While consumers are using their mobile devices to check email more and more, almost 73 percent of marketing emails are being opened on the desktop, according to new metrics from eMarketer. According to the report, 20 percent of emails are getting opened on smartphones and less than 7 percent are being read on tablets. The report also found that about 23 percent of all emails are being opened at all, and an average of five percent of these emails are getting clicked on. Emails coming from the financial services industry average the highest open rates at around 38 percent.

Author Jamie McGuire was surprised when Amazon sent out an email to all of the customers who had bought the self-published Kindle version of her book, Beautiful Disaster, stating that there was a problem with the book and offering customers a refund or the ability to re-purchase the book. McGuire had pulled the self-published Kindle edition of the title after her work was picked up by a big publisher, but that still doesn't explain Amazon's bizarre emails.

Big data, sophisticated toolsets that let marketers pull data from multiple sources and analyze marketing it across multiple touch points, is proving that it is more than just a buzz word. It's all in the numbers. By using big data-enabled technologies Epsilon executes seven times more campaigns a week, which bring in 20 percent higher revenues. Big data technologies has given MediaMath the ability to deliver 10 times the output with half the manpower. Merkle clients have a 70 percent reduction in processing time for complex marketing campaigns, thanks to big data.

Microsoft's new Outlook.com email service has been having some issues. A number of users have reported receiving an error message that there is a problem. The message reads, "We're having a problem accessing email. You might not be able to see all your email messages. We're working to restore service right now."

Google has admitted that it violated consumers' privacy while creating Google Maps with Street View and has promised to clean up its act. As part of a settlement in a case brought against the online giant by 38 states, Google both acknowledged that it accessed the passwords, email and other personal information of unknowing users, and promised to make amends. For the first time, the company promised "to aggressively police its own employees on privacy issues and to explicitly tell the public how to fend off privacy violations like this one," reports The New York Times. Despite the $7 million …

Google's webmail service Gmail has come under scrutiny by Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) for allegedly violating privacy laws. The investigation came about after a number of Russian citizens complained that their privacy was being violated when they received contextual ads based on their Gmail conversations. Google has defended itself, claiming that emails are scanned by software and not human beings, which would keep the online giant in the clear.

While not every email marketer uses an email sign off, they are becoming more common as marketers are seeking to sound more familiar in and personal in their messages. So be warned, the email sign off is not as cool as it once one. In fact, Slate columnist Matthew J.X. Malady is calling for the end of the email sign off.

While email apps like Incredimail offer an excellent resource for organizing your inbox, these new tools are challenged with an old email problem: inbox overload. These apps offer the ability to organize task lists around your email messages, so for example, you can assign a marketing message to a task list for further review. The problem is that with so many emails coming in, this further review category can get bogged down. And unlike Web-based email clients, most of these apps don't have multi-delete features, so you'll have to individually delete every single unnecessary message.

A lot of work goes into an email marketing message, and it is a big disappointment to find out that your message hasn't been delivered. To help marketers avoid the junk folder, direct marketing expert Ernan Roman has put together a list of tips with advice on best practices. His tips include tactics like creating a welcome series, using dynamic content, and rewarding email shares.

According to metrics from Marketing Sherpa, 58 percent of marketers said that mobile and tablets will affect email marketing programs in the next year. But as Daniel Burstein, director of editorial content of MECLABS and a contributor to the report, points out, marketers should be thinking less about channels, and more about the customer experience across channels. Burnstein says that people are checking their emails on their phones and the survey shows that email lists are still growing somewhat for more than half of marketers.