Email Programming 101- Top 10 Tips & Tricks

Even though school's out for summer in most parts of the country, for those just getting started with email, class is still very much in session.

Here are my top 10 tips to remember with email:

1) Audience. Knowing your audience is imperative. Audience selection is the key to personalizing language, tone and content within your emails. For example, is your audience young moms or retirees?

2) Build vs. Buy. I always recommend building your own email list versus buying email lists. If you send an email to an unexpected receipt who has not opted into your email program, you'll risk getting added to a blacklist, experiencing deliverability problems or you could ultimately land in the spam folder.

3) Opt-In. Asking your subscribers to opt-in to receive email communication is a great way to cultivate an engaged list of subscribers. Think quality over quantity.

4) List hygiene. As you continue to build your email list, it becomes more and more important to periodically remove unengaged users, to maintain good deliverability. Be sure to monitor and track engagement metrics on your sends. Later on, you can put a process in-place to remove inactive subscribers or you can create a reactivation campaign, giving them a reason to reengage.

5) Design. Start out with a standardized template that's mobile friendly. The goal is ensuring the subscriber has a seamless experience, no matter what device they're opening the email on.

6) Welcome email. Once a subscriber joins, let them know you're excited they joined. This gives you the opportunity to say hello, re-introduce yourself/your brand and set expectations on the types of emails they can receive, along with the frequency. This is hopefully the start of a two-way dialogue.

7) Customer First. When getting started with email, ask yourself the question "What's going to be valuable and strengthen our relationship with the subscriber?" Answering this question will help you to share valuable information.

8) Identify your success metrics. Metrics can be different, based on the intent of the email. Common metrics of success include open, unique opens, clicks, CTR, unsubscribes and conversations.

9) A/B testing. Starting out, it's important to test and learn on an ongoing basis. However, be sure you're only testing one element at time, as well an ensuring you have ample sample size, so you can stand behind the testing results.

10) Identify your best subscribers and reward them. Over time, you'll start to realize who your best email subscribers are. Once you do, reward them for their engagement and offer them something extra. It's an easy way to make them feel special and say thank you.