This month's Hints & Tips Email Marketing newsletter focuses in on list building. You'll get best practices to follow and fresh ideas for growing your list.

Read the July issue here.

How do you grow your email list? Share your ideas by making a comment below. We want to hear from you!

The Constant Contact Best Practices Blog welcomes new blogger, Ellen Siegel, our Director of Technology and Standards here at Constant Contact.

Ellen is the one who makes sure that we are on the “straight and narrow” when it comes to best practices. She is a CAN-SPAM expert and is knowledgeable on a broad range of current deliverability technologies. In an ongoing effort to help fight spam and protect legitimate email, Ellen is also a leader and active participant in a number of email industry organizations including the Email Sender and Provider Coalition (ESPC) and the  Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG).

As a blogger, Ellen will cover issues including anti-spam, email authentication, deliverability, the law (as it relates to email marketing), and more. She will help you understand how these issues can affect you and offer guidance in navigating them.

In her first blog post, she gives an update on the recent developments with the CAN-SPAM Act.

Welcome, Ellen!

Best,

Amy

The New York Enterprise Report is hosting the webinar on their site, so you can watch it at any time. This is excellent material if you are just getting started with email marketing or if you are looking for ways to grow your list and improve the communications you send. There’s a little something for everyone.

Topics covered include:

This month's issue of our newsletter Hints & Tips Email Marketing is all about email newsletters.

Content includes:

• An interview with e-newsletter expert Michael Katz
• An article on the ingredients for excellent newsletters
• Four examples of newsletters that are following best practices
• Info on a free newsletter makeover webinar and more!

View the newsletter issue now!

I’ve got more notes to share from the Email Insider Summit. Here are some tips from Aaron Smith and Lisa Harmon from Smith & Harmon Associates. These folks are a talented duo from Seattle who know what they are talking about when it comes to email design. They also use Constant Contact to send out their email newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

Here are four design tips from Lisa and Aaron:

Images off solutions – Because many people have images turned off in their email accounts, use HTML instead of graphics and use alt tags with images so the recipient has a description of the image they are missing. Also, whether the images are enabled or disabled, your email should look almost the same.

According to my friends at the reference desk of the Boston Public Library, there are more than 1.9 million professional farmers in the United States today. Interestingly, this same source couldn't find a single person in the nation categorized as a "professional hunter."

Frankly, this doesn't surprise me. Despite having slept through much of Mr. Schweitzer's 10^th grade social studies class, I did learn that the people who grow food for a living are considered more anthropologically advanced than the hunter/gatherers of the world. And so it makes sense that in a highly developed country such as this, hunting as a career option has all but vanished.

What is surprising however, is that in the world of Western business, hunting – not farming – remains the dominant strategy for growing a company.

In June, Hints & Tips Email Marketing will focus on email newsletters. Working with the topic got me thinking about a great presentation I heard last year when I attended the Marketing Sherpa Conference in Miami, Florida. The session was on email newsletters and featured a number of professional email marketers who are each responsible for email newsletter programs.

One of the speakers was Rick Crossett who, at the time, worked at Tech Republic of CNET Networks. I was impressed when he said that he sent 45 different newsletters a month! I figure that a guy who sends that many newsletters must know a thing or two about the topic. And he did. His advice was simple, but memorable. Here’s what I learned from him, mixed with a few pointers of my own.