Do's and Dont's of Email Marketing

A colleague recently ask me what the Do's and Dont's of Email Marketing were.  I had to say I wasnt sure so I did some research. An email account will likely get suspended if you fail to follow the guidelines below.

DON'T:

• Personally send more than 100 emails per day
• Personally send out more than 10 emails at a time
• Have more than 25 emails bounce back with invalid email addresses
• Send mass emails using the BCC field - they are considered "spam"
• Use all caps in your subject field
• Use exclamation points in your subject field
• Use multiple colors, fonts, bolds, all caps, links, etc. in the body of the email

DO:

• Send out personalized emails to your contacts in small batches, a few every day
• Use an email service like Constant Contact, or Mail Chimp, but only if the recipients first "opted in", or agreed to receive email from us
• Add a field to our Sales Agreements granting permission to email customers with special offers and other information; this will help build our email database
• Keep subject lines to < 49 characters 
• Use the HTML email we created for you (to forward in small batches - see above). Our developer is working on an email-friendly version that you can send directly from your gmail account. I'll forward to you as soon as I get it.