Email marketing firm Alchemy Worx routinely scrubs its client data to improve email marketing performance.  The company recently outlined 7 myths about email marketing that are still ubiquitous today, but that really need to be rethought since the company’s own user research, as well as statistics from Direct Marketing Association research, show that often just the opposite is true.

Here are those 7 email myths:

1.  Consumers get too many branded emails.  In fact, research shows that 60% of consumers say they receive less than six emails a day from trusted brands.

2.  Timing isn’t everything.  85% of email opens occur within two days of receiving an email, so don’t get caught up in thinking your email needs to be sent on a certain day at a certain time.

3.  “Inactive users” should be culled from your list after six months.  Actually, 20% of your annual openers do so after being inactive for six months.

4.  Consumers mark most branded emails as spam.  Less than one subscriber in every 2,000 will mark an email as spam.

5.  The more email a brand sends, the more they are ignored.  Actually, if you send four emails a month instead of just one, this actually doubles the number of consumers who will open one or more of your emails.

6.  You get better results with short subject lines.  It depends on how you define results.  Research shows that email subject lines with under 60 characters increases opens, but subject lines of more than 70 characters increases the number of clicks received.

7.  Email goes to a spam folder because of subject lines.  According to an analysis of 540 billion emails, spam keywords like “free” have little or no effect on whether they will end up in the junk folder.

The latest McKinsey research, which Lawyers.com editor-in-chief Larry Bodine reported about on his blog last week, shows that email marketing is still a highly effective way to acquire new clients.