Lyris mentions that there there are a number of email marketing myths that are simply not true. Here are the top three email myths and why you can ignore them.

Myth #1 — Never Use The Word “Free”: Contrary to what has been reported in the past, the word “free” wil not cause any of the major spam filters to reject your email. According to Lyris, when used correctly, the word “free” can provide a powerful boost to your results.

Myth #2 — Don’t Send Emails on Weekends: In general, distributing your business emails on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday is a good rule of thumb. (Interestingly, in an online poll of the 60 Second Marketer community, our readers prefer to receive the 60 Second eNewsletter on Fridays.) All that said, if your company’s offering is particularly relevant to your subscriber’s weekend lives, consider testing different distribution times on Saturday and Sunday.

Myth #3 — You Can Improve Your Results by Growing Your List: Increasing the size of your list is often a good thing, but a quality list of active, interested and motivated subscribers/customers is really the end game on which you should focus. Consider taking steps to clean out the dead wood in your list. At a minimum, you should reduce the energy you spend on your inactive members.

There’s a great deal of information in the Lyris White Paper and we’ll be providing 60 Second Sound Bites of it in the future, but if you’d like the whole ball of wax, be sure to download it by clicking the link.

One of the key questions we get asked at the 60 Second Marketer is “What metrics should I measure in my email marketing campaign?”

With that in mind, here are the top 18 things you should measure in your next email marketing campaign. These are pulled from an excellent white paper put out by Lyris|HQ called “Guru’s Guide to Email Marketing Success”:

1. Open rate
2. Click-through rate
3. Click to open rate (number of unique clicks/number of unique opens)
4. Bounce rate
5. Delivery rate (emails sent – bounces)
6. Unsubscribe rate
7. Referral rate
8. Number of or percent spam complaints
9. Net subscribers
10. Subscriber retention
11. Web site actions (number of visits to a specific web page or pages)
12. Percent unique clicks on a specific recurring link(s)
13. Number of orders, transactions, downloads or actions
14. Percent orders, transactions, downloads or actions of emails sent or delivered
15. Total revenue
16. Average order size
17. Conversion rate
18. Average dollars per email sent or delivered

For the full report, be sure to download the “Guru’s Guide to Email Marketing Success.” It’s an excellent white paper with tons of great information.