It may be hard to imagine, but the power of e-marketing solutions can be instrumental to the success of your brand. Advertising a product or service via e-mail is easy, but your efforts will be lost if your potential audience doesn't read your well-crafted e-mail. Getting a potential customer to read your e-mail starts and ends with an effective subject line.

Studies indicate that some Internet users go online only for checking their e-mail. That reality can work to your advantage in preparing e-marketing solutions specifically for e-mail, if you know how to capture the readers' attention. These days everyone's inboxes are bombarded with all manner of spam, most if it purporting to sell something bigger, better and altogether more life altering than anything that has come before it. The problem is that these e-mails are, much more often than not, scams. Your goals are to get your e-mails read and to convert potential customers into actual customers.

A well-crafted marketing e-mail will convince someone who may have never even considered buying a product like yours that they cannot live without it. The process is thus: First pique the readers' interest, converting them from casual readers into prospects. Then they read your e-mail further and are convinced that they need whatever it is you are selling. Better yet, they begin to wonder how they ever lived without it! And if your product delivers what your e-mail campaign claims, a customer often becomes a repeat customer. And it all started with a humble (but effective!) subject line.

But wait: Before you go running off to your computer with dreams of creating an e-mail message readers can't refuse, you'll need to know what an effective e-marketing solution looks like. Here are a few tips to get you started:

One of the most effective ways to grab readers by the collar and make them listen to what you have to say is to ask them a question right in the subject line of the e-mail. Be careful though! You want to ensure that the question in your e-mail is crafted in a way that will elicit the answer you want. If you ask a question that is too open-ended and you don't get the answer you want, your efforts are lost. If you were the owner of an independent book store and you came across an e-mail with the subject line "Is your store struggling to compete with the big guys?" chances are good that you would be intrigued. On the other hand, if an e-mail with the identical body text had the subject line "5 easy ways to stand out," it's not likely to fetch the reader's attention. Tailor your approach to your targeted audience.

Leave them wanting more. Make sure the subject line of your marketing e-mail not only asks a question, but also asks an enticing question to which the reader is compelled to know the answer. You want to be a tease so your reader will want to know more. Craft your e-mail subject line so that they are left with no other choice but to open your e-mail and read it.

Always bear in mind the "what's in it for me?" mentality; most people live by this mantra. To get your readers to open your message, you will need to convince them that there is something in it for them to do so. Everyone is busy, and you need to incite a sense of urgency in your reader. Using the example above, adding just a few words to it would not only convince the readers that the contents of the e-mail pertains to them, but that it will somehow make their lives better and that they must read further. How about: "Is your store struggling to compete with the big guys? 5 easy ways to stand out." The reader will read that and instantly feel included in your intended audience, the answer to the question will likely be "yes," and you are compelling them to read further by offering an easy solution, the "what's in it for them" factor.

Every time Internet users sit down to read their e-mail, they have three choices to make for each. They can delete it outright, leave it to read later or open it immediately and read it. If the subject line of your marketing e-mail isn't relevant and compelling, it isn't going to be read. It will either be left for later or deleted. Either way, this is not an effective e-marketing solution for your business. By taking the time to craft an effective e-mail subject line, you increase your potential for e-mail marketing success exponentially. Of course, what's inside the e-mail counts too, but if you don't compel your reader to read past the subject line, everything else is irrelevant.