I see customer-centric organizations becoming more commonplace and individual departments asked to work together through leadership consolidations or task forces. Don't get me wrong, this is great news. Yet, as the groups come together and compare notes, I see them confronting the reality of a multitude of agencies, platforms, reporting and monitoring tools. They are finding disparate customer databases and missed monetization opportunities. This shouldn't be the end of the story. Why not take inventory of what causes you (or your resources) to walk up that very big hill everyday to get anything done? And then why not lay out …

A bunch of self-proclaimed "email snobs" (myself included) have been heating up the Twitterverse, email discussion lists and the blogosphere with a debate over the merits (or lack of them) of the language we use as email-marketing practitioners. Some of us believe that seemingly harmless words, like "blast" to describe deploying an email message or campaign, or "buy" to describe list rental, are symptoms of marketer ignorance, both accidental and intentional. Others say efforts to obliterate these words from the marketer's lexicon waste everybody's time on inconsequential matters and distract us from the real issues we have to deal with …

Email was a huge innovation when it became widely available more than 10 years ago. But the platform itself has not changed much in that time. However, now we are starting to see shifts in the way large mailbox providers construct the inbox experience, mostly in response to the loss of eyeball share from social networking sites -- where an increasingly large share of person-to-person messaging is occurring. Dubbed "the social inbox" by industry pundits, these innovations focus on including social networking features (like status updates) within the inbox and also make it easier to find and respond to messages …

I was recording a podcast with Alex Williams of eROI recently and he asked me what ONE retail email program I would recommend that people subscribe to. It's a tough question because all the retailers that I track do things that are likely to spark new ideas and encourage testing. You'll have to listen to the podcast when it's released to see who I named, but I thought I'd talk about four of my favorite retail email programs here.

No matter how well you've embraced Twitter and Facebook, you get nowhere if the handoff to email or other channels is sloppy and unsophisticated. Here's one case history of how a company forgot to adjust transactional email streams to the new reality of social influence marketing -- and probably lost a customer.

Many email marketers usually assume that they have a small window of opportunity to communicate with recipients, but it isn't necessarily an all-or-nothing or -- or an open-or-delete -- proposition. Cheap storage, along with organizational tools such as filters, folders make it easier than ever for subscribers to keep their inboxes orderly without simply hitting the delete key. If recipients hold onto your old messages, they likely hold onto other marketing messages too. If messages from your competitors are also being saved, it only makes sense to optimize your messages with keywords specific to your industry as well as your …

With so many developments happening in the email inbox, from technologies like SWYN and video GIFs to "grid-breaking" design innovations, it's fair to feel a little apprehensive about incorporating new ideas into your campaigns. What if the new approaches don't work? Though this question is valid, we all know -- deep down -- that taking risks is the only way to grow. Paul Arden's "It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be," is full of rally cries for creative types. We've selected some of his most motivational points and considered what they mean to us …