You can’t consider yourself an email marketing expert without implementing all 18 of these top tips!

1. Get on the insider list – Ask your subscriber to add your incoming email address to their contact list, safe list, or address book in order to get around any email client blocks.

2. Preview emails every way – You can never test your design enough so make sure that it’s previewed and verified to be legible and correct in a preview pane as well as full screen, and with images both on and off.

3. Use email safe fonts – While considerable technological progress has been made with font display in emails, you’re still going to be best off using the conventional universal standards such as Arial, Georgia, Helvetica, Times New Roman, and Verdana.

4. Limit to three fonts – While you are simplifying your choice of font styles you should also place a firm limit on the number of fonts. If you’re exceeding three you’re getting too fancy.

5. Don’t write like a spammer – You have to avoid ALL CAPS, red text, and lots of exclamation points!!!!!! Placing this sort of text even within the body of an email may trigger some spam filters.

6. Write to an 8th grade level – Technical emails are often written in a university grad manner which is incomprehensible to your average subscriber. Your goal should be to make even the most complex issue readily comprehensible to any 14 year old.

7. Logo on the upper left – Numerous eye tracking studies have proven that people look for your logo on the upper left hand side of your email, so place it there!

8. Stick to the image ratio – Many major brand email marketers have found that the 60% text to 40% image is the best ratio to ensure clarity and fast downloading on the slower mobile networks.

9. Slice it up – If your email features a large graphic, then you are going to be better off to slice and dice it up into smaller pieces which are distributed throughout your email.

10. Text link to web version – Provide a text based link at the very top of your email which takes the customer to a web based version of the email.

11. Shun the fancy stuff – It’s an email, not a web site or an app, so why are you even remotely considering the insertion of complex elements such as nested background colors, background images housed in DIV or TABLEs and (gasp) Flash?

12. Always fill in the ALT – An inordinate number of your subscribers are viewing your emails by default as images off, so if you are not writing into your ALT the full description of what the images are portraying you’re confusing your customer and losing sales.

13. Absolutely absolute paths – Don’t get into trouble with malfunctioning links and always use absolute paths whenever you’re referencing an image in any of your marketing emails.

14. Optimize image file sizes – If you’re using JPGs or GIFs then you can experiment with lower qualities and color quantities until you’re right on the ragged edge of where the picture quality visually degrades.

15. Stay on the good side of CAN-SPAM – The law of the land is CAN-SPAM so you have to keep up to date on its regulations and ensure that your emails are in full compliance.

16. Don’t keep your privacy policy private – You should always feature a link in the footer of every email which links to your web site’s privacy policy page. Never just copy and paste another site’s policies, but develop your own particular ones which are vetted by an attorney with extensive online legal experience.

17. Never horizontally-scroll – With most emails now being opened on mobile devices, keep your layouts to under 550 pixels wide to avoid the evil horizontal-scroll.

18. Send at the right times – Breakfast restaurant? Email at 4 am. Night club? Email at 5 pm on Friday and Saturday. Suit your timing to your product or service for maximum engagement.

If you’re missing even one of these top 18 tips in your email campaigns you can’t call yourself an expert!