Carolyn Nye, who acts as the email marketing manager for S&S Worldwide, recently outlined three widely respected tactics and ideas that haven’t worked in her experience.  The first is to avoid using images to convey key points.

Nye wrote, “This is something I’ve tested repeatedly, spending hours hand coding campaigns, only to discover my efforts didn’t really pay off.  There was never enough of a lift in the optimized versions to warrant the extra time required to create them.  For a company that sends several versions of campaigns twice per week, the extra work was not viable.”

The second concept relates to focusing on open rates.  Nye reasoned, “Open rates are an important benchmark for your reporting, but they are only relative to the subscriber base you are segmenting.  For example, emailing everyone who has purchased in the last three months will probably have a much higher open rate than emailing subscribers who have never purchased from you.  Note these differences when analyzing results.”

Then the final idea involves cutting loose quiet subscribers.  Nye believes emailing them less often is a viable alternative, or it might be possible to grab their attention with special incentives.

Email advertising specialists should always make sure they’re using the approach that works best for them.  After all, it used to be a good idea to pump the brake pedal when stopping on ice, but with a modern car, that’d just cost the driver time and quite a lot of distance.

A catch for some people will be that Borrell Associates, which is a research and consulting firm, expects most of the gains to occur on a large scale; think more “McDonald’s and Pizza Hut” than “mom and pop.”  Let’s move on to the stats, though.

Borrell Associates said in an official statement, “Email advertising will see moderately strong growth in 2011, up 9% to $16.0 billion for national and local.  Growth in this format is almost all from national advertisers; only 3% is local.”

Then the press release continued, “White paper marketing is a major contributor to its popularity – especially among B2B advertisers.”

So there’s perhaps a detail or two to help email advertising professionals get ahead of competitors.

Fortunately, if that nine percent estimate holds true, even landing on target will be a pretty good result after what the Dow and Nasdaq have been through over the past couple of years.

Here’s a little background information about the two parties: eCircle is an email marketing company that is more than ten years old, is headquartered in Munich, and has roughly 200 employees.  It counts both Nintendo and Samsung among its clients.

TA Associates, for its part, is based in Boston, and has put money into AVG, Sophos, and Tempur-Pedic.

A press release also stated, “Email remains a strong marketing channel and represents a growing subset of the 12.9 billion European online advertising market.  Forrester Research estimates that the volume of email messages will double, with the value of the market increasing from 1.5 billion in 2007 to 2.3 billion in 2012, as marketers use more sophisticated on-demand targeting, messaging and analytics to engage the consumer.”

This development represents a piece of good news for just about everyone connected to email marketing, then, as it supports the optimistic figures.

ExactTarget published a whitepaper today, and according to a statement, “the research found a positive correlation among consumer usage of email, instant messaging, social networks and text messaging, dispelling myths that the explosion of social media and texting will overtake traditional email usage.”

Indeed, this would seem to indicate that Google Wave might help email.  It’ll represent another way of holding conversations, after all, and then folks who aren’t chained to it will turn to things like email and IM every so often to continue chatting or carry out some specific task.

So there’s one point against the latest rumor concerning email’s death.  Next, we have to consider people’s first impressions of Google Wave.  Nicholas Carlson recently summed them up with the phrase “‘Impressive’ But ‘Useless.’”  He provided a little picture of a surfer wiping out, too.

Google Wave isn’t quite set to replace email as the dominant form of electronic communication, then.  Email marketers can go about their business as usual.

While the statistics indicated that “sponsored links in a search result” and “advertising within a page (such as banners)” are a little more effective, email advertising still ranked above pop-ups, ads that automatically play sounds or videos, branded applications, games, gifts on Facebook, and pop-under ads.

That’s not a bad collection to beat.

The official report also claimed, “Email advertising is particularly effective for those aged over 25. 34% of 25-34 year olds said they had seen and sometimes clicked on an ad from an email. This suggests there is a valuable role for email, not only for advertisers but for businesses who want to remain in contact with their customers as well as provide them with information about products and services they might be interested in.”

So go enjoy CADIE’s homepage or any of the other April Fools’ Day hoaxes that have been set up with a little more confidence in your chosen method of advertising.

First there are the issues of quantity and frequency. A short daily newsletter may be regarded as spam if it does little other than stick a logo and “buy now” link in the reader’s face. A long yearly mailing leaves all sorts of time for would-be customers to forget what the heck a company does. Find your own balance.

Next – or at the same time – consider quality. The StreamSend release states, “As worldwide email volume continues to grow, seek out highly relevant ways to communicate with your customers and to stand out from the crowd.” Segmenting lists may lead to the best results here.

Then there are the true basics, of course. Evaluate subject lines and general layouts. Expose groups of recipients to changes and see how they react. Sweat the small stuff, even colors and font sizes.

Most of this could fall under the heading of “common sense,” so consider it a refresher course more than life-altering advice. But again, January’s a back-to-basics kind of month, and the fundamentals are always critical to success.