It takes all sorts of experts to launch a rock-star email campaign, and it's crucial to have everyone's eyes looking out for ways to boost the creative. Even team leaders without strong backgrounds in design or copy can effectively evaluate email creative to get campaigns into tiptop shape. Make these three steps part of your agenda before letting an email leave your desk (er, computer screen):

Before we get to the "how," let's explore the "why"? In today's age of rich media and social connectivity, multi-modal consumers reserve their attention for the most compelling, contextual experiences. With that said, how does a static medium like email survive as a marketing tool?

What are you focused on right now? What are the Big Kahuna issues that you are spending serious brainpower thinking about? In the last few months I've met with about a dozen companies, mostly in B2C industries, and, somewhat to my surprise, the topics we discussed were amazingly consistent from company to company. Not a single company wanted to talk about list/database growth. Rather, every issue or topic of concern revolved around approaches to maximize engagement and conversion among existing contacts.

Return on investment (ROI) is the metric marketers most commonly use to compare ads, campaigns and even entire channels. ROI makes sense for evaluating marketing when the primary input is external spending: buying media, printing expense, postage, creative costs or sponsorship fees, for example. Email, however, does not fit neatly into the same model. Because the monetary "investment" denominator in email is comparatively low, using a strict ROI calculation will always allow it to shine. That's fine with those of us in the email industry, as we always win the ROI contests. But it misrepresents what must actually be invested …