When your current email creative is scoring touchdowns, why would you add a new play into the rotation? Because, most likely, your competition is looking at your game-winning plays and figuring out how to copy them or trump them. And that means you have to evolve your formula and elevate your A-game. If you haven't committed your 2010 email resolutions to paper yet, you might want to think about adding a creative A/B test to the list. What's a creative A/B test? It's where you pit your current creative (A) against a revamped version (B) to see which one garners …

Three numbers: 90; 10; 0. 90 is the percent of total time spent on an email campaign during which email marketers work on getting that campaign out the door. 10 is the percent of time spent in reporting and analysis. And zero is the amount of time most marketers spend figuring out how to optimize a program.

I have come to terms with the fact that not everyone's intentions are as honest as mine when it comes to Facebook (or anything on the Web, for that matter). When it comes to marketers using Facebook as a vehicle for communicating with customers, we need to be smarter than my creepy middle school vice principal who found me on Facebook -- only to pursue a line of seriously inappropriate, personal questions. But this is the reality of the world we are trying to navigate.

54% of marketers plan to increase email budgets in 2010. Another 43% plan to keep their email marketing budgets the same, leaving only 3% that will decrease spending on email. So yes, our expertise will be in demand for the foreseeable future. Questions about how and why budgets are being reallocated are more intriguing.

As an industry, we can learn a lot from the mistakes of our peers. That's the spirit in which I publish the Oopsy Hall of Fame each year. This year's inductees demonstrated several weak points in our collective email processes....

My encounter with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has troubling repercussions for the email industry.