This week I’m at the EEC’s (Email Experience Council) Email Evolution Conference in San Diego with about 500 other email marketers. I’m here to get new ideas and insights that I can share with you. I will be writing and publishing a number of blog entries today and tomorrow (much more than usual) in order to share what I’m learning as I’m learning it.

I started my time at the conference by attending the Email Marketing Bootcamp. This was a session that had roughly 50 people from different companies (medium to large in size) who wanted a crash course in email marketing. It was a pre-conference workshop that I attended with our Distance Learning (a.k.a Webinar Guru) Heidi Tobias.

The three presenters, Karen Talavera from Synchronicity Marketing, Austin Bliss of Fresh Address, Inc. , and Jordan Ayan of SubscriberMail, did an excellent job of educating the attendees on some of the most important basics of email marketing. Here are a few miscellaneous tidbits that stood out to me (mixed with some thoughts of my own):

• Setting Goals for Your Emails – Do you know what you want to accomplish with each of the emails you send out? Have you thought it through? Because email is so quick and easy to send, we can skip this very important part of putting a campaign together. What do you want the reader to do once they open your email? This will help you determine the objective of your campaign and how to set it up and measure its success.

• Getting Past the Human Filter – Spam filers are only part of the challenge. You have to get past this to get into you subscribers’ inbox. The next filter is the human one. What can you do to make sure the reader doesn’t perceive your email as spam? For starters, use a recognizable ‘from line.’ Secondly, create a compelling subject line that is relevant to your reader.

• Subject Lines – Try having someone who didn’t work on the campaign write the subject line (or at least run the subject line by someone else before sending, with the question…would you open this?). Give a clear indication of why to open and what to expect.

• Try Remarketing – This means to resend to subscribers who clicked on a certain link showing interest but didn’t take the ultimate action you’re looking for (purchase, register, etc.). Send a targeted email to these people a few days later and sweeten the offer to help them get over the “hump.”

• Clean Your List – 50 million people changed their email address this past year. Our lists are always in need of cleaning. Why does it matter? Because inactive email accounts can impact your deliverability. So clean that list!

• Watch the Typos in Email Addresses – You lose email addresses all the time because they were typed in wrong by the user (or by someone on your end). If you have a relatively small list, go through your email bounces and see if any need to be fixed (add the “.com,” etc.). Also, if you use Constant Contact, turn on the option on your sign-up form that requires the subscriber to type his or her name twice. This will help eliminate errors.

Okay, more to come. My next entry will have stats and some other interesting info from this morning’s keynote.

P.S. Check out the blog Be Relevant! written by Tamara Gielen for blow-by-blow notes from the conference.