Although many small business marketing professionals may not have thought about using video to enhance marketing campaigns, Shawn Naggiar, customer revenue officer at Act-On, said the strategy can be effective. However, rather than integrating videos into email, he said marketers should post them on a website or on the company's YouTube channel, and only include links in the actual email message.

Other things marketers should remember with video in email marketing videos include keeping the length short and to the point, not getting too wordy in the video, creating a transcript and reviewing how it went for future campaigns.

“Video allows marketers another avenue for effectively tracking engagement,” Naggiar said. “Video links within email messages allow you to track open rates, play rates and references to friends.”

With all of this data, marketers can craft new and improved marketing campaigns that will connect better with their target audience.
With HD smartphones and tablets, video could become more important than event in marketing emails. Cisco's Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Forecast for 2011 to 2016 said video traffic was more than half the wireless use in 2011 and is expected to go up to 70 percent of mobile data traffic in 2016.

Making way into a small business marketing email campaign can be tricky for beginners, but with good CRM software and a little bit of know how, the campaign can go a long way pretty quickly. Digital marketing expert AJ Kumar writes on Entrepreneur.com that things such as split tests for opt-in forms and split testing broadcast messages can be very useful to see how a campaign is doing.

"Because broadcast messages usually announce timely information such as product launches and sales promotions, it can be important to make them as effective as possible," Kumar said. "Consider split testing both the subject line and call to action in your broadcast messages. Even small improvements in open and click-through rates can make a significant difference in the ROI for your email marketing."

Kumar said other tips for email marketers is segmenting the list to make sure the correct subscribers get a message suited for them, helping people now and selling to them later to develop better trust, and surveying customers to get better information from those willing to give it.

ClickZ recently reported that small business marketing professionals should go where the people are when testing. To achieve the best results with a testing strategy, the active segment should be more heavily weighted and the inactive segment should be left alone until a campaign is launched.

Many small business marketing professionals gathered from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012, and Adam Sutton, senior reporter for MarketingSherpa, said there were some good takeaways for marketers at this year's event.

Sutton said allowing subscribers to use social media to log in to a company's website or register with its email campaign can be a great way for businesses to integrate and get data from both email and social media. Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations at Silverpop, said this is being used by political campaigns and others. McDonald said Shazam, a popular music application, increased its subscriber base from 700,000 to 2 million last year with Facebook Connect.

Another takeaway that can help marketers improve their strategies is to make unsubscribing from emails easier for customers. Improving this option may leave a positive impression with subscribers and keep the door open for them to return. Sutton also said marketers should remember that every part of their email messages matter, so they should be careful crafting each sentence.

A takeaway from the event Rebekah Henson writes about on the MarketingSherpa Blog is always remember the customer is king. This means marketing emails should be used to speak with customers and get to know them, and shouldn't be pushing items until a consumer expresses interest in making a purchase.

While marketing emails are an important part of any business, marketers need to know that the unsubscribe process is important and should be easy for those who are subscribers. Eric Wittlake, a B2B and digital marketer, writes on Business 2 Community that there are many common ways processes are made overly difficult, which businesses need to avoid.

Wittlake said one awful tactic used by marketing departments are forced email subscriptions. Essentially, these subscriptions do not enable customers to opt out of receiving marketing emails without also sacrificing all the other benefits of being a member. Taking this approach often frustrates members and may drive them to a competing brand.

Other bad practices include inhibiting recipients from unsubscribing from multiple lists, using a CAPTCHA-protected unsubscribe system and hiding the unsubscribe link or button.

"Yes, email continues to be a core driver for businesses, but do you really want to be emailing people that are trying to get off your email list?" Wittlake asks. "Beyond the potential damage to your email sender reputation from encouraging the use of the Report Spam button, is this how you want to treat the people that once asked to receive your email?"

Rob Van Slyke, an interactive consultant, said not making it easy to unsubscribe from a marketing email list can hurt a business. He said companies need to protect their brand by making it an easy process and having a good enough campaign to make people not want to unsubscribe in the first place.

E-marketing has many sensitivities. Whether it's time of day sent, what is said in the email body or who the emails are being sent to, small business marketing professionals need to be careful how they word their messages. AllSpammedUp, a blog for small businesses, said there are many words or phrases that marketers need to try their hardest to avoid to stay out of the spam box.

The website said marketers should avoid phrases and words such as "meet singles," "business opportunity," "buy direct" and "hello." While some of these may be difficult to avoid, part of marketing is creativity, and writers will have to be creative in getting around spam filters.

"Perhaps one day they will be able to use them again without fear of the spam filter – although given the avalanche of such messages it is hard to imagine," Marketing Vox said of the words. "However, last month, a number of email giants, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced the launch of a working group to promote a standard set of technologies that will reduce phishing emails and otherwise make email more secure."

After small business marketers weed out these harmful words from subject lines and body text, they can use marketing automation and CRM software to make sure they get the best results from the email campaigns.

Before small business marketing professionals jump headfirst into a new campaign, they may want to first learn about some practices to avoid. Freelance email marketing writer Yo Noguchi recently wrote on the Customer Think blog that there are a few definite no-nos of email marketing, such as emailing without permission.

"Getting an email newsletter that you didn’t sign up for feels like an invasion of privacy," Noguchi said, adding that shortcuts shouldn't be taken by small business marketers. "Small businesses often start their email marketing campaigns by buying a list and then hitting everyone on that list."

Other mistakes small business marketing professionals may make with their first online marketing campaigns is having an irrelevant subject or "from" line, blasting out content that doesn't matter to the reader, having no purpose for the email and not having a good entry for getting feedback from the customer.

SmartBiz said one way to help build a list is to have a public privacy policy that subscribers can see. This way they know when marketing emails are sent their way, and they can opt out or change the frequency at any time.

Sales and marketing teams are always trying to figure out new ways to put possible clients and customers into the sales pipeline, but one of the top methods may be one that everyone is familiar with: email marketing. Inbox Insight's recent survey shows that 61 percent of companies have a lead generation program in place and 64 percent use email for that.

"Organizations are beginning to see the importance of lead generation and are utilizing different methods to find which avenue is most effective for them," said Emma Wootton-Woolley, Inbox's creative director. "Email marketing provides a low cost way to generate high quality opt-in leads making this is a popular channel within an organization's lead generation strategy."

The only thing that supersedes using email is the website, which 77 percent of respondents said they use to generate leads. Fifty-three percent said they use social media to attract new and existing customers, 57 percent said events and 49 percent said direct marketing.

About 80 percent of respondents said lead generation is a valuable tool for drawing in new customers. Small business marketing professionals should look into tools such as marketing automation and CRM software to help get more informative data on clients.