As a small business, it can be a real challenge to stay up with all things related to email marketing. Whether you are just getting started with email marketing or are an experienced marketer with a dedicated team that does your email marketing for you, there are email marketing best practices that apply to all. Understanding and following best practices when emailing is extremely important because those that don't use best practices will see an adverse impact on their ability to deliver email to customer and prospects' inboxes. And an email that isn't delivered to the inbox is an email that is unlikely to be read.

My primary job at Keap, which helps small businesses deliver powerful communication to clients, is handling email compliance issues as a member of the email operations team and I routinely see examples of email best practices that are followed or ignored. Each month I work with a large number of customers to help them resolve email compliance issues that they have including excessive spam complaints, high bounce rates, and sending to and hitting spam traps-just to list a few. A common part of the resolution process for the customer is helping them review email marketing best practices and implement any that they are not already doing.