There’s a new blog post over at Campaign Monitor that discusses what’s changed in e-mail marketing design in 2008. I found this article helpful as it is an updated list of best practices for the industry. These include the following topics:

• Don’t waste your readers’ time
  Inboxes are full — give them something useful.
• Permission matters
  Remind customers why they are getting the e-mail.
• Relevance trumps permission
  You need permission, but a relevant message generates action.
• Make unsubscribing easy
  Why pay to send to customers that aren’t interested?
• Image blocking is common
  View your design without images to see if the message still comes across.
• Bring back tables
  E-mail clients are not standards-compliant and your table-less CSS layouts will be totally trashed.
• Add inline styles
  Gmail will strip out all other stylesheets.
• Don’t forget your plain text version
  Make it readable and encourage scanning.
• Meet your legal obligations
  Brush up on CAN-SPAM regulations.
• Test, test, test
  Want to get more action from your e-mail? Test new versions to see what works.

With the economy in its current state and gas prices through the roof, many shoppers are leaving the car keys in the drawer and shopping online (Source: Harris Interactive — “one-third (33%) of online US adults say they are more likely to shop online rather than at a store because of high gas prices“).

Relevant, timely e-mail campaigns are a great way to drum up online business, and following the guidelines from Campaign Monitor will help you manage a better campaign.

I’m proud to announce the launch of a new project that’s been nearly 8 months in the making (hey, client projects always come first). Recently, we launched a newly re-designed version of the Rick Whittington Consulting web site.

While there are a lot of new features”behind-the-scenes.” I wanted to share a couple that you’ll want to take note of.

• A more integrated, improved blog
  You can now see new blog posts in relevant places on the new site (outside of the blog). You can also sign up to have blog posts e-mailed to you (just look to the right and enter your e-mail address) — a great way to receive new content! If you use an RSS feed reader, you can add our new feed to your list — it’s at http://feeds.feedburner.com/WebSiteEffectivenessBlog. If social bookmarking is your thing, you can also help me promote things I write on the blog.
• An updated portfolio
  I’l be the first to tell you that it’s embarrassing that we hadn’t updated the portfolio in nearly 2 years. I’ve updated the portfolio with new projects to better showcase our design and development capabilities. View the portfolio now.

There are also a few other behind-the-scenes capabilities that allow us to serve content based on where you’re from and how you get here. We’ll be using that soon.

Time and time again, I’ve seen that truly successful people (and companies) pay attention to the “little things.” This post is about one of those little things — specifically e-mail signatures.

Since nearly everyone has an iPhone, Blackberry, Smartphone or the ability to check their e-mail on their mobile devices, e-mail signatures become very important. Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit that everyone has e-mail ready mobile devices, but a good percentage of businesspeople use these devices to check their e-mail.

So why is the signature so important, and what should you include in your e-mail signature? The answer is rather obvious but goes overlooked by many — your phone number.

If you include your phone number in your e-mail signature, then the recipients of your e-mail have easy access to your phone number if they need to call. For example, if I send a proposal to a prospective client and they read my message on their mobile device, they can just “click” on my phone number to call me. If you’re like me, you probably don’t keep the contacts into your phone’s address book up-to-date like you should, so it’s really helpful when someone adds their phone number to their e-mail signature.

Making it easy for clients and customers to call you back just may net you some more business.

Think that blogging can’t have an impact on small, local businesses? This story definitely contradicts that notion. Family-owned St. Paul Classic Cookie in St. Paul, Minnesota was close to closing its doors when owner Katie Novotny blogged an appeal to her loyal customers (read it here).

The result was an outpouring of support which saved the cookie business. This case study shows that blogging is great way to reach loyal local customers. Novotny also publishes press releases, news and menu items on the blog. Small, local businesses should take note of the St. Paul Classic Cookie blog, read it, and get ideas for connecting with their customers.

Ever wondered why having a blog can be an effective promotional tool? Problogger today released and interesting albeit unscientific survey about what sites generate the most traffic for blogs (answer: Google). Read more at Problogger.