As usual, the month of December has been a hot and happening stretch of time for business strategists who have busy brain storming sessions on how to take advantage of the massive traffic for ecommerce sales and for the increased holiday demand. There are special promos offerings, coupon codes, contests and several other tactics of drawing customers with free shipping offers etc. In the midst of these, you can easily loose focus of the long-term business goals.

Pause a moment and let us examine top tips that would help you achieve increased email marketing conversions as we enter 2011.

• Proper Tracking

You need all the facts in place before your email marketing optimization can take place. Without proper tracking, you don’t have a means of ascertaining whether the changes you made impacted the results. Conversions are the most essential metric you can track.

• Redesign Your Email Layout

Perhaps you’ve been using the same email layout for the past 12 months, 6 months or even 2 months. It is important that you experiment with new email layout designs, testing them with a segment of your database. You may be wasting money using a poor email marketing template.

• Extensive Testing

The test should start out simple, carrying out basic split tests on your subject line. Then, venture into the layout and design of your message with the testing. As soon as you decipher these variables, go ahead and test other areas which may not be aspects of the real email – however, they affect the outcome substantially. You can achieve untold results by testing the message segmentation, email sending time as well as landing page variables.

• Segmentation Increase

A lot of people are yet to start implementing segmentation; if you are among them, ensure that implementing segmentation becomes a priority to you as we approach 2011. Email marketing has grown to become a cooler and increased personalized communication medium, especially with the advent of social media as well as tracking – the engine that moves this personalization is segmentation!

• Captivating Content

It is appalling that most email senders do not have the skills and quite surprisingly, most of them do not take a serious note of fresh and captivating content. Ensure that this year you experiment with relevant, conversational and captivating content in place of the graphic-heavy email layout.

• Get Fresh Subscribers

One of the email marketing changes you should embark on in 2011 is list growing. Ensure that all hands are on deck for this task in your company (whether large or small). Your team members should take advantage of every opportunity – on the phone, at the register, in person etc and work towards growing your database.

• Consider Outsourcing Your Email Marketing

If you notice that the other techniques (1-6) are not producing results (probably because you are not implementing them rightly), then consider outsourcing your email marketing to any email marketing company with an established reputation.