I know a thing or two about screwing up. With almost 10 years working in email marketing I, or the people who work for me, are bound to make mistakes once in awhile. I have nightmares about it. I have anxiety about hitting "send." Inevitably mistakes happen. As the legendary physicist Nils Bohr said, "An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." If that's what it takes, call me an expert. Let me share with you some of those mistakes and, in my expert opinion, the best way …

Instead of filling your inbox with more predictions for the year to come, I thought it would be much more useful for me to highlight some of the companies that I will be watching in 2012. Several of these companies shared their solutions on panels at Mediapost Email Insider Summits in 2011 and piqued my interest. Others are companies I have been introduced to by clients or trusted colleagues. Still others we already use on a regular basis. I've studied or used them all and consider all worthy of a quick look to see if they might be able to …

There are so many ways one can "optimize" an email program. Depending on the maturity of your email program, your product or even your company can drive the needs of this optimization effort. But one thing is sure: no matter where you sit in maturity, you can benefit by more effectively integrating social into your program this year.

For a long time, customers have made it clear that if brands want to capture their attention in the inbox, those brands should have something valuable to say. Not just valuable information, but information that is valued by the individual recipient. In other words, a brand's messages should be individually relevant. This is a high standard for any brand. Most cannot live up to these expectations.These new tools are going to create a new sub-industry known as Social CRM. Social CRM is going to help us listen to our customers and give them the relevant messages they want. It is …

The email marketing holiday season was a wild ride -- one that looked considerably different from past years and will surely set the tone for the 2012 holiday season. Here are some of the highlights that made this holiday season remarkable: