As KISSMetrics founder Neil Patel points out, some 66% of consumers over the age of 15 have made a purchase because of an email. No wonder, then, that there is an art to crafting the perfect email – a few tweaks and hacks to your standard email can transform you from marketing mediocrity to marketing magnificence.

So what to do? Well, you could do worse than check out this info graphic that Neil has made, setting out a bevy of email do’s and don’ts. But if you don’t have time, here are four tips to help you perfect your marketing emails:

1: Pimp your subject line. Nearly 1/3 of emails are opened (or not) according to the quality of the subject line. To improve your open rates, use active language in your subject lines and make them reflect the useful content you want to share.

2. Pimp your body copy. Don’t bamboozle your readers with a long screed of text. Rather, chop it up with lists, bullet points, quotes and pictures. Think brevity and impact over length and depth.

3. Pimp your call to action. Ultimately you probably want your readers to visit your site, or at least engage with you further on social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn. Enter the call to action… While you can create text-based links, visual buttons and graphics will look more attractive. (These are readily available in email templates on sites like MailChimp.) Think carefully where to place your call to action, as readers may not see them if they are buried at the bottom.

4. Address your readers properly. If you know the first names of your email recipients, use them in your opening salutation – it will help prevent those email filters from sending your email straight to the junk folder. To automate the process, you can keep a simple database or spreadsheet of your recipients, including clear, separate columns for fields such as ‘first name’ and ’email address’. Services such as MailChimp can then easily use this information to sort out where the first names should be placed in your email template.