Email is an important marketing tool. Regardless of whether you are sending out a single email or a newsletter or broadcast to stay in contact with potential or existing customers, it will be a waste of time if the recipients do not open your email. Follow these tips to make your email communications user friendly and compel recipients to read them.

Here are two suggestions to get people to open your email.

1. Write subject lines that indicates the content of your message. Many receivers may delete your email without reading it if your subject line is not compelling or does not indicate the content.
2. Keep the subject line brief. Many email programs cut off long subject lines.

Below are eight useful tips to make your email message user friendly.

1. Include your name at the end of your message. People often dont remember email addresses and may not know who sent the email. Also, including your name personalizes the communication.
2. Quote the email you are responding to. If you don't, the reader may not know what youre talking about. You can do this automatically by highlighting the message you are responding to before hitting reply.
3. Use a clear and concise writing style.
4. Keep messages short, preferably under 25 lines.
5. Write short sentences and short paragraphs (5 lines maximum) to keep your readers focused.
6. Break up text with white space. Use subheadlines and bulleted lists to visually break up your copy into easy-to-read sections, highlight benefits, and keep readers reading.
7. Avoid using all CAPITAL letters.
8. Be sure to use spell-check before sending out an email. Spelling and grammar errors can suggest that you are not educated or knowledgeable.

Make sure your readers can read your information! The email message you send may not look the same when displayed on your receiver's screen. Follow these tips to avoid incompatibility problems between email software.

1. Know your audience so that you can determine whether to send plain text or HTML messages. If the receiver can not view email as a web page, they will end up seeing your text all mixed up with HTML code instead.
2. Be cautious with attachments. If the recipient does not have the software you used to create the document, they wont be able to read your attachment.
3. Avoid placing graphics in the body of email messages. Graphics add to the file size of an email message and could very well take over the file size limit of the readers software. Also, graphics can greatly slow the downloading and opening of your email.
4. Avoid formatting such as bold and italics. Different email programs read them differently.
5. When mentioning a web address, include http://. This allows most email software to link to a URL and allows the user to click on the link and go to the web address. Many computer newbies don't know how to copy and paste a web address into their browser.
6. Format articles and newsletters to around 60-65 characters per line with hard returns after each line. If a reader's software wraps lines differently, your text may be hard to read.

Increase sales with user-friendly and compelling email messages. You don't want to lose prospects and subscribers because they have trouble reading your email.