Whether you're an industry veteran or a newcomer, your email campaign will benefit from revisiting these fundamentals.

Even if you are a seasoned email marketer, taking a look at your current email process on an annual basis (or more frequently) helps you stay on top of trends, industry best practices, new rules and regulations, as well as your current internal processes. No matter where you are in the email marketing process, it's always a smart idea to brush up on the basics of email endeavors.

Study up
In an ever-changing email world, it can be difficult to stay on top of current industry trends, best practices and new technologies. One of the best ways to stay at the head of the pack is to work closely with your current email service provider. You can also do a bit of self-education through the many email industry organizations and associations that provide a forum to learn what is new in the space.

A great place to start is The Email Experience Council. The EEC publishes an electronic newsletter and offers subscription-based options to access industry whitepapers and research and participate in online seminars. Other providers such as MarketingSherpa and The Direct Marketing Association are great sources for industry events, education and research. Both provide email newsletters packed with up-to-date industry information as well.

Depending on your budget, you may want to consider attending an email-marketing-focused tradeshow or seminar. Some events to consider include the MarketingSherpa Email Summit, the Email Insider Summit by MediaPost or eTail hosted by Worldwide Business Research. Industry events, expos and workshops can provide valuable industry insight and offer you a chance to network with other email marketers.

Reporting
Well-thought-out reporting can provide your organization with much more than how many recipients opened your messages or clicked on a link. Taking a closer look at the most popular links within your campaigns can help you determine content for future campaigns. Additionally, the most popular links on your website can be a great starting point for building content and identifying offers in your email communications.

Don't just let your reporting data sit there. You know what you want your emails to do, so look to your reporting data to help identify shortcomings in your email marketing strategy. A decrease in open rates month over month doesn't necessarily mean that your recipients are not interested in your communications. Instead, this could indicate that you are having deliverability issues or other problems with ISPs.

List hygiene
Tired lists can lead to more than just a decrease in opens, click-throughs and, eventually, sales. For optimal performance you need to ensure you are practicing the following basics:

• Inactive users. It's quality, not quantity. If you know that a recipient hasn't opened or clicked on a link in two months, perhaps it's time to have them suppressed from your communications. Better yet, create an offer for these unresponsive subscribers to reengage them in your program.
  
  
• Feedback loop processing. You know the "report as spam" button; some users simply use it to help clean up their inbox when it gets too full, while others use it for unsubscribing. In any case, this information should be collected from the ISPs, which in turn provides a feedback loop so you can remove these individuals from your database. Continuing to send to consumers that have tagged you as spam will hurt your deliverability reputation, and your reputation is everything these days. You should work with your email service provider to fully understand the ins and outs of list hygiene.
  
  
• Adding new emails/customers. From time to time you may be adding large amounts of email addresses to your database. Of course, you should make sure the addresses were collected legitimately, you have permission to email and the emails are in proper structure. But all the fundamentals aside, you shouldn't automatically add these addresses to your current database. A better strategy is to use smaller sample-sized campaigns that launch independently from your existing campaigns to ensure that these new addresses are valid. A damaged reputation from sending bad emails takes longer to repair than spending a little time preplanning.

Testing
When was the last time you tested your campaigns? A proper testing strategy should be ongoing. As you start to look at future budgets and timelines, make sure that you are building in the appropriate time and costs to test any new templates or content that you will be including in your communications. Raising the bar just a point or two can add up to more than a year's worth of messages.

To ace the test, hit the books and don't forget about the basics. Use your resources to stay current with changes within the email world and implement the best ideas and solutions as they fit within your organization.

Christopher Lovejoy is account executive, strategic services, at Premiere Global Services.