Check out these tips to make sure your email strategy is living up to its potential and how you can get the best from your email partner.

Email marketing is booming. A recent DMA study found email delivers the highest return on investment by a landslide-- $57.25 for every dollar spent. Compare that to the ROI of all non-email online marketing, which is $22.52. JupiterResearch predicted email marketing spending will rise to $1.1 billion by 2010. Furthermore, email marketing will account for approximately 71,000 jobs this year in the United States.

This is the perfect opportunity to gain buy-in from your senior management to fully evaluate and improve your email marketing program, but where do you start? Your first step is to focus on a fundamental piece of any email marketing program: the strategy.

Email strategy is often overlooked in the never-ending campaign management cycle. Most daily resources are devoted to the creative, copy and deployment of promotional and newsletter emails. However, like any marketing program, if the goals are not defined and articulated to team members, email campaigns can be adrift at sea, paddling aimlessly with no end in sight.

Proper email strategy often requires a step back from the daily rigors of the email process and a holistic review of the entire email program. While many email managers can barely lift their heads up from their inboxes to see the forest through the trees, an outside email strategy partner is sometimes necessary to bring the programs in line with industry best practices and ensure optimization of internal and external efforts. Besides, who wants to get left in the dust by the competition?

Hiring an email strategy partner can be a complex process in and of itself, so take a look at these tips to help you find and work with the best email strategy partner for you.

Author notes: G. Simms Jenkins is founder and principal of BrightWave Marketing, an Atlanta-based email marketing and customer relationship services firm. Read full bio.