I came across this excellent infographic on email marketing and wanted to pass it on to you. If you do just the four things in the Content Checklist, you’ll be ahead of most of your competition.

Here they are:

A Compelling Subject Line

Copyblogger recently ran a subject line competition for Marketing Sherpa. The winners’ entries served as a lesson on the right way to go about getting an email opened.

Forget about being clever. The important thing is to capture the attention of your recipient so that they are curious about the email and can see a potential benefit for them in opening it.

If you read through Copyblogger’s post, you’ll see that the winning subject line was very clear about its purpose. A discount was available for a conference but only for a limited time.

One Central Idea

Taking the above example, that email had one central idea: to offer a discount to Marketing Sherpa’s list to encourage registering for their conference.

Whenever you create an email for marketing purposes, ask yourself: what is the one purpose for the email?

Is it to get the person to download a free report? To attend a webinar? To buy a product?

Focus on one thing.

Don’t send out an email that invites someone to download a free report and then say, “Oh, by the way… we’ve got this great webinar coming up, why don’t you sign up for it now, too?”

Such emails dilute the message. Your opens and click-through rates will suffer as a result.

A Clear Call to Action

When you have one central idea, your call to action becomes simplified.

“Download Here!”

“Click Here To Register”

“Buy Now!”

You can test the copy of your CTA but the point is, you need at least one. Many email marketers will have two or three CTAs in their email. One or two will be text links and then another will be an image link (like a button).

If your subscriber just opened an email, got a clear message that is asking them to take action, then they need a simple, easy way to take that action.

Make it very simple for them to do so.

Relevance to the Audience

If I had a dime for every marketing email I’ve received that wasn’t relevant to me, I’d be in Hawaii by now.

Make sure your message is relevant to your list. If they’re a small business, send them updates that apply to small businesses, not an enterprise.

The more you send irrelevant email messages to people who don’t need what you’re offering, the quicker your subscriber will click that dreaded “unsubscribe” button.

You want to provide value for your audience. Always. Pay attention to what they do click on and the subject lines that get their attention. Create more of that content. In time, you’ll get to know what your audience likes and what they don’t like.

A simple way to remember what I call the Marketing Trifecta: Sales, Savings, or Sunshine.

Your offering will either help someone increase sales, decrease costs, or make their customers happy.

(h/t Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping: Unleashing the Power of Partnerships. I just heard Andrew speak at Interact14 and when he said this, my first thought was “brilliant!” It’s a very succinct way of capturing the top concerns of business owners today.)

If you create email content that hits upon one of those points, you have an excellent chance at remaining relevant to your subscriber and earning your place in her inbox.

Here’s the infographic. I’d print this one out and hang it on your wall for quick reference.