These are two important email marketing metrics that should serve as the initial measure of your email marketing success.

Email deliverability rate (or acceptance rate) is the success rate of getting an email delivered to a person’s email address. To find out the deliverability rate of your email marketing, you simply take the number of emails delivered and divide it by the number that were sent.

Spam reports: how many times your emails were marked as junk mail/spam by recipients.

Unsubscribes means how many people unsubscribed from your emails.

Inbox rates: how many delivered emails actually made it into someone’s inbox (rather than their junk folder).

Bounce rates: the percentage of emails that were rejected by recipients’ mail servers.

Over time, you need to track your email marketing efforts alongside your larger goals, whether they’re direct sales (like B2C retail companies), website traffic and conversions (B2B or B2C with long sales cycles) or referral business.

Similar to the best day/time to send an email, this question can also be a bit slippery to nail down. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. Even if two people in the same industry sent the same email at the same time with the same content, they could have very different open rates due to factors like list quality and personal relationship.

Once a month is fine for keeping your name in front of someone. Two-three times a month leaves enough time in between emails so you don’t become a nuisance. Obviously, four times a month gets you to a weekly consistency. Essentially, you can keep increasing your send frequency as much as you want, but be conscious of your open and unsubscribe rates. When your engagement starts to decline, you know you’ve taken it too far.

The jury is not as undecided on this as they are on the best time and day to send emails. The optimal frequency to contact your customers is one to four times a month. This is the frequency we use for our customers, and our clients see great results with a twice-a-month schedule.

Early mornings and weekends … but also says those days/times are also the most likely to get you unsubscribes and bounces.

There are many right answers to this question. If you’re looking for a fairly safe bet, try Wednesday afternoons around 2 p.m. But every person, recipient and email list is different. Try different days and times and find what works best for your audience.

You have only 3-4 seconds before someone decides whether or not they are going to open your email, so it’s important to make an impact.. Best practices for subject lines are debatable, especially when trying to compare different industries and topics. However, there are some ballpark best practices for subject lines that you can feel confident about following.

Fifty characters is generally a good, safe rule of thumb to follow. However, people have seen great success with subject lines over 70 characters and less than 49, so feel free to experiment. Other tactics that work well in subject lines include asking questions, numbered lists and personalization.

The best email subject lines tend to be specific, short and compelling. Set expectations up front and let the email content do the rest.

As I mentioned above, it’s good to email people you personally know. However, some email lists might include people from bought lists or lead gen services (which you should generally avoid). We don’t recommend buying lists because there are laws in place to protect people from receiving certain types of unsolicited communications.

The CAN-SPAM Act spells out the rules for email marketers, whether their intentions are good or bad. If you’re sending emails for commercial use, you have to do the following:

-Include an unsubscribe method.
-Actually unsubscribe someone when they request it, and do it in a timely manner.
-If sending for commercial uses, you need to include a physical address.
-While not explicitly banned, sending to people who have not opted in is discouraged.