email tips - from TheStreet.com

Small Business Tips of the Week

Nine Tips for Email Marketing Design
Entrepreneur.com
06/11/08 - 11:00 AM EDT
Written by Gail Goodman

The good news about email marketing is you don't have to be a design expert to create great-looking campaigns. Most email marketing service providers offer pre-designed templates you can choose from (that are created by professional designers). But even with templates, you still have some design decisions to make: What colors and fonts to use, what size to make the fonts, and how much text you should include, to name a few. Follow these nine tips and you'll create emails that not only look great, but also get great results.

Tip 1: Include your logo in the same location each time.

Build your brand with every marketing email you send. One way to do this is to include your logo in all of your email communications. The best practice is to include it in the same location each time you send out an email. It may be in the header or somewhere else in the email (preferably above the point where a reader would have to scroll down to see it, but don't take up the whole preview screen).

Tip 2: Keep the preview pane in mind.

A recent study by Marketing Sherpa found that 70% of recipients that have the capability to read email through a preview pane do. What this means is your subscribers may only see a portion of your email before deciding to open it and look at it in its entirety. Make sure your logo, as well as some enticing information about the email contents can be seen in the preview pane.

Tip 3: Use color for emphasis

While it might be tempting to use a lot of colors in your email campaigns, resist. When deciding which colors to use, start with your company's colors. All of your emails should represent your visual brand, and a key component of that is using your colors consistently.

Colors outside your brand should be saved for emphasis. Use it to call attention to something that is important in the email -- to make it really stand out to the reader.

One of our designers here at Constant Contact likes to use a cooking metaphor when he talks about using color. He makes the point that just because you have every spice on your rack doesn't mean you use each one. You use a little bit here and there to add a little flavor. It's similar with design; you want to use colors to add flavor.

Tip 4: Limit the number of fonts you use.

A good rule of thumb is to use a max of two fonts in your marketing emails. You may use one for the body and another for the headlines and subtitles. Use standard fonts like Arial, Times New Roman or Verdana for the greatest readability. If you use a less common font that not all the people on your list have, their computer will make a substitution that can change the format of your email.

Tip 5: Make your point clearly and quickly.

When it comes to writing the copy for your email, get to the point quickly. The reality is that most people scan. They don't give you much longer than a second to capture their attention. If it takes much longer than that for them to engage, you may lose them. With every moment, a reader is determining if he or she will keep reading or abandon your email.

In the case of newsletters, your copy will be longer than with a promotional email, but the concept of getting to the point still applies. I've found that most first drafts of articles can be chopped down to as much as half their original word count while still conveying the article's message.

Tip 6: Pick photos that support your message.

Including images in an email campaign can make it more attractive and help you communicate your message. (A picture is worth a thousand words.) But this isn't true of any image. If there is too much going on in your photo or if it's poor quality, it can distract the reader and reflect poorly on your business.

When choosing an image for your campaign, look for something that is simple and easy to focus on and relates directly to your content. You don't want readers to look at an image and question what it has to do with your message. If the image doesn't support your message, it will only take away from what you're trying to communicate.

Tip 7: Don't embed your text in an image.

Many of the programs people use to receive and read email have images turned off by default. To ensure that people with this default setting get your message, include text in your email that is not embedded in an image.

Tip 8: Remember that white space is your friend.

What is white space? It's a resting place for the reader's eyes. Without it, your reader will not know where to look. Make sure that you have plenty of room between headlines, articles and any other content you've included in your email.

Tip 9: Keep it simple.

In design, less is more. Emails that are uncluttered visually and have a clear message get a better response. The goal of your email is to get your readers to take some kind of action. You want them to visit your Web site, buy now, get more information, etc. A well-designed email will get your readers to pay attention and make it easy for them to take the action you desire.


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from Motley Fool - Tips on Quick Money (Speculating vs Investing)

How to Win CNBC's Million-Dollar Portfolio Challenge
http://www.fool.com/investing/small-cap/2008/05/07/how-to-win-cnbcs-million-dollar-portfolio-challeng.aspx

Bill Barker
May 7, 2008


Last year, right before its annual contest started, I wrote an article about how to win CNBC's 2007 Million-Dollar Portfolio Challenge. Now that the fantasy stock-picking game is back (following some retooling because of possible cheating by a number of Class of '07 participants), I thought I'd revisit the concept of how to win it -- and the $500,000 which goes to the winner.

Get ready to get smarter
The first thing to keep in mind at all times is that this is not a contest to identify or test investing acumen. Superior investing returns are properly measured over years, and are achieved by taking an appropriate level of risk. A two-month long contest that rewards only the very top performer each week out of a crowd of what will be hundreds of thousands of participants (each of whom may enter five separate portfolios), is not testing your abilities or intelligence as an investor. To come out on top of a very large group of competitors measured over such a short time period is simply a matter of luck.

That said, the best way to put yourself in the way of the good luck necessary to win the contest is to take the absolute greatest amount of risk that the contest allows. In other words, simply increase the randomness and volatility of your results. To do less, is to simply acknowledge that you're not in the contest to win.

It works
The 2006 contest was won by somebody who put all of his notional money into one company. This company also happened to be embroiled in a Ponzi scheme investigation at the time, and is today essentially worthless.

Now, to take a million dollars and put it into one stock that is quite likely a fraud is the epitome of recklessness and stupidity in real life. But to play that move in a game, in the hopes that a severely beaten-down stock will catch a few moments of glory off of "a dead cat bounce," is brilliance.

And so, as long as you accept that what makes sense in this game is often the polar opposite of what you should do with actual money, there's fun and, for a very few people, rewards, to be had. So here's how you should proceed:

Use all five portfolios. This one is obvious. You can't win if you don't play, and you can't maximize your chances of winning if you don't use all the portfolios available.
Maintain a super-concentrated portfolio. In this year's contest, you can no longer place all of your notional million into one stock; you can put only 25% of your portfolio into any one position in the 2008 version of the game. Playing as close as you can to the minimum of four stocks maximizes the randomness and volatility of your results.
Size matters, so go small. Small caps generally move more dramatically than large caps whether there is news or not. Unfortunately, you can't play with micro caps since the contest is limited to companies that have market caps of $500 million or more, but the closer you play to that cutoff line, the better your chances of putting a dramatic move in your portfolio.
Focus on earnings announcements. You also maximize your chances of getting a big move if you focus on stocks with earnings announcements scheduled during the dates that the contest is live. While small companies are your best bet to get volatility playing the earnings game, even Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) managed a 20% jump on the release of its most recent earnings, thanks to its beating expectations.
Look at companies trading at or near 52-week lows. That's where Google was prior to its earnings announcement. The announcement was certainly good, but the magnitude of its move was made possible by being so beaten down.
Celebrate low-priced stocks. Speaking of beaten down, stocks trading below $10 or even $5 per share are more likely to make extreme short-term moves than companies of similar market caps with higher per-share prices. That's a market anomaly, but an enduring one.
Look for shorts. Stocks with a large chunk of their shares shorted are great candidates for quick upward moves, especially when combined with the potential for a good earnings announcement. When there's a significant portion of the stock shorted and the stock starts to move up, the shorts start to cover and send the stock even higher.
Merger mania. Investing real money solely on the possibility of a merger or acquisition is loony. But for this contest, it makes sense. Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) may or may not really have walked away from Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), but in the absence of a better idea, or until a better idea comes along, it makes some sense to play Yahoo! for a quick pop on the hint or rumor that merger talks could reawaken.
Biotechs, baby. Biotech stocks frequently populate both the top performers of the day and the top drops of the day as major news is released about a drug trial. As for which biotechs will have trial results forthcoming, I pinged our biotech guru Charly Travers. Myriad Genetics (Nasdaq: MYGN), he told me, "is releasing phase 3 data on its drug Flurizan for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease in June." Now, Charly -- like most of the investment community -- doesn't expect the results to be positive. But since expectations are so low, we could see a pretty big pop if the announcement contains any good news at all.
Simply have fun. Having spoken with the fine people at CNBC about their contest, they fully recognize that they're offering a fun game -- not a real exercise of their contestants' investing acumen. Remember that and enjoy the opportunity to trade stocks in a way that you would never attempt in real life.
Some additional ideas
Combining some of these criteria, here are a few small caps with low share prices, high short ratios, and upcoming earnings:

Company
Market Cap
Stock Price
Shares Short as a Percentage of Float
Date of Earnings

Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI)
$546mm
$2.78
43.8%
May 15, 2008

Circuit City
$860mm
$5.10
17.6%
June 16, 2008

FuelCell Energy (Nasdaq: FCEL)
$602mm
$8.87
17.5%
June 2, 2008

TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO)
$842mm
$8.39
18.1%
May 26, 2008

Data from Yahoo! Finance and Thomson Financial.
Furthermore, Blockbuster and Circuit City offer the added volatility of a bizarre merger contest that involves angry activist shareholders.

Back to reality
It behooves me to point out, once again, that I don't consider employing most of these tactics a worthwhile way to invest. Yes, small caps provide better returns than large caps over the long term, and we explore how to actually invest in them in a real-world sense in Motley Fool Hidden Gems. In fact, you can see our top small-cap picks for new real money now, by clicking here to join the service free for 30 days.

But life isn't all about real-world achievable returns, nice as they are. Sometimes, it's worth seeing whether you can turn $1,000,000 into $3,000,000 in a matter of weeks, especially when there's nothing to lose by trying.

Bill Barker does not own any stocks mentioned in this article. Microsoft is a Motley Fool Inside Value recommendation. Myriad Genetics is a Rule Breakers pick. The Fool has a million-dollar disclosure policy.