A study of early holiday season emails by Experian Cheetah Mail revealed that the use of personalization in subject lines is up 21% over the same period last year. And with good reason - the emails with personalized subject lines show an improvement compared to non-personalized in open rate (4-6 percentage points), click rate (1-2 points), conversion rate (.3-.4 points) and revenue per email ($.12-$.22). 

How relevant your email are impacts all your metrics, from open rate to conversion, unsubscribes to even deliverability. Make your emails more relevant with data, appended from external sources, applied from internal sources, and by making some calculated assumptions about your subscribers through behavioral lookalikes.  Read the full article on the Silverpop blog.

A survey by IBM and Oxford University about how organizations are using Big Data revealed that transactions are the most common source of data, used by 88% of respondents. The next most popular source is log data (73%), followed by events (59%) and then email (57%). Only 43% are using social media as a source of data.

New research by the Direct Marketing Association reveals that 43% of consumers subscribe to emails from 10 or more brands, an 10% increase over 2011. Only 29%, however, believe that at least half of the emails are relevant and interesting, though the silver lining there is that the number is up from 9% in 2010. 

Much has already been written about the subject lines and key performance indicators of the presidential candidates' email programs. Today, StrongMail VP of Marketing Services Kara Trivunovic analyzes the content strategy in a piece for Direct Marketing News. She found that Obama's emails were better attuned to a more digitally savvy subscriber base, employing tighter copy and more colloquial language. "If you look at the typical Romney email," Trivunovic said, "it's standard political letterhead, copy-heavy, and lengthy. It feels like a direct mail letter. It's where we were with email 10 years ago." 

The InboxLove conference on Wednesday in Mountain View drew a crowd of email engineers and entrepreneurs to discuss the future of the inbox. While the range of platforms and approaches to email is frustratingly diverse, most of the solutions presented at the conference tackled productivity and the idea that people wrongly use email as a to-do list. 

Launched in 2003, Mimecast is a cloud-based email security, archiving and management company headquarted in Waltham, MA. The company secured a whopping $62 million investment round last month and plans to grow its Waltham office from 75 to 150 employees over the next year, with an aim of “IPO grade fitness in the next couple of years” according to CEO Peter Bauer.

A new study by Computer Economics reveals that both CRM adoption and investment have been on the rise over the past few years. 51% of surveyed companies had adopted CRM in 2011, up from 34% the previous year. 35% of companies made CRM investments in 2011, up from 30% in 2010. "Companies are giving very high priority to any investments related to customer experience, anything that has an effect on sales and topline revenue or on improving customer retention," said Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics.

Marketing Automation company Marketo announced the launch of "The Marketing Nation," a community of marketers who share insights and best practices. Set up like an association, The Marketing Nation also affords members a range of benefits around education, support and services.

Return Path has analyzed the email campaigns of the presidential candidates and developed an infographic that illustrates how each campaign fares across key performance indicators. President Obama enjoys a list five times the size of Governor Romney's, as well as a 68% inbox placement rate to Romney's 50%. Where the Obama campaign suffers, however, is in spam scores. 5% of emails are marked as spam, as opposed to just 0.8% for the Romney campaign. The Romney emails are also 150 times as likely to be forwarded as emails from the Obama camp and are only 16% as likely to be …