Given the short tenure of an email marketing manager (two to three years), it's not surprising that this role is hard to staff and hard to retain. I've always considered it to be a burn-out job in some ways, with rapid turnarounds, the constant pressure of deadlines, and no forgiveness for mistakes. So how you can support the growth of this role so it's not a burn-out? Marketing organizations, write this down: Develop a career path for your email group, even if it's only made up of two people.

If you track the Twitterverse, you've probably read about Justin Halpern, who converted his father's crusty, cranky and curse-laden commentary from a hot Twitter account into book and CBS sitcom deals. His success has energized millions of basement bloggers, but marketers and other communicators can also pick up pointers about creating highly focused, in-demand content, whether they occupy cubicles or spacious corner offices.

If you thought inboxes were already cluttered, just wait until this year's holiday season ramps up to full speed. Retail business are struggling to recover, while at the same time cutting ad and direct mail spending, and focusing more resources on ROI-heavy programs like email. But what if you're not in retail? What if the emails you need to send in November and December don't care that it's a holiday? You've got newsletters to distribute, conference seats to fill, annual memberships to renew, software upgrades to announce.... How can you compete with the tsunami of "Free Shipping, today only!" and …

Have you ever found yourself standing in front of an automatic towel dispenser, waving your hands frantically over the hands-free scanner, praying for a towel to come out? Yeah, me too. A week ago, I found myself working up a sweat in front of a towel dispenser when a waitress finally came in and said, "Oh, you have to actually touch the button." To which I said, "But the button says hands-free." Her response? "Oh, it's wrong. You actually have to touch it." Interesting. This little interaction got me thinking about the importance of directions, or as we call them …

This is a subject we often talk about in apologetic terms when it comes to email marketing: segmentation. It's a really time- consuming commitment for an organization to do great segmentation. While traditional monetary-based segmentation (Recency Frequency Monetary-RFM) and demographic segmentation drive most programs, what is the value of behavioral segmentation -- or better yet, attitudinal segmentation? There's obviously value in all forms, yet I find the challenge is balancing the right segmentation methodology with an organization's ability to work within these guides

As the year winds down, marketers seem to be doing two things: planning for next year's successes, or making excuses for not being able to do more with their email marketing programs. To the former group, kudos to you. To the latter group, I am calling your BS. Following are the three most common excuses I get from marketers for why their email isn't more relevant.

In all the talk of social media and its influence on email marketing, it occurred to me that email marketers consistently commit an antisocial sin. Worse still, it is a sin often taught as a "best practice" in order to decrease the hassle of managing a large number of responses to marketing email messages. I am writing of the dreaded "no-reply@" email address.

Imagine you're walking through a store and see signs for a demonstration of a product you're interested in. You follow the signs to the back of the store and through a door that leads into the back alley, where you see the product demonstration going on. It's not the best brand impression, so chances are you're not going to stick around.It's the same thing when you reach a dead-end landing page without any branding, navigation or secondary content. I call this "back alley syndrome," and I've seen two glaring cases of it from major retailers in recent months.

A study by Focalyst shows that seniors (62+) using the Internet today have higher purchase intents than younger segments do, in major categories such as travel, CPG, entertainment and pharmaceuticals. What's more, seniors who do use the Internet have almost double the income and are twice as likely to have gone to college and still be working and married, than those who are not connected. And there are other considerations about this huge demographic that should make them interesting to email marketers....