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Mark Twain once said, “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”

It’s easy to look at friends, coworkers, or competitors and point out their bad habits. Twain was quick to recognize the hypocrisy in that behavior. We all have room to improve, but what does it really take to find your place among the successful email marketers? Let’s focus on the good habits.

Email on Acid surveyed email marketers to find out more about how they define and measure success. We released those findings in our exclusive report, Success in the Inbox: The Keys to Effective Email Marketing. The survey also revealed some common criteria for a top-tier email marketing program.

We created the infographic below to highlight these keys to success. Keep the following concepts in mind as you launch new campaigns and elevate your team to success!

1. Know your email marketing metrics

Digital marketing is full of data. It’s easy to get buried in the numbers, but there’s gold waiting for those who dig deep enough. Successful email marketers understand how to look at their KPIs to find important insights that guide business and marketing decisions.

List segmentation is crucial to achieving visibility into subscriber behavior. When you correctly segment audiences and then parse the data, you’ll discover clear insights into the kinds of content and campaigns to which your various audience are most likely to respond.

Beware of vanity metrics that might look good on reports but fail to reveal the truth. Whether you’re an agency or an in-house marketer, don’t shy away from data that reveals potential problems. Addressing those stats could be the fastest way to improve.

Our report found that more than half of respondents still see email open rates as a key email marketing metric. That’s not untrue—knowing who opened your emails is great—but opens only tell a small part of the story. Plus, open rates can be unreliable for a few reasons, including the fact the Outlook often blocks the pixel that tracks opens. Plus, some people open emails only to unsubscribe or delete them.

Email analytics tell you a lot about how people interact with your campaigns, but successful email marketers understand which metrics really matter. That’s why our survey found best-in-class programs are more likely to focus on improving email engagement metrics as a top goal.

2. Document your plans and processes

If your master plan for email marketing is all in your head, you’re going to have problems. Successful email marketers put their plans down on paper (or pixels as the case may be). The same goes for standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the team to follow and reporting dashboards that track and compare your metrics.

The Content Marketing Institute found 65% of the most successful B2B marketers have a documented strategy, but only 14% of the least successful marketers document their plans.

An important internal process to document is your pre-deployment checklist. What should your team be testing and double-checking before launching your next email campaign? It’s easy to overlook an important step, which could lead to a costly email error.

Yes, defining and documenting your processes is time-consuming, but it’s worth it in the long run. Once established, you can aim to automate certain processes and save time. Email on Acid provides Campaign Precheck, our automated pre-send checklist that helps you streamline and optimize predeployment testing.

3. Test before and after hitting send

When you think about email testing, you might imagine split testing subject lines, graphics, or messaging. That kind of testing is extremely helpful, but don’t ignore the importance of testing every email before you send it.

Predeployment testing improves deliverability, helps you catch things like typos or broken links, and gives you a preview of how your campaigns will render when a contact opens their email. Our email readiness platform provides email previews on more than 90 different live clients and devices.

Ensuring everything works as expected means when you do split test your emails -- you won’t have to throw out the results because one of your variants got sent with a mistake in it.

4.  Keep your eye on email team efficiency

All too often, the bigger the organization or email marketing team, the harder it is to produce things quickly and efficiently.

Our white paper on email errors found nearly 70% of email marketers claim it takes them more than a week to launch a campaign. That’s not exactly speedy. Successful email marketers are more likely to use state-of-the-art solutions to improve speed and efficiency. The right technology automates tedious tasks and improve collaboration among email teams as you plan, design, develop, and launch emails.

For example, our email errors report also found 57% of respondents are using manual processes for predeployment testing. That means they’re often sending test emails to colleagues to open on different clients and devices.

Are you sure these fellow employees know what to look for in your email test? Are you relying on their opinion of how the email rendered instead of seeing a preview with your own eyes?  That’s taking quite a risk. Email on Acid gives you a much more efficient and accurate way to get that job done!

5. Learn, teach, and innovate

Part of what our new report discusses are the drivers of change in the email industry. While email service providers and certain agencies were the trendsetters in the past, a new generation of innovators is entering the scene. These are tech companies developing AI for email, interactive features, and real-time indicators that can help successful email marketers take their efforts to the next level.

Taking calculated risks and becoming an early adopter of these technologies creates demand for more innovation as others follow your lead. Furthermore, being an email pioneer positions you as a marketing thought leader. Thought leaders are also lifelong learners. If you want to be successful, stay curious, and never get too big for your own britches – because email is always evolving.

Successful email marketers share their knowledge with others. That could mean hosting lunch and learns for the company, contributing to your company’s blog, or speaking at industry events. The idea here is that sharing helps everyone become more successful, and it moves the email industry forward.

More about the traits of successful email marketers

Curious about what else our survey of email marketers uncovered? We’ve got stats on the most-trusted metrics, most-important tactics, and more. You’ll also find out what your peers say are their biggest challenges and who plans to keep investing in email in the coming months.