Gmail's new Priority Inbox: Will this message classification and prioritization system become one of the biggest changes to affect commercial email and the inbox, or will it evolve into a footnote along with Google Buzz and Wave?

Personalization is poorly used in most marketing emails. The belief that "any personalization is good personalization," simply is not true. When personalization is overdone or done improperly, the email can come across as phony, contrived or downright creepy. For example, I recently received an email that used my name in the subject line: "Neil, Labor Day hotel sale going on now." Awkward. Best practices to ensure personalization works for your campaigns -- not against them -- include:

Words can lift our spirits, darken our moods, catch us by surprise and inspire us to take action. Words have the power to build lifelong allegiances or irrevocably sever relationships. This is important stuff we're talking about here. And depending on how you speak to consumers in your emails, you can either win them over or wind up in the trash folder.

As email marketers, we track and leverage data to inform elements of the programs we run: opens, click-throughs, conversions, opt-outs, heat maps, and so on and so on. But what about good old customer feedback? Not something you see in a report, but something you hear directly from the source? Not something upon which you base an assumption, but something that can be categorically accepted as fact because it came from the consumer's mouth?

For over a year now, email deliverability experts have been talking about the 'fact' that ISPs use engagement metrics (typically not defined by these so-called experts) to determine inbox placement. But calling it a fact is a bit misleading given that none of the large mailbox providers has talked publicly about if they use engagement metrics to determine where emails get delivered.