in our demo and we’ve just come up with a daring and hilarious email to send people on their birthday. You’ll probably agree that it’s very unexpected if you get it.

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Wouldn’t it be great if we all got everything right the first time, every time? Unfortunately, everything — including email marketing –  has room for human error. And on top of the small mistakes you might make when creating or modifying your email newsletter, there are the variety of email clients out there that may wreak havoc on your message.

It’s incredibly unfortunate that there are no enforced standards for email clients like Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and Outlook as far as formatting. Email is already kind of “stuck in the stone age” coding-wise. Since email doesn’t recognize css (cascading style sheets — the “rules” for how a website looks), businesses using email marketing have to use basic HTML to construct their message.

And even within this HTML, some email clients will pick up or ignore elements differently than others. Take Gmail for example. Gmail doesn’t recognize background colors, and 9 times out of 10 text will come through a smaller size than you intended it.

And don’t even get me started on Outlook 2007. Although a lot of people use this to look at email, it is by far the worst as far as standardized email formatting. Something about Outlook 2007 using Microsoft Word to run the HTML through causes many email templates to look like they went through a meat grinder.

The only way to make sure your email is going out to every one of your subscribers exactly the way you intend it to is to test, test, test. By far, this is one of the most important tips we can give you. In fact, if you only follow one of our ten email marketing tips, it should be this one.

Your system to be set up to test messages through multiple clients, so that you know what your message looks like in all of them. How does your newsletter look for those using AOL, Mac.com or Mozilla Thunderbird? Don’t know? Maybe it’s time to switch over to a system that can provide you that information, as well as info for Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Outlook. You wouldn’t believe how different each of these can look with exactly the same HTML coding.

Testing also gives you the chance to read over your email newsletters multiple times to check for spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. Send it to yourself a few times, as well as at least one other person in the office. A fresh pair of eyes can recognize a lot.

Save yourself the embarrassment of a mangled message or poor grammar — test, test, test! And give yourself the time to do so. It’s not worth trading time for quality, is it?

Want to know our secret strategy? We have checklists for everything that we fill out as we test. Everything has to be marked off before we send our messages. We think it’s the best strategy for getting it right, all of the time.

If you’ve done any marketing before, you know what the term “target market” means. It’s the specific group of people who are going to be the most interested in your business or product — and therefore, it’s who you want to gear your advertising toward. You should always be thinking about your target market in your email marketing campaign. Most likely, your target market will be very similar to the other advertising you do.

However, it’s always a good idea to confirm this. You wouldn’t want to design your email marketing campaign around people 40-60 years old if your subscribers are all 20-35. By now you should know that buying a generic list is both illegal and a dumb marketing move, so you should have a pretty specific group of subscribers that you can analyze.

These are the people who have come to your website and were interested in more information, or people who were interested enough in what your company does to attend one of your events or come into your store. By looking at the kind of people who subscribe to your emails, you should be able to see clearly what kind of groups your subscribers fall into. You have a target market, you just need to determine who that is.

And once you do, make sure that your email marketing campaign is geared toward that group of people. Not everyone is the same.

Is your list mainly prospective clients/customers or are they people you have worked with before? Are they interested in information and tips, or did they subscribe for products and deals? Knowing this information is going to be the key to creating relevant messages and keeping your “list churn” (the amount of people who unsubscribe) down.

Prospective clients and customers want to hear how and why what you offer will benefit them. They want testimonials and incentives. Previous or return clients and customers want to know you care about following up with them — asking how their product or service was and if there’s anything further you can do for them.

Each company’s incentives will look a bit different. Sometimes it’s appropriate to incentivize with monetary deals, like free or reduced-price products and shipping, or a buy-one-get-one-free service or coupons. Sometimes your target market may benefit more from tips and tricks or advice. Think about what is most relevant for your subscribers, and you’ll find that you have a happy list full of people who actually enjoy getting your messages.

And isn’t that the most you could ask for in an email marketing campaign?