While the rest of the email marketing world goes a little crazy with predictions for 2015, predictions you as a marketer can’t control, let’s go a little crazy with the things you can control: your own email marketing program. Let’s talk about resolutions for 2015, rather than predictions.

Although email best practices abound, they’re not always adhered to. I get that. It’s easier to keep doing things the same way as before than it is to change your habits. But email is a numbers game, with little, tiny numbers adding up to big dividends.

Consider the measly 1%, a number so insignificant, it’s only a penny if you’re talking about a dollar. A 1% improvement in deliverability might mean 1,000 more emails delivered for one business, while a 1% improvement in conversions might mean $100,000 in additional revenue for another.

As an email marketer, you should constantly be on the lookout for incremental improvements you can make. You probably do a lot of things right already, and you won’t find a magic bullet that doubles your open rates or conversions. But there are a lot of things that can give you a little lift, and a few little lifts will add up.

Below are six proven yet oft-overlooked ways to improve email marketing results. Not one of these is hard to do, so how about trying them all over the next 12 months? Just repeat after me, “I resolve to….”

1. “I resolve to…budget appropriately between email and social media marketing.” Social continues to get most of the media attention, and let’s face it, it’s a lot sexier than email! But when email delivers an ROI of $4,300 (according to the DMA), why would your focus be on the less tangible social side of things?
2. “I resolve to…focus on new subscribers.” The past year brought us bunch of articles and posts on re-engaging inactive subscribers. How about we resolve to spend 2015 striving to get new ones? From where I sit, I think a lot of companies would benefit from putting more resources into growing their email lists.
3. “I resolve to…keep our in-house list clean.” How often does your list get a good scrubbing? Keeping bad and inactive email addresses on your list only hurts your deliverability and reputation. It might pain you to watch your list quantity decrease, but watching your metrics improve will more than make up for it. And as for those inactive subscribers, either institute a plan for re-engaging or drop them from your list. Period.
4. “I resolve to…be CASL compliant.” Canada’s anti-spam law is so strict that it should keep you compliant in every country if you only adhere to it. I can’t promise that Norway or some other country won’t top Canada’s law in the future. But I can tell you that for now, CASL is the toughest anti-spam law out there, and complying with it is the smart thing to do.
5. “I resolve to…do more testing.” Marketers have so many opportunities to improve incrementally just by making A/B or multivariate testing a standard practice. Why not test something every single time? There are literally countless factors you could test, including obvious ones like subject lines, preheader text, body copy, and calls to action…heck, even the color you choose for a CTA button can easily be tested. So let’s resolve to do more testing (and improving) in 2015!
6. “I resolve to…start using responsive design.” After the Thanksgiving and Black Friday numbers showed a dramatic increase in mobile shopping, I suggest all retailers start focusing more on mobile, in particular by switching to responsive design, which enables emails, landing pages and websites to be optimized for small smartphone screens, slightly bigger tablets, and even bigger laptop and desktop screens.

Not one of these six resolutions is that hard, right? And all are worth doing. Resolve to do these six things in 2015, and track your numbers. Then report back to me December of next year with your results!

About the Author: Scott Hardigree is Founder of Email Industries (the folks behind Indiemark, BlackBox, Formswell and Email Critic). Connect him everywhere, here.