The easiest way to obtain behavioral targeting data is through the reporting capabilities of your e-mail marketing campaign tool: what customers open and what exactly they click on.

This means that as writers and marketers we have to think hard about ways in which to tag our emails as being both relevant and timely.

Highlights from the study include:

Yet e-mail works, and marketers and advertisers keep putting it to new uses. Moreover, consumers—whose opinions are the ones that matter—genuinely like e-mail. Nearly three-quarters of adult e-mail users in North America said they used it every day, according to an April survey conducted by Ipsos for Habeas.

If your list does get messy over time, it's wise to recognize the symptoms. Here are a few notorious indicators:

I have a number of questions and recommendations that you might want to consider if you're planning a midyear review of your e-mail marketing performance.

In this column, I'll lay out the framework for a very simple segmentation of your list.

To help you keep up with the trends and changes in strategies, today I'll point out some "best practices gone bad" in e-mail.

Here are a few areas, among others, that (we) focus on...  Perhaps you'll get some ideas for your own mid-year review from them.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding of what whitelisting means, its effect, and how it's done. As with many things in e-mail, the situation continues to evolve. Whitelisting is no exception.

Here are four typical reasons for unsubscribing and how you can best respond...

It's an email marketing fact of life.

But nobody expects addresses to go bad in around 15 minutes. But that's happening more often with the growth of disposable email addresses. Here's what you need to know...

I stand guilty as charged of not offering an alternative to the open rate in that first column. I will remedy that in this column.

So, what are the alternatives to the open rate?

Many small business owners will harvest business cards and then just blast away with poorly planned-out emails.  It’s vital that you have some plan, goals, and objectives around a contact plan.... One of the hardest things to do with email is to develop goals and objectives. Why? 

But, when I look at the emails in my inbox every day, the vast majority of marketers don’t treat the top any differently from the bottom of their messages.

On second thought, they do. In many cases the bottoms are better optimized. Putting aside those few messages with well-optimized preview panes, most fall into two other camps:

Choosing third-party lists is both an art and a science. You're looking to identify lists that have the people you want to reach, also known as your target audience. But you can never really know how a list will perform until you send to it. Here are my five tried-and-true rules for getting started with third-party lists.

Promote your e-mail value at the following crucial places:

Campaign reports are like exhibits in a Museum of Modern Art. We're pretty certain they're valuable, but we're not quite sure what they're trying to say.

Is there some deep meaning in there about the nature of our subject lines? Or is it just random numbers?

Here some tips to help you get your head around those report metrics.

Think about it. The two are not the same.

When 95% of us login to our service or software's reporting interface, the only "big" numbers we see are:

Here are five email takeaways that can make you a better marketer overall:

Updates to the documentation include: