by Gail Goodman, CEO, Constant Contact, Inc., a provider of email marketing and online survey tools for small organizations, including small businesses, associations, and nonprofits, was recently awarded the Stevie® Award for Best Customer Service Team in The 2008 American Business Awards; and Gail Goodman was recognized as Best Entrepreneur in the 2007 Stevie Awards for Women In Business.

The good news about email marketing is that you don't have to be a design expert to create great-looking campaigns. Most email marketing service providers offer a selection of professionally-designed templates to choose from. You will still have some design decisions to make: Which colors and fonts to use, what size to make the fonts, and how much text to include, for example. Follow these nine tips and you'll create emails that not only look good, but also get great results.

Tip 1: Include your logo in the same location each time.
Build your brand with every marketing email you send. One way to do this is to include your logo in all of your email communications. The best practice is to include it in the same location each time. By placing the logo in the header or somewhere high in the email the reader won’t have to scroll down to see it. Don't take up the whole preview screen.

Tip 2: Keep the preview panel in mind.
A recent study by Marketing Sherpa found that 70% of recipients that have the capability read their email through a preview panel. This means that your subscribers may only see a portion of your email before deciding to open it. Make sure your logo—as well as some enticing information about the email contents—can be seen in the preview pane.

Tip 3: Use color for emphasis.
While it might be tempting to use a lot of colors in your email campaigns, resist!  When deciding which colors to use, start with your company's colors. All of your emails should represent your visual brand, and a key component of that is using your colors consistently. Colors outside your brand should be saved for emphasis only.

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by Anna Murray, President of the e*media division of tmg-e*media. She is the author of articles and books on content and media, and her blog, Content Is Queen was voted Blog of the Year in the 2007 Stevie Awards for Women In Business.

YouTube is bigger than France. No really. I learned that recently at the OMMA Video Conference in New York, put on by Media Post.

Here’s how those numbers work. According to Brian Cusack, Sales Manager of You Tube, France is a country of 68 million people. In March, You Tube’s Comscore number was 85 million visitors.

So, according to this logic, YouTube is the 4th largest country in the world, behind China, India, and the US. And, as I mentioned before, already well ahead of France.

YouTubers aren’t the only ones at this conference quoting YouTube numbers. Nor is it only this conference. In fact, citing stratospheric YouTube statistics is getting to be a sport among digital video enthusiasts. Here are some more…
A Levi’s viral ad placed on YouTube shows a guy jumping into a pair of 501 jeans. Literally, he’s bouncing on his bed while a partner holds the pair of jeans. Bounce, bounce, bounce, then WHOMP! He lands in the jeans. In the first day of this video being posted on YouTube, it got 1 million views.

Soulja Boy is a kid who created his own dance craze through posting his “Crank That” dance on YouTube. He got 26 million views. Then others, both amateurs and professionals, did their own Crank That dance videos. If you add up Soulja Boy’s views and his imitators, you end up with 500 million views.

And then (here’s the whopping number) in that same month of March–the one when YouTube beat France– the site had a total of 4.3 billion video views.

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Wingstop Restaurants was one of just a handful of companies to win multiple Stevie Awards in The 2008 (6th annual) American Business Awards last month, taking home Stevies for Best Overall Company (More Than 2,500 Employees) and Best TV Ad Campaign.

Wingstop has more than 600 restaurants open or in development across the U.S.A., and focuses on just one signature dish - chicken wings.

We recently spoke with Andy Howard, Executive VP of Marketing, Purchasing & R&D for Wingstop, about the company's origins, about what sets it apart from competitors, and what winning two Stevies has meant to Wingstop employees and franchisees.

		Listen to Our Interview With Andy Howard of Wingstop...

Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs that we think might be of interest to you.

BlogHer : The online community for women who blog.
Web Worker Daily : Offers practical tips for anyone who uses the web for work abd wants to use the web to be more productive, more connected and more successful.
Rain Today : Published by the Wellesley Hills Group, RainToday.com is an online resource for insight, advice, and tools for growing a service business.
AstroPixie : Interesting info on astronomy, science, and life.