Email marketing, when used properly, can be one of your most powerful marketing channels.

First, lets get some email marketing best practices facts out of the way. It's important that you understand all those facets of email marketing that can have an effect on your own efforts.

1. The first thing to know is that email is opened on mobile devices are increasing at a very significant level every 6 month period.
2. Mobile email is accessed least often on a Monday compared to desktop email that is least opened on Sunday.
3. When you are talking about ecommerce or shopping, web mail seems to be the preferred format of email usage.
4. The industries that are leading the way in mobile email usage is social networking, publishing and entertainment.

What does all of this mean? That depends on your business. I suggest you take some time to review these realities as they relate to what you sell online. Then these facts may make more sense to you. The more you understand these relationships, the more you will understand how to approach email marketing best practices.

The big picture...

Try to develop your email marketing best practices as a holistic approach with the goal of educating your contacts about your company. This is important because this one sentence gives you a high level view of your email marketing and what your overall objectives may be.

The following information will define the specific challenges many companies experience when they create their email marketing best practices.

Below we outline all the problems. To see what solutions we can offer you, read our free eBook on email marketing best practices.

1. Integrating your email marketing and data with other data systems you are using. Most marketers want to integrate as much of their data as they can because this makes it easier to evaluate various relationships. For example, the relationships between your emails and your landing pages or your emails and the calls to actions you are using. You also need to understand basic data like the sales process of email conversions. If you realize that the complete optimization of your sales funnel will always improve when you can successfully bridge the gap between your email marketing performance, your social media activities, landing page conversions and new customer acquisitions. Anything that helps you deliver content that your audience considers valuable will help you identify your specific email marketing best practices.
2. Improving deliverability - Your deliverability rate is the percentage of email messages delivered successfully into your customer (or prospects) inbox as oppose to email messages that were simply sent. Understanding soft bounces and hard bounces are key to developing your email marketing best practices. Also, a low delivery rate can be a red flag for your ISP. On top of this challenge, your ISP can also consider an abandoned email address as spam related.
3. How can email marketing best practices increase and retain my subscribers? Have you considered purchasing an email list? This strategy can surely get you into trouble. It could pollute your entire email database. These recipients have never "opted-in" to your subscriber list and that alone can cause a variety of problems. Avoid list purchases in any form as it is certainly not a part of any email marketing best practices.
4. How can you achieve measurable ROI from your email marketing campaign? How difficult is it for you to connect the dots between your email messages and an engaged prospect or better yet a new customer. You can see how this challenge is related to challenge number 1. If your data systems aren't talk to each other, it's difficult to put your finger on those activities that are most successful.
5. Using your email marketing best practices for funnel optimization? Email is only one segment of your total marketing mix. This means that at least part of this challenge comes from not understanding how to manage the most effective marketing mix for your company.

For effective solutions to these email marketing challenges and others, download our free report on email marketing best practices. This comprehensive eBook will provide you very valuable material that will help you improve your email marketing best practices and be sure your email campaigns are as strong as possible.