Jason sends an email to Tyson using his smartphone who reads it on his tablet PC

I’m willing to bet you’re not sending enough email. I know, I know—that’s a big statement, especially considering how much email each of us receives on a daily basis. What I mean is, we’re not sending enough VALUABLE email. The fact is, if you poll any group of marketers, chances are, they’ll unanimously vote email as their best performing sales/marketing channel.

Question is, what should you send? Answer:  CONTENT 😉. Start to think of email marketing as another channel to distribute your blogs, videos, and social media posts. If you immerse yourself in creating valuable content—tips, advice, and updates about your local marketplace—then no matter where you publish that content, it’ll be received with great enthusiasm. Email included. Why? Because it's valuable/useful.

Now, what to send is one matter—best-practices around HOW to send your email is another. Scan through the stack of images for tips on how to get better performance out of your email marketing campaigns.

1. Everything Clickable: Since Apple’s release of its Mail Protection Privacy program, Open-Rate metrics are virtually unreliable. Nowadays the Mail app on iOS devices preloads ALL your emails on its “proxy servers,” which email service providers interpret as an open—even if the recipient never did so. So hyperlink your images, text, and so forth so that you can get a better read on who’s consuming your campaigns.

2. Smartphone Optimized: Year-over-year, mobile email adoption rates continue to soar. That being the case, it’s critical to ensure your email campaigns are outfitted and optimized for smartphone consumption. For example, make sure text is sufficiently sized so it's readable, avoid multi-column layouts in which viewers have to pinch-and-zoom in order to see properly, and make all buttons extra BIG for an easy tap.

3. Preview Text: When you send an email campaign, there’s an option to customize the “preview text,” which is the sentence-or-two snippet that appears below the sender name and subject line in recipients’ inboxes. If you don’t modify it, by default, it’ll usually say something unfortunate, such as: "Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list." Nooooooo! My advice: customize it!

4. First-Name Personalization: When someone says or writes, JASON—as would be expected, it get’s my attention. Why? Because that’s my name! It’s simple psychology. My advice: utilize your email service provider’s {FIRST-NAME} merge tag feature so that your bulk emails send out personalized to each and every recipient. It’ll increase your campaign's relevance and, by extension, its performance.

5. Drop the ”Newsletter:” Not literally. In fact, I think the concept of a newsletter—that is, a recurrent email campaign sharing news, tips, advice, and/or updates related to your business—makes for a fabulous email. However, that being said--whatever you do--DON’T incorporate the word “Newsletter” in your subject line. It’ll get deleted faster than you can type DELETE.

A tablet is a wireless, portable personal computer with a touchscreen interface. The tablet form factor is typically smaller than a notebook computer, but larger than a smartphone.

The idea of tablet computing is generally credited to Alan Kay of Xerox, who sketched out the idea in 1971. The first widely sold tablet computer was Apple Computer's Newton, which was not a commercial success. Technological advances in battery life, display resolution, handwriting recognition software, memory and wireless internet access have since made tablets a viable computing option.

Today, the most common type of tablet is the slate style, like Apple's iPad, Microsoft's Surface or Amazon's Kindle Fire. External keyboards are available for most slate-style tablets, and some keyboards also function as docking stations for the devices.

Other styles of tablets include:

• Convertible tablets. These typically have a display that rotates 180 degrees and can be folded to close, screen up, over an integrated hardware keyboard. Convertible models may allow user input through a variety of methods in addition to the hardware keyboard, including natural handwriting with a stylus or digital pen and typing through a screen-based software keyboard.
• Hybrid tablets. Sometimes referred to as convertible or hybrid notebooks, a hybrid is like a regular notebook, but has a removable display that functions independently as a slate.
• Rugged tablets. A slate-like model that is designed to withstand rough handling and extreme conditions. Rugged tablets are usually encased in a thick protective shell and have shock-protected hard drives.

The new 9.7-inch Apple iPad Pro supports the Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil.

Tablet PC operating systems and features

Consumers and businesses have a range of tablet devices and operating systems from which to choose. Collectively, tablets have made numerous technological advances and gained increasing popularity in enterprise BYOD environments.

Microsoft's Surface and Surface Pro tablet PCs are configured for a 64-bit Windows operating system. The Surface Pro 4 has a 12.3-inch screen and includes a stylus for drawing and writing on the touchscreen. Google's Android is the best-selling tablet OS; the 6.0 Marshmallow version is featured on such devices as the Lenovo Pro 12 tablet, and 5.1 Lollipop is included in the Samsung's Galaxy Tab E tablet PC.

Apple is largely responsible for igniting tablets' current popularity, having released its first-generation iPad in April 2010. Since then, Apple has developed a family of associated devices, including the iPad Air, iPad Pro and iPad Mini. The iPad Pro is available in two touchscreen sizes: 9.7 inches and 12.9 inches. As for capacity, the iPad Mini ranges from 16 GB to 128 GB, while the iPad Pro is available with 32 GB to 128 GB of storage. Apple also released the Apple Pencil stylus for the iPad Pro.