Anyone can through together and email and send it out to subscribers. Even building subscribers isn’t terribly difficult. Most people will sign up if you are offering them something of value that they want. But creating an email marketing campaign that’s highly effective and creates a high click through rate is not something everyone does well. As a result, many many people are wasting their time sending out emails and not getting the results they want.

Let’s have a look at this email marketing report card and you can decide if you pass or fail. You can also decide where you need to make changes to increase your click through rate.

#1 Does your email have a goal? What is the purpose of your email? Are you telling your subscriber what you want to share and what you want from them? Email should always be action orientated. And your message should be clear and concise. Test it. Ask someone not familiar with what you are doing to read your email and get their response.

#2 Do you have a real person, company, or brand in the ‘from’ name box? You need to make sure that your email is coming from someone real. These day’s people are much more cautious and if they cannot connect the email to someone real, it’s going to land in the trash or even in their spam.

#3 Does your email address come from a real person? You should not be using email addresses like admin@ or sales@ These will not be nearly as effective as using an email address that’s from a person like sally@ or john@. Subscribers want to connect with real people.

#4 Does your subject line contain an action oriented or compelling subject? Your subject line should contain a call to action. However, you only have 45 characters here so use them wisely. A common mistake is to have a subject line that is too long. It then gets cut off and ruins your message. Go for short and sweet – keep it easy to understand. In this case, less is better.

#5 Do you have at least two links in your email? Have you made use of an anchor text link in the first sentence? You need to! You can place links with tracking URLs in the rest of the email.

#6 Does your email comply with CAN-SPAM Law? This is very important; otherwise, you’re going to find your email in the spam folders. To comply you must include your company name and address as well as an unsubscribe link. If someone wants to unsubscribe you must do this within 10 days of being notified.

That’s it – well did you pass? If yes – congratulation! If no – that’s okay, because now you can get to work fixing.