As email marketing experts, we all know that if the present and future direction of email marketing could be summed up in one word, it would be personalization.

The proliferation of SaaS solutions into the massive and ever-growing cloud ecosystem has been godsend for digital marketers for more than 15 years. The days of expensive, IT intensive, on-premise solutions are largely a thing of the past. However, all the benefits of cloud solutions have not come without a significant...

We’re almost there; Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and every other day from Thanksgiving to Christmas will fill up with online shoppers looking for those special gifts. Online businesses will ramp up marketing efforts and website optimization to capture all they can from floods of consumers scouring their inventories. Big and small companies, alike, will be looking for the advantage that makes them stand out this holiday season.

"Browse abandonment emails are straightforward, focused, real-time emails to offer help and call shoppers back. They are different from newsletters, and marketing brochures, and other types of abandonment emails."

The demands and expectations to boost sales during the holiday season are inevitable. Whether your business is retail, publishing, media, entertainment or any online marketing effort involving targeting and sending email, this year’s sales goals are likely higher than last holiday season. As email marketers, we all face the same pressure from our organizations to send more email and drive more traffic.

Suddenly September is here, Fall is closing in, and Holiday 2014 is right around the corner. As of today, there are 85 days left until Black Friday, the official kickoff to the holiday season. If you’re not planning out your holiday strategy now, you could quickly get behind. Yes I know I’m preaching to the choir but this season comes around once a year, and there are some new email tricks you can use to drive success in 2014.

"One of the joys in being a digital/email marketer is that you don’t have to rely on opinion. You can simply run some numbers and decide for yourself."

There are dozens of sources, methods, and tactics to grow your email subscriber list, and we all know that not all of them are equally effective. Marketers have vague notions that organic list growth is best and paid acquisition of sources may yield lower quality subscribers, but there is little data available that gets at the validity of that assumption. I pulled some data from my own subscriber list to help throw some hard data into the mix.

"While CASL seems well intended (What? You like spam so much that you won’t try to stop it? You must be a spammer!!!!) it’s a lousy piece of legislation. It’s akin to trying to kill a fly with a hammer. CASL is bad legislation for three simple reasons –"

For many of us in the email marketing profession, customer interaction equals B2C. Tens of billions of marketing emails are sent every day – to consumers. “Buy This!” “Check Out This Incredible Offer!” “Download the Last XYZ You’ll Ever Need!” … the thrust of most email campaigns is planned, designed, targeted, segmented, analyzed, measured, filtered, and executed with one purpose: drive consumers to a website and convince them to take action. So goes the eCommerce engine. And it works.

"When it comes to B2B email strategies, here’s 9 things that B2B marketers need to consider when preparing content for their campaigns."

"While mailing subscribers is indisputably important, there are several reasons why the importance of capturing email addresses has nothing to do with sending your new subscribers another email. And how you obtain those addresses has become critical."

If you take them aside in confidence and buy them a drink or two, most people working in email marketing will eventually admit there’s a hungry beast they have to deal with that is never full and always has an appetite for more. No matter how much or how often they feed it, it’s a bottomless pit.

"Every marketer knows that one of your greatest assets is your email list. In the '90s and early '00s, relatively little attention was paid to how you actually built that mailing list; the focus was on building the biggest mailing list possible, and mailing lists were often bought, sold, or shared. Nobody really thought about the concept of "permission", after all email was the closest thing to free advertising and marketing you could get, and if somebody had an email address, it was considered fair game."

"As email marketers we often get ‘in the weeds’ – focused on whether or not the opt-in box is checked (if you’re collecting email addresses from Canadians, CASL says it matters), agonizing over where the email sign-up call-to-action appears on your Website and trying to figure out if someone who offers to send your ‘sign up today’ message to 70 million qualified (according to them) prospects around the world is worth the $1,500 they’re going to charge you (hint: it’s likely not)."

"At FierceMarkets, a digital B2B publishing company, anywhere from 30%-80% of our email newsletter list growth comes from converting web visitors into subscribers. In this article, I’ll share what’s working for us, and hopefully you’ll be able to apply it to your organization."

"Getting end customers to go paperless is a focus for many companies and one of the easiest ways to do this is ask them to switch off paper for their bills and receive an electronic version instead."

"MarketingProfs started in 2001 and built up entirely organically a list of mailable email addresses that stands at over 300,000 today. In 2013, we deployed over 10 million such acquisition emails. So, having seen literally hundreds of advertisers trying thousands of offers has given us a great portal into what works in B2B email marketing."

"the single most important piece of data for a successful email program is the email address. You may think, "Hey Bob, thanks for that blinding glimpse into the obvious." The truth is, this is a piece of data that if often beyond the control of the email team to actually gather, as this is usually a function of the web team. "

"With leading marketing technologies already established and new technologies emerging on a seemingly daily basis, marketers are faced with making decisions about how to optimize and deliver results with their technologies of choice."