When a CEO realized that internal email comprised half to three-quarters of all traffic at his company, that his employees were spending an inordinate amount of time sifting through it, that it limited accountability, personal contact and productivity, and that it "facilitates lazy and thoughtless communication" he made the decsion to ban it for a week. The result is that the organization started paying more attention to what was important to the company, instead of what felt urgent in the inbox. Stress fell, productivity rose, and the CEO concluded that email was preventing the company from doing its best work.

Three people in Japan were arrested recently when emails containing death threats were sent from their email accounts. The very specific and highly targeted messages included the threat of mass murder, blowing up famous shrines, an email to an airline threatening to bomb commercial aircraft and warnings to a kindergarten that hosted a child from a royal family. The menacing emails were traced back to a malware infection named Backdoor.Rabasheeta. Once the malware was discovered, the three people arrested were released without charge.

Cirrus Insight is a Gmail plugin for CRM, which allows users to manage leads and contacts within the Gmail inbox. A new update brings CRM data from Salesforce into the inbox interface as well, and also integrates more cleanly with other Gmail plugins such as Rapportive. 

2012 is officially the year of mobile in email, and this week's launch of the iPad Mini will only further underscore the trend. Learn how design, price and precedent, app potential and screen resolution might play a role in your email marketing programs.  

Data on the engagement metrics of Daily Deals retailers analyzed by Return Path revealed that Wednesdays enjoy read rates at 12% higher, and also see 20% fewer messages ensared by spam filters. Monday is the least responsive day for Daily Deals emails. The study's surprising finding is that the word "Free" in subject lines not only did not increase spam rate, but it actually increased read rate by 12%. 

According to a new survey conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, 10% of consumers use a smartphone or a tablet as their primary device for checking email. 39% open email from trusted brands on their mobile devices, while 36% will save messages to read later on their desktop.

From strategies like inbox zero to tools ranging from priority inbox, filters and inbox management applications, consumers are increasingly organizing themselves around organizing their email. But the difficulty may lie more in consumers' brains than their inboxes. The psychology of reciprocity, law of effect, hyperbolic discounting and ownership/responsibility help explain why consumers just can't quit email. 

A study of early holiday season emails by Experian Cheetah Mail revealed that the use of personalization in subject lines is up 21% over the same period last year. And with good reason - the emails with personalized subject lines show an improvement compared to non-personalized in open rate (4-6 percentage points), click rate (1-2 points), conversion rate (.3-.4 points) and revenue per email ($.12-$.22). 

How relevant your email are impacts all your metrics, from open rate to conversion, unsubscribes to even deliverability. Make your emails more relevant with data, appended from external sources, applied from internal sources, and by making some calculated assumptions about your subscribers through behavioral lookalikes.  Read the full article on the Silverpop blog.

A survey by IBM and Oxford University about how organizations are using Big Data revealed that transactions are the most common source of data, used by 88% of respondents. The next most popular source is log data (73%), followed by events (59%) and then email (57%). Only 43% are using social media as a source of data.