Read rates appear to be declining. Machine learning seems to be driving more of your drops into spam folders. Email clients are giving users easier ways to unsubscribe, Keeping customers engaged has never been harder and more critical. Marketers who have fought back the disengagement challenge share how they are analyzing reader behaviors and crafting engagement strategies for maintaining the base.

An EIS tradition - the baring of the souls. Several of our messaging gurus share their most embarrassing but valuable mishaps. We explore not only where and how good intentions went wrong, but what marketers learned from them. What weakness did this faux pas reveal? And most importantly, what did they do to ensure it wouldn’t happen again?

Deep personalization reaches far beyond the custom subject line and "Dear XXXX." A new generation of direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are showing how true one-to-one leverages data and messaging seamlessly across touchpoint to understand a customer's personal shopping journey, relationship to the brand, and future needs. We ask some of the most innovative emerging brands to share how they are using messaging to drive performance and build brand all at once.

The pain of integrating a new ESP is legendary. The best start, however, is a solid RFP that clarifies for brand and vendor the needs and goals of the project. Marketers who have successfully navigated this experience recently share their lessons learned, their checklists, their regrets. How did they poll and reconcile internal stakeholders? Understand their database need? Work with IT, product development and engineering? Define goals and feature sets?

Continually growing email leads at the top of the funnel is extremely important for conversion, but having leads is meaningless if emails are not reaching their inbox. See how Sleep Number is tackling deliverability as it exponentially grows its lead database.

As most email marketers continue to move away from batch and blast and towards target and trigger, waves of new data layers and automation tech pile in. The promise of higher tech always has been better performance, but it also claims to free teams up from mundane tasks to focus on higher level strategy. Is it so? We ask several brands to reflect on how they are managing (or being managed by) automation. Has it just added a new task set? Did the new tech come as advertised or get used in unanticipated ways? Is it helping them achieve higher level marketing goals? And what have we learned about making automation work for rather than us work for it?

Email is just one important touchpoint in a complex customer journey across channels and beyond the usual marketing silos. Scotts strives to create a more coherent customer experience by connecting the dots of cross-channel behaviors that convert. We explore how the brand is orchestrating site and email activity, direct mail and call centers to weave more seamless experiences, grow brand and optimize conversions.