I've decided to go on a diet--a data diet. In an email world of bounces and conversions, people who click 67% more when mailed on Tuesdays and people who never click when it's raining, I've lost sight of what's important. I'm bloated by bounces, overindulgent with opens. To paraphrase a tired old cliché (the best kind), I can't see the strategic forest for the tactical trees.

With turkey day approaching, I thought it would be interesting to examine the Thanksgiving related e-mail campaigns that ran last year at this time. For many of the retail and catalog sites, the days surrounding Thanksgiving are the highest-trafficked days of the entire year. People obviously bored by Thanksgiving at Aunt Ruth's are hitting the Internet big time in search of those holiday savings.

One of the topics to be explored at the upcoming Email Insider Summit is the role of e-mail in a Web 2.0 world. Bluestreakhas done some interesting research on consumer attitudes toward these new technologies, but the value and adoption of certain Web 2.0 communication channels was made clear to me recently through some personal experiences.

As the saying goes, "you are a product of your looking glass." Some are broad and full of hope and ideas, some are so narrow that you can't see the trees for the forest. I've crafted this column to tell you a short story and a view into how I work with my teams.

Here are five key tips that every good marketer should consider when selecting the right sales offer (especially in the B2B community).

In stark contrast to the rather anemic Direct Marketing Association show a few weeks ago was the 2006 New York Ad:Tech show running this week. The conference, which has obviously outgrown its venue, was packed, with three floors of vendors taking up every available space. If you've ever wondered if Internet advertising was back, all doubts would be removed by looking at this crowd.

Dear E-mail Diva: We are seeing an increasing number of spam challenge replies to our newsletters. We have to either reply or, in many cases, visit the e-mail supplier Web site and type in a CAPTCHA code to validate our sending address as legitimate. Currently, this trickle is manageable as a human process, but it is increasing and could soon become just too large to manage. How do large e-mail vendors manage these challenge replies?

What a hot topic. Who wouldn't want to see the behavior of all Web visitors and be able to track it back to the source that impelled them to the site? The analysts are talking about it as the next phase of "e-mail relevance"--using Web analytics data to target and trigger messages--but is it really a new issue or an old issue with a new sense of "urgency"?

In most computer environments, people have become accustomed to technology rushing to their aid. We marvel at the precision of spell-check, the scrutiny of grammar-check, and now the speed of autocorrect. Unfortunately, visitors to your Web site and readers of your emails get none of this assistance when typing their email addresses--and typos can lead to lost revenue, poor customer experience, and poor deliverability.

The Direct Marketing Association released its latest Power of Direct economic-impact study last week, and the figures surrounding e-mail were quite amazing. The data has been mentioned in a few columns but bears repeating: The ROI for e-mail marketing was $57.25 for every dollar spent. The ROI of all non-e-mail-related online marketing was $22.52, less than half.