It is quite evident that any modern and highly competitive business uses some kind of email signature, but are they doing it the right way? Email is undoubtedly the major corporate communication medium used by most, if not all companies. The signatures used in emails are used for legal, operational and creative purposes giving your email more relevance as well as intelligent features. Unfortunately most of the time corporate email branding is just some kind of pre-designed image or writing that is copy-pasted into the mail browser before it is sent. This simple procedure carries many disadvantages compared to a well integrated, embedded, pass through branded email. It creates no consistency with the emails you send, the compliance footer must be showcased and if not it could have legal implications, you cannot track any clicks or drive clicks to your website etc.

Companies invest in their brand image by advertising via multiple marketing channels. They use their image, their logo and slogan to creatively showcase themselves so that they can initiate a response from potential stakeholders. Whether you market your brand on a t-shirt or on TV, you are effectively investing in your brand for the long term. Investing in something as simple and cost effective as Email branding brings about an opportunity to leverage a unique intermediate that has been overlooked by many businesses in our digitally driven world.

There is simple process you can follow that will grab the potential customer’s attention when they are exposed to your marketing. Email marketing needs to do the following: create Attention, make them Comprehend, build Interest and Persuade them.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could figure out today what your marketing plan should look like in six months? Crystal balls don’t exactly grow on trees, so we’ve asked two industry experts—Jordan Ayan, president of SubscriberMail, and Joel Book, director of eMarketing Education at ExactTarget—to weigh in on what’s coming in 2008. Here’s what they said.

It is simple, practical, affordable, measurable and exceedingly effective. Just follow these steps. If you brand it they will come.

When engaging your customers with email marketing, or any other media, it's not just a matter of getting results; it's about getting the right results. Having a way to define which responses are most important to achieving your objectives and then optimizing your campaigns based on their relative performance over time should be the cornerstone of any email marketing strategy.

INTERNET ADVERTISING REVENUES IN Q3 ’07 SURPASS $5.2 BILLION, SETTING NEW HIGH – BUT WITH THE ONLINE AD SPACE OVERFLOWING…ARE YOU GETTING NOTICED?

You can get a great open rate and a very impressive CTR (Click-Through Rate) but if the landing page doesn't carry the reader through to the primary goal it's pointless.

Here are 7 tips for creating more effective landing pages.

Earlier this week, an interesting piece came up in the States about how it just may have taken Al Gore's Nobel Prize to make an environmental stance manly.

No longer about simply "cleaning up" or "keeping house" in a Mother Earth way, coming up with solutions for climate change, a.k.a. global warming, is now seen as "brave," " brilliant," and "pragmatic."

As he put it:

"But, ever so slowly, there is a seeping realization that there is nothing cute or bleeding-heart about environmentalism. The challenges before us are for brave leaders, brilliant engineers, and pragmatic problem-solvers. There is nothing idealistic about saving our environment; on the contrary, it's an extremely practical matter."

While women are certainly driving the consumer push toward sustainability and shrinking environmental carbon-footprints, they could never go it alone. EVERYONE has to get on board. If it takes new labelling, clever positioning, nuanced semantics - or even a Nobel Prize - to make an environmental stance valid for more people - then let's do it.

How we persuade or motivate human beings to take their own personal baby steps to positively affect any cause is simply the means to the one big end (upon which most of us can likely agree when it comes to the environment). It doesn't matter so much how you get people to take that step, or if different groups need to hear different words/messages to take it.

Just like any campaign, you have to consider your environmental initiatives, and the community relations surrounding them, very uniquely for each of your markets. At this point in time, I'd bet a lot of the men and women buying your goods will respond wholeheartedly to an environmental approach filled with bravery, brilliance, and pragmatism. Go forth!