If your company is in a very price-competitive industry segment, you are probably stuck on the promotion treadmill. On the promotion treadmill, every day is another set of promotions, you are forced to send emails more and more often to help make sales goals, and every email screams a discount. You're probably tired of hearing all the best-practice advocates telling you to jump off the treadmill and send lifecycle emails for engagement. Even if you think they have a point, that's not your decision to make. Your job is to move the needle on sales while still sending out the constant hail of promotions.

"You probably know by now that segmentation improves email marketing performance significantly, so if you’re still operating primarily in “batch and blast” mode it’s time to start slicing and dicing your subscriber file. Marketers that practice list segmentation see better open and click-through rates, fewer unsubscribes and better deliverability."

Batch and Blast – the process of sending out email with little to no segmentation – has become the Tom Cruise of the email industry. Once white-hot popular, yet now almost comically reviled. You can’t pick up an entertainment magazine without a little Cruise-hate. You can’t pick up a marketing publication that doesn’t attempt to eviscerate BB and basically tell you that you’re a moron if you use it.

"Personalization is under attack. Not the act of personalizing messages to be more relevant and valuable – just the word itself. A recent Buzzfeed article reports that brands like Walmart, Macys and Gap are eschewing the term "personalization" in favor of "relevancy." Why? There are a couple of reasons. First, with the amount of contextually relevant data now available to marketers, the term personalization seems dated, limited and even "invasive and robotic," according to the article. Second, brands are very aware of not crossing the line between relevant and creepy. "

"In 2012, after 6 years in strategic planning at various digital agencies, I switched coasts (East to West) and became a client-side digital marketer. Lately, I have been reflecting on the transition - and what other consultants and strategists could take away from that perspective to make clients (like me) more successful."

Ever since the final session at EEC 2015, it’s been a seismic few weeks for the email community when it comes to understanding deliverability from the perspective of the inbox providers. In that session, a seemingly innocuous question from yours truly turned what would have been a worthy, but predictable panel on deliverability featuring 4 major inbox providers (AOL, Comcast, Gmail and Outlook.com) into one of the most controversial and talked about panels in the history of the EEC.

"The best tips I can give you this holiday season is to spur your creativity with example of past programs that did more than offered shopping experiences. Given it’s less than a month out, it’s still not too late to use your brand as the experience vs. selling products to augment the experience. Not everyone has a power brand like Tiffany’s. "

"Email. It’s “antiquated,” always on the verge of dying and if you ask what the internet thinks of email marketing you will find that 74.9% find it negative. Yet 66% of B2C marketing professionals still maintain that email is the most effective channel to reach and engage customers. Our job as email marketers is to continually drive engagement and grow this high ROI channel. This Valentine’s Day let’s get back to the basics and take a look at nine great best practices we can follow to fall in love with email again."

When looking to China, and in excess of a half billion consumer mailboxes , it is no surprise email marketers will identify substantial opportunity, this should be balanced with the understanding the landscape is very different to anywhere else in the world.  It is certainly not a simple matter of transferring your experience gained in North America, Europe or even Asia-Pacific and applying that to the mainland Chinese market.

Marketing in China offers several opportunities. The overall market huge and wealth is on the rise – two factors that are especially attractive to international companies. That said, marketing in China can differ significantly from marketing in the U.S. as well as many other Western countries. Email marketing, in particular, offers specific challenges not common in the rest of the world.

I’ve been lucky in my career – I’ve been brought in three different times to turn around and/or grow an email program. Two were (and are) rousing successes. Let’s just call the other one... a valuable test.

"Here’s what’s on the 2015 “to-do” list of these top marketers, and should probably be on yours as well."

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at an Atlanta Interactive Marketing (AiMA) event on must-have marketing automation tools. Marketing is about getting the attention ofthe people who matter most to your business, and what makes it possible to reach these people is the data we have about them. No matter how you compile it, the data you have about customers is what drives your automation. What I wanted to share at this event was that, regardless of which automation platform you use and which processes you have in place, your automation efforts will never be as effective as they could be if you’re not automating the data that drives these processes. Marketing automation isn’t complete without data automation.

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the letters “RFP”? Chances are it isn’t something good—unless, of course, you work at The Relevancy Group. We love RFPs and helping our clients manage the process and get great deals. But for the rest of the email world on both the buy side and the sell side these three letters come with a lot of baggage. Why is that?

I love "what if" games, don't you?  Recently, in a group to which I belong, this question was posed:  What if the boss gave you $10,000 to improve your brand's email marketing ROI?

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.

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.

"Drip marketing describes a series of predesigned emails sent on a predetermined schedule geared toward education, branding, positioning, or selling of your product. Drip marketing emails are distributed to a broad audience; lead-nurturing emails are distributed to a specific segment."

"Triggered messaging is a rapidly growing part of marketing with extremely good ROI. It's about delivering business messages that are personalized and near-real time: often sent by email but increasingly by other channels such as within web pages. "

"And what's the process for controlling email marketers and taking away the power of the channel? It's easy. Call them a spammer."