Opt-in forms are easy to overlook as a key part of your email marketing strategy. But if you think about it, the opt-in form is really your subscribers’ first experience with your email program.

A well designed opt-in form will go a long way to supporting your list growth plans. Here are 5 quick tips for improving your conversion rate:

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You wouldn’t drive your car for 50,000 miles without getting the oil changed and the tires checked. If you have let an entire year go by without getting under the hood of your email marketing program, you don’t know what’s working and what’s about to break down the next time you send.

Testing the mechanicals is just one of the items that need to be checked or tested in your email program. See how well your email program performs according to these essential diagnostics:

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Email designers are up in arms today at the release of Outlook 2007. Up until the latest release of this software Outlook 2007 was using Internet Explorer’s rendering engine but with the latest changes it drastically reduces Outlooks capability to render properly marked-up semantics based CSS/XHTML.

Some sites have even gone as far to say that Microsoft’s latest change to the software Takes email design back 5 years.

It is sad that Microsoft is this out of touch with web/email developer’s today. Most every web developer I know has for the last few years been recommending FireFox and Thunderbird for web and email browsing solely because Microsoft makes inferior web products.

The new Outlook will use Word’s HTML rendering engine, the CSS properties that this engine currently supports can be found on their site.

Alot of email designers are acting like this is the end of the world, it isn’t. Table based design is just as easy and efficient as CSS design and will work in this engine. CSS unfortunately has never been supported fully across the board in email clients. Even in prior versions of Outlook and most other browsers a stylesheet hack is needed to get minimal support.

You would think that Microsoft would have taken the opportunity to become a leader in CSS support as they did have one of the better browsers for it…

I wonder if perhaps they have an upgrade to the HTML rendering engine in Word in progress though, or if they will be releasing some kind of newsletter service sometime soon, as in the current climate the change seems utterly incomprehensible and absurd to anyone in the world of email marketing.

In today’s inbox environment more than 50% of readers use the preview pane to decide if they want to read your message. The horizontal preview pane is most popular by a margin of 3 to 1. As well over 95% of email clients block images. This means the most valuable real estate in their inboxes is going to be at most 650 pixels wide by 225 pixels high positioned at the very top.

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I came across this neat little flash built color application this morning made by Adobe, which allows you to create color palettes and save and adjust them on the fly. I have seen tools like this before but the interesting thing about this one is the ability to save color palettes into a community and then rate them.

It takes a few minutes to get used to the interface, but there are some pretty handy features, like create a palette from a rule which includes Analogous, Monochromatic, Triad, Complementary, Compound, Shades and Custom. When you adjust your base color it changes the other colors in the rule to give you a full palette.

Check it out at kuler.adobe.com