2. Make A List Of Your Product’s Benefits - How will it improve your prospect’s life? How will it save them money or time? How will it make them more productive? Use top three or four benefits in your email. Be specific and tone down hype.

3. Spend Time Creating Effective Subject Lines - Don’t rush through this task. A subject line is equivalent of a print headline. If it doesn’t catch their attention right away, a reader won’t bother opening message. Avoid writing cute punsor play-on-words.

Make your subjectline sound valuable to your prospect. For example, “5 Ways To Increase Your Web Traffic.” Using this “How To” approach is one of most powerful tactics in advertising. People are always hungry for info on how to increase sales, save time or increase productivity.

Another effective technique is to ask a question: e.g. “Need More Web Traffic?”

4. Select Your Words Carefully - With increasing use of anti-spam software, even legitimate “opt-in” emails often get blocked. You need to choose words that prevent your email from being filtered out. Never use word “free” in a subject line. For a list of words to avoid, visit this site: http://spamassassin.org ests.html

So how do you improve chances of making your email stand out from junk mail? (And I’m assuming you’re not sending out unsolicited email. If you are, shame on you.)

First, you want to make it easy for your subscriber or prospect to quickly identify that it’s from someone they know -- “you.”

--Make sure that your “From” line uses your full name rather than something generic like “Webmaster.” You want to burn your name into your prospect’s mind. A webmaster could be anyone.

--Never use ALL CAPS in your subject line

--Don’t use an exclamation mark “!” either.