Picture a coin with two sides. One side is your objective -- wanting to sell your goods or services -- and the other side is your customer wanting to buy your goods or services. Signups to your email programme follow suit. You want to email them and they want to hear from you, agreed?

Personalisation has been a buzzword in sales, marketing and customer service circles for many years. Get it right and you will improve loyalty, advocacy and sales, but the problem is that personalisation, or behavioural merchandising as it is also often known, is very easy to get badly wrong. Most SME websites just don't have enough visitors for some systems to work.

One of the more intriguing trends I've noted recently, particularly in the barrage of "email isn't dead" articles in the more mainstream press, is the emergence of the curated newsletter. It makes sense: every day we're inundated with interesting articles via social media, so there's a great appeal in having someone sift through the most interesting stuff and present a digest every day or week.So how could this style of campaign benefit a brand?

There are various opinions about the psychology of today's email recipient, some based on real-life stats and survey data and others simply using common sense, empathy and logic. Most agree that with so many people reading their emails on their phones, more consumers now see emails soon after they are received no matter where they are or what else they are doing. These people are also less likely to click through at this time, because they're making the time-killing inbox check, performing an initial triage when they are checking email on the go.