You’re leaving ridiculously stupid money on the table unless you:

1) Design for the small screen. You have one chance to get someone to respond to an email. As smartphone usage explodes, it’s imperative to design email messages so people can interact with them on their mobile devices.

2) Have a welcome program. Failing to welcome new subscribers is akin to a store clerk ignoring people when they walk in the door. A welcome message, or ideally a series of welcome messages, will ease people into the email stream, boost sales and minimize spam complaints.

3) Exercise list hygiene. ISPs are getting more and more persnickety about delivering commercial email. They want to deliver email people want and filter the stuff they don’t want. The key to delivery is engagement. The trick is knowing which email addresses to remove and which are email addresses held by customers who want to hear from you but simply don’t need you right now.

4) Are CAN-SPAM compliant. This is the least a marketer can do. Know the rules. They’re pretty simple. And don’t ever say “but we’re CAN-SPAM compliant” to justify sloppy email marketing.

5) Know your metrics. Intelligent decision making in email marketing is impossible without knowing which metrics are important and what they mean. Many email marketers mistakenly put too much focus on process metrics such as open rates when analyzing testing or performance — potentially leading to dumb and dumber decisions.

6) Have an abandoned-order program. This one’s a no-brainer. A typical abandoned-order program will account for fractional percentages of a marketer’s outbound email volume and double-digit percentages of their email sales. You just have to play nice with IT.

7) Have a win-back program. Another no-brainer. Lapsed customers are your best prospects. The key is defining what exactly a “lapsed customer” is, spotting behavior that indicates customers are ready to defect, and testing for the right approach to get them active again.

In 15 years of reporting on email marketing — interviewing hundreds of marketers in the process — these seven practices have emerged repeatedly as the most consistent keys to success.

No.1: Failing to Design for the Small Screen

One question: Do you honestly think someone’s going to open your email more than once? Honestly? Then why aren’t you sending emails that are readable and — more importantly — easy to interact with on mobile devices?

According to email security and deliverability firm Return Path, email readership on mobile devices is growing so fast that by the end of 2012 it will be the predominant platform for email consumption.

Among Return Path’s key mobile stats:

• Year-over-year, from March 2011 to March 2012, email opens on mobile devices grew 82.4 percent.
• Apple devices account for 85 percent of all mobile email opens.
• Email readership on the iPad has increased 53.6 percent year-over-year.

Simply put, it’s time to get serious about designing email messaging for mobile devices:

1) Design for the thumb. Email links need to be easily clickable for mobile readers. Make the buttons big and make sure there’s room for error around them. If you’ve got a designer who loves clean, delicate graphics (and if you’ve got a designer, you’ve got a designer who loves clean, delicate graphics) please explain to them, politely at first and then progressively more forcefully if need be, that this is about functionality, not pretty. If we can get pretty and functionality to live together, great. But pretty dies first.

2) Make it one column. For Pete’s sake, don’t send people through a navigational maze just to read your content. Let ‘em read it in one fluid motion from top to bottom. And those sidebars? Kill them. And keep the offers simple. Don’t throw 20 at them. Pick one, maybe two.

3) Think beyond the email. OK, so you got them to click through your message on their phone, why are you sending them to your homepage? Send them to a page on which they can close the deal. And B2B marketers: Why are you making people fill out 43 different fields of information to get your white paper? Can’t that wait? Finally, make sure the landing page is congruent with the message.

4) Focus on the outside and the top. Whenever an email is opened on a mobile device, the top of the message is all the recipient will see at first. Make it count. And no, including unsubscribe copy in the top of the message is not making it count. The three most important pieces of real estate in a mobile-ready email are the “From” line, the subject line and the top few inches of the message. If you’re doing it right, those three things combined will translate in the recipient’s mind to: “Hi, it’s me. You love hearing from me, remember? Here’s what I have for you today.”

If you think about it, designing for mobile devices is really just taking us back to the roots of direct-marketing design. For too long, too many marketers have been throwing everything they could into an email simply because, well, they could. Designing for mobile returns our focus to simple, straightforward and user-friendly creative, something many marketers have strayed away from in their email designs.

No.2: Failing to Welcome New Subscribers

Imagine a woman walks into a store and says to the clerk, “Hi, I’d like to see what you have for sale,” and the clerk says, “Today only! Forty percent off!” or “Free shipping on orders over $100!”

Stupid, right? Yet that’s exactly what many marketers do with new subscribers to their email programs. They don’t acknowledge the new sign-up and say “thank you.” They simply toss them into the regular mail stream with everyone else and start shouting offers at them. Even worse, some marketers don’t send email to new subscribers for days or even weeks after the initial sign-up.

Whereas average email open rates are generally in the 20 percent range, welcome email open rates have been reported to average from 50 percent to 60 percent. Besides being a prime opportunity to make that first sale, welcome messaging — whether a single email or a series — can help limit spam complaints.

People sign up for things all the time and forget. And the longer an emailer waits to send that first message, the more likely the recipient will have forgotten signing up and mark the new message as spam.

Too many spam complaints will result in the emailer’s messages being treated as spam by the inbox provider and either shunted off to the spam folder, or worse, blocked from reaching recipients altogether. So not only is a welcome message imperative, it’s imperative it goes out right away.

A typical welcome message should include:

1) A link that either allows the new subscriber to confirm their sign-up, or one that allows them to opt out.

2) A description of what they can expect as a result of their subscription, such as how many messages they’ll get in a typical week.

3) A request that recipients mark you as a safe sender.

4) An introductory offer, such as a percent-off-first-purchase coupon.

5) A “thank you” note for supplying their email address.

6) A prompt of some sort to get them interacting with the brand on social media or the company blog, if one exists.

Your welcome message or series of welcome messages are your email store clerk greeting customers and prospects as they walk through the door. But unlike human retail clerks, you can decide what your email store clerk should say and do and know they’ll execute your instructions flawlessly every time.

No.3: Failing to Exercise List Hygeine

Want to know how good spam filters have become? Consider the following true story: I run a fantasy football league for email marketing vendors. Every year the champion gets an engraved crystal trophy.

After the first season, I bought the trophy from a mail-order company and it added me to its email file. I didn’t mind, but I don’t need this company’s services but once a year.

Gmail apparently has figured this out because all the awards company’s email throughout the year was delivered into my spam folder.

All except one.

As the second Magill Report fantasy football season was about to wrap up, I received a message — in my inbox this time — with the subject line, “Time to Re-Order.” The body of the message included the details of the previous year’s football trophy order.

Somehow the spam filters at Gmail were able to spot the one single email I would want from this company all year long and deliver it to my inbox.

Astounding.

And that’s what you’re up against. Email inbox providers have made clear they want mass emailers to send wanted messages. In determining whether or not people want the messages an email marketer sends, the ISPs use engagement metrics, such as opens and clicks. By sending to inactive addresses, you drive your engagement metrics down and risk being unable to communicate with even your best customers.

The obvious answer is to clean inactive addresses from the file. But not so fast. Some addresses that have been inactive for, say, a year, could be someone like me — someone who wants to hear from you only once a year.

So how do you tell the inactive addresses that are held by potential repeat customers from the truly dead addresses? One way is segmenting by source.

There’s a big difference between addresses that have shown purchasing activity and then gone dormant and those that have never shown any activity after initial sign-up.

So here’s one approach you can take:

1. Track email-address acquisition by source.
2. Segment your file by source.
3. Identify poor sources of names.
4. Identify inactive addresses that have never made a purchase after sign-up.
5. Eliminate addresses that have never been active.
6. Consider eliminating poor-performing acquisition sources.
7. Implement a win-back program for the inactive addresses that have made purchases.
8. Take measures to try and catch people before they go inactive. (See tip sheet No. 7.)

Eliminating email addresses from a house file is one of the most difficult decisions a marketer has to make. But the addresses that have never been active are not just a waste of resources, they’re dangerous. As ISPs continually improve their ability to determine what email people want and what they don’t, list hygiene will be increasingly critical.

No, 4: Failing to be Can-Spam Compliant

OK, so this isn’t really a ridiculously stupid way marketers leave money on the table, but no discussion of responsible email marketing is complete without it.

Quick: What’s the dumbest thing a marketer can say when defending sloppy email marketing? “But we’re CAN-SPAM compliant,” that’s what. Adhering to the rules laid out by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 is the absolute least an email marketer can do.

Claiming CAN-SPAM compliance is simply saying, “But we’re not breaking the law.” Yeah? Well, so what? Even mediocre email marketing requires much more than simply following the law.

So without further adieu, here’s the skinny on what you must do to comply with CAN-SPAM:

1) Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information — including the originating domain name and email address — must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.

2) Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.

3) Identify the message as an “ad.” The law only requires this when sending messages to recipients without their permission (“affirmative consent”) and gives you a lot of leeway in how to do it. But you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that a non-permission-based message is an advertisement.

4) Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency.

5) Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future emails. Your message must include a clear explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read and understand. Creative use of type size, color and location can improve clarity.

Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.

6) Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. Do it right away, though.

You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website.

Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, except to transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with CAN-SPAM.

7) Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. Even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that sends the message may be held legally responsible.

The CAN-SPAM Act gives marketers a lot of wiggle room. But email inbox providers are stricter about what they’ll accept than CAN-SPAM requires. The ISPs own the pipes through which email travels, so they have every right to decide what gets through and what doesn’t. Of course you should comply with the law, but realize the people who deliver your email expect you to move well beyond it.

No.5: Failing to Know Their Metrics

Somewhere right now some people are sitting in a conference room talking about the performance of their email program, and someone is touting its open rates. And you know what? Most of the people in that room have no idea what it means.

An “open” is recorded when the receiving machine calls for graphics from the sender. So a more accurate term would be “graphics-rendered rate.” With images frequently turned off by default, a lot of email can be opened without having registered as such.

This isn’t to say open rates are unimportant. They simply need to be understood as a barometric measure, not an exact one.

A high open rate — 20 percent is about average — indicates high recipient engagement because they’re turning their graphics on. Open rates plummeting at a specific ISP are a sign of trouble at that ISP.

Accurate definitions of email marketing’s top metrics are imperative for making smart decisions. The following are definitions of some of email marketing’s most important metrics:

1) Email Conversions: The number or percentage of people who took a direct, desired action as the result of an email campaign.

2) Email Revenue: The amount of revenue generated as a result of a campaign.

3) Email Gross Profit: The amount of revenue generated as a result of a campaign, minus direct costs, such as the cost of deployment, creative development, list rental, unsubscribes and customer service.

4) Total Email Click-Throughs: The number or percentage of links that were clicked on in a campaign. This can include clicks on multiple links in the same message.

5) Unique Email Click-Throughs: The number or percentage of unique people who clicked on a link or multiple links in an email campaign. Clicks on multiple links in the same email count as one.

6) Click-to-Open Rate: The number of unique clicks compared to the number of unique opens expressed as a percentage. Yes, opens are barometric, but the click-to-open metric can give insight into the effectiveness — or lack thereof — of offers, copy, creative and links.

7) Email Unsubscribe Requests: The number or percentage of people who unsubscribed after a particular mailing. If this number is climbing from campaign to campaign, you’re doing something wrong.

8) Email Abuse Complaints: The number or percentage of people who report a sender’s messages as spam. Spam complaints are one of the top metrics email inbox providers use to determine if an emailer’s messages are spam. Too many complaints can result in all the senders’ messages being shunted off into the spam folder, or even blocked from reaching recipients altogether. Obviously, keeping this metric as low as possible is crucial to the health of an email program.

Notice the first three metrics are about conversion and the money that results. Email marketers can drown themselves in metrics if they choose to do so. But if only for sanity’s sake, it’s important to focus first on the ones that truly matter.

No.6: Failing to Have an Abandoned Order Program

Pssst. Want to know a secret? You know all those email pundits who are incessantly urging marketers to segment their email files and send different stuff to different people?

Well, I’d bet my wife’s share of tonight’s martinis that not a one of them have ever worked in a resourcestarved creative-services department — resource-starved creative-services department being redundant — and had to manage all the creative their advice would require.

They have never been on the receiving end of, “Just take this and repurpose it. It’ll take you five minutes.”

Am I recommending against segmentation? No. By all means, if you’ve got the resources, do it.

But there’s another way to treat different customers differently that is far more practical: Triggered emails. And there is one type of triggered email you should put resources against immediately: abandoned-site/order emails.

In all my years of email reporting, I have yet to hear of a single marketer who hasn’t achieved gangbuster results with them. They take some upfront resources and tweaking, but then they generally run on automatic.

Case in point: an abandoned-shopping-cart email program implemented by library supplies merchant and Silverpop client DEMCO.

The program entails three messages sent one, three and five days after the cart is abandoned. The first message serves as a simple reminder. The second is a little more urgent and the third offers a free tote bag as an incentive to purchase.

According to DEMCO, the messages convert at 22 percent, 15 percent and 24 percent, respectively. DEMCO’s abandonedcart emails drive 97 times the revenue of its broadcast messages. Also, while abandoned-cart emails account for 0.3 percent of DEMCO’s outbound messages, they account for 18 percent of the company’s email sales. And DEMCO’s results are reportedly pretty typical.

So here’s what you do: and get them on board by explaining how much new money abandoned cart emails can bring in.

1) Politely approach IT

2) Implement more than one abandoned-cart message; I’ve heard three is generally about right.

3) Test timing. One marketer has likened abandoned-cart emails to the crab pots on cable TV’s Deadliest Catch: Leave them in too long, you get fewer crabs. Take them out too quickly, you get fewer crabs. Likewise, send abandoned-cart emails too soon and you may get fewer orders. Send them out too late and you may get fewer orders.

4) Test offers. Should you offer a premium? In the first message, probably not. But only you can decide what’s right for your business.

5) Measure results, once the program seems to be humming, of course.

6) Pick your jaw up off the floor, take the results to management and politely ask for more resources to begin implementing more triggered-email messaging.

Whenever I’m asked the one thing email marketers should do to get immediate results, I recommend abandoned-order messaging. Not only are they one of the most efficient ways to increase revenue from the email program, their almost-guaranteed success can open the door to new resources for the department.

No.7: Failing to Implement a Win-Back Program

You know those new resources you were able to get as a result of your bang-up success with an abandoned-order program?

Well, one place to invest some of those new resources is in a win-back program, or series of win-back programs. Studies have shown that most marketing managers vastly underestimate the percentage of customers they lose each year.

And inside your list of lapsed customers probably lies a vast untapped opportunity. Consider them your best prospects.

What to do:

1) Define “lapsed customer.” The definition of “lapsed customer” will vary from company to company and possibly from customer segment to customer segment. Someone who purchases a seasonal item once a year who hasn’t bought in 11 months clearly can’t be defined as having lapsed.

2) Look for patterns indicating possible defection. Look at your data for signs that customers’ buying patterns are shifting. You may be able to spot customers ripe for defection to a competitor.

3) Study recency, frequency and monetary value metrics. Are customers buying less often than in the past? Are their order sizes dropping? It may be time to show them how much you value their business with a sweet deal of some sort.

4) Look for patterns you can take advantage of. Customers who buy once a year and who have different billing and ship-to addresses are probably gift buyers. Hit them with a reminder or two the week before they typically buy. If it’s a guy buying for his wife, he just may appreciate the birthday or anniversary reminder.

5) Test, test, test. A/B split tests are crucial to a successful win-back program. Test offers. What does it take to get them back? A 15 percent discount? Ten percent? Free shipping? A tote bag?

6) Get the timing right. Is six months after the last purchase the right timing for a reactivation email? Twelve months? A year and a half? Maybe it’s all three.

7) Consider picking up the phone. Yes, if all else fails, pick up the phone. You have addresses for customers. You probably have their phone numbers. If not, they’re easy enough to get. Have a customer service rep call them. Ask them why they left. You might learn something that will help you keep other customers from leaving. Make them an offer they can’t refuse. They’ll be astounded. And best of all, they’ll tell their friends.

8) Know when to say goodbye. Some email addresses are just dead, dead, dead. And truly dead addresses are dangerous. As painful as it is, remove them.

A good win-back program may just be the most educational experience you can give yourself about your customers’ lifecycles and the way you conduct business. As you begin to spot patterns indicating customers are about to defect, you’ll no doubt uncover areas of your business you need to fix.