In the days following Steve Jobs' death, I found myself thinking, oddly enough, about Apple's TV commercials, especially "Lemmings," in which briefcase-toting office workers march off a cliff until one man lifts his blindfold and sees what's happening. Many marketers run their email programs like lemmings, because they copy a competitor's or peer's new practice without doing proper due diligence first. As a result, an effective email design might evolve into a mishmash of uncoordinated additions that obscure the email's main purpose, like the call to action.

Combining email and social media has become a sort of Holy Grail quest for marketers and the vendors who support them. It is an apt analogy. Combining the conversation and social spreading power of social media with the analytics and visibility of email would lend some much needed accountability to social media, increasing its adoption among companies that rely principally on email and earning it a protected line item status in the budget. As marketers, it's easy to love the potential of social media, but hard to quantify what resources to allocate to it until metrics comparing email to social …

Appraisals. Hmph. I am very much over assessments, appraisals, valuations -- pick your term. As many of you may remember from my previous articles, I have my house on the market. When the stars aligned, and I was able to secure an acceptable offer within seven weeks, I was on cloud 9! We flew through the inspection unscathed and just had to go through the appraisal process -- which we were assured would not be an issue. But that's when the wheels fell off the bus. In the world of email, the appraisal is equivalent to the inbox providers making …

We are looking for Email Insiders to join us in Deer Valley, Park City, Utah, Dec. 4-7. We made a call for submissions last spring and received some great proposals that were included in the agenda as a result. So here I am asking again.

While the jingle bells can be heard only faintly at the moment, four weeks from now email marketers will be ringing them loudly. Just days after Halloween, the majority of retail emails will include some reference to the holiday season. Here are some of my predictions on how the holiday season will go this year:

If email were a stock, would you short it?   For many that live outside the email space, there seems to be a growing sentiment that email is diminishing in value as an asynchronous engagement vehicle.   While the projection for email growth is still climbing, the nature of the business is changing in many respects.  The response proxies are declining, the performance proxies are being challenged (conversion declining) and it’s never reached the scale of media in terms of reach and frequency without negative fanfare.   Email appending is still polarizing as a “responsible” way to reach customers that you engage through …

Your database is the backbone of a successful email-marketing program, and there's no better time to build it up than during the holiday shopping season, when hordes of motivated and interested shoppers are coming to your Web site. This year, more than ever before, your list-growth strategy should include a plan to offer opt-in opportunities to shoppers in every channel where you have a presence. These should be optimized for the advantages as well as the limitations of each channel. Following are five key areas to collect opt-ins:

Emails are getting cluttered. It's not enough to have a headline, some copy, and an image or two anymore. These days we need preheaders, snippets, "view this email online" links, and all sorts of social sharing links as well. Some marketers are starting to question whether we need all of these links when most of them drive very few clicks. And first on the chopping block seems to be those "share with your network" links.

Email offers a number of powerful advantages for marketers: prospects and customers like to interact via email, it's cost effective and it's easy to measure results. Although there are many metrics to use in an email marketing campaign, when measuring email effectiveness you're really trying to answer three questions:

This past weekend I held a garage sale with a dear friend and neighbor. It was the first garage sale I had done in 20 years, and I will not likely have one for another 20 years. It was painful -- not because it was a a garage sale, but because it was something I don't do very often. To put it bluntly, I didn't know what the hell I was doing! I can admit it. All my garage sale-ing friends had all kinds of "after-the-fact advice" (like, Thursday is the best day for a garage sale -- uh, …