Time to reflect and start the new year off with ACTION. Here are 10 MUST DO email marketing tips you gotta use to get going in the new year!

1. What were your best open rates in 2012? Look at the subject lines and use more like that!

2. What were your best click rates in 2012? Check out the most popular links. Are people clicking on images (including buttons) more than text or vice versa?

3. Make emailing your non-responders part of a plan, you know those folks that didn’t open your email or click on your treasured links? Blasphemy! Tamara has tips over at BeRelevant!

4. Test! Sign up for Which Test Won to get some really great ideas in your own inbox of things you can test in your emails to squeeze out some more clicks!

5. Test an image of a video clip and see how it performs. MarketingProfs posted a survey that suggests WAY high click-through rates when video is used.

6. Include content (like a recipe with a wine offer) with promotions and see if they outperform promotions only.

7. Send your customers a coupon with a code. See if they interact more when they have to type in a code to get a killer offer online or if they show it on their mobile device at the point of purchase. Jordie over at emailMonday published a great set of stats including that redemption for mobile coupons is 10x over those mailed or printed in the paper (who reads a newspaper anymore?)

8. Change the day you send email to your customers and see if you get a better response. Copyblogger has done a bunch of testing on this themselves. You might just find that after some testing Sunday night is right for your email sends!

9. Make sure your email is readable across all mobile devices. Strongmail has a great read and Litmus has great tools!

10. Pay attention to your confirmation emails and thank you emails (transactional). It’s an opportunity to make another impression on your customers and according to a post on the Sendgrid blog, 64% of consumers consider transactional emails to be the most valuable messages in their inbox. We consider this an awesome way for you to give them another opportunity to buy!

2013 is right around the corner, so look to your email past to make your biz future better!

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