The "take-away close" is not something I learned about from my days as a marketer, but from my tenure as a mother. My husband, a sales guy at heart, used to use the take-away close during his days as a stockbroker: "Sure , Steve, I understand. You don't need an extra $500,000 in the bank -- which is exactly what you could be missing by passing up this investment opportunity. Not a problem at all." It wasn't until our kids were able to talk that I learned about this sales technique -- and it works like a charm! "You don't …

Eight seconds has been quoted for some time as the amount of time subscribers take to real an average email. Even if still accurate, I suspect a small handful of emails dramatically skew this number. In reality, you probably don't have a full eight seconds to convey your message. You definitely don't have that amount of time to grab their attention

I was speaking with a reporter recently and was asked the obligatory, "Why is email dying?" question. I don't think he really thought that was the case, but that he just wanted to see how I would respond. I gave him a five-minute rant on why email is alive and well -- and then told him the two marketing channels that are on my deathwatch list:

Well it's official. lLast week began the 2011 retail holiday season. An optimist would say the retail holiday season's proverbial glass is half full, with an expected 2.8% growth over 2010. A pessimist would say the glass is half empty, suggesting consumer confidence is pretty low and access to credit diminishing consumer optimism. An optimist looks at the good, the pessimist looks at the bad -- and a marketer might say, rather, "Your glass needs resizing."

Since 2002 I have written somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 articles and blog posts for various publications. This one is my 109th Email Insider column. Some columns resonate long after publication I've listed them here, along with my personal awards that explain why they're still on my mind.

Sales-focused B2B cultures tend to align themselves along two extremes: either they dismiss marketing entirely and refuse to consider the value marketing can bring to their efforts, or they give marketing too much free rein and lose the connection between marketing and sales efforts. Either way, direct-response marketers are in a tough spot. Without a direct connection between marketing efforts and revenue, we must rely on optimization metrics to show that the incremental results from a marketing/sales mixed effort generate greater ROI than without.Measurement is difficult to do in any organization. When marketing and sales are disconnected, or when marketing …

While we all think about opens and clicks as engagement metrics, inbox providers also consider "reply" an act of engaging -- and we often overlook it, blatantly. We pride ourselves as facilitators of conversation with our customers, yet somehow that conversation has become very one-directional. Marketers talking "to" customers, but not allowing them to talk back? Does that seem wrong to anyone else?

Hotmail has been releasing new features to combat gray mail over the past year that have left marketers wondering if they'll have an even harder time reaching the inbox. The good news is, the changes may actually be beneficial to senders and some will actually see their sending reputations improve. The bad news is, some senders may actually see response levels drop as subscribers tune out, filter, or block more email.

We all get excited about open rates, and it's true that once a subscriber opens an email, he or she is one step closer to taking the action we intended -- right? Well, not always. As we strive to win subscribers' attention and clicks, we are up against a tough lineup of inbox distractions, all ready to steal away our hard-fought conversions. Strengthen your email with the best armor for the inbox battles by considering your users' experiences.

We can argue that we are moving to personalized, coordinated engagements that all drive a unique value to the consumer and that email is a catalyst to connecting these engagements. I've bought into this story for years, and tried to shape solutions to help deliver it. The challenge is there is really no business concept for "real time" and "marketing intelligence" in the same sentence. Yet, how do we reconcile marketing intelligence and real time to execute on the best, most relevant customer insight?