A survey of 3000 small business owners by AWeber Communications found them largely optimistic about 2013, with 67% planning to increase their total marketing spend and 85% intending to increase the amount they spend on email marketing. Social spending is expected to rise as well, though not as dramatically. 72% plan to spend more on blogs, 70% on Facebook and 58% on Twitter.

The average email user received 5,579 messages and responded to 869 of them in 2012, according to new data from Cue. The average response time rose to 2.5 days from 2.2 over 2011, though 56% of messages that received a response saw it within the first hour. Tuesday was the busiest email day of the year, with 11am the peak time.

Despite all the talk about companies using big data to uncover insights, maybe automation is the real reason the world is so excited about big data. It could be that big data technologies are more like manufacturing robots - better tools for specialized tasks at speed and scale.  Read the full article on GigaOm.

Merger and acquisition activity in the marketing services and technology sector grew by 67% in 2012 to 485 deals, according to a new study by The Jordan, Edmiston Group. The total value of the deals eclipsed $20 billion, a 36% lift over 2012. Database and information services deals rose to $11 billion, with mobile media and technology deals reached almost $3.5 billion. 

While many marketers are finding 30% - 40% of their emails opened on mobile devices, others think the number could be significantly higher with a mobile-first email strategy. When Publishers Clearing House noticed its mobile open rates were lower than the desktop, it acquired a mobile agency and brought it in-house to fix the problem. Now the brand sees mobile opens at 90%.

A new study of email performance metrics by Eloqua shows that marketers in the Asia-Pacific region enjoyed higher click and open rates than marketers in Europe and North America. While Eloqua does not attribute the disparity directly to email volume, it notes that North American emailers sent "an order of magnitude" more emails than their Asia-Pacific counterparts. 

During 2012, top online retailers sent their subscribers an average of 210 emails each, an increase of 19% over the 177 emails sent on average in 2011. The biggest increases came in January, February and October, with the slowest gains in December, March and April.

Ongage, a decentralized email gateway allowing mailers to route messages through multiple vendors through a single front end, has launched plug-and-play connectivity with 25 EDPs and Cloud SMTP services. 

Email delivery tools company Unlock The Inbox has acquired MailCounter through a startup auction by The Next Web. MailCounter keeps a visible tally on publishers' websites of how many times an article has been emailed, similar to the counts of shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social channels. 

While the Nigerian Email Scam appears to be a product of the digital age, the ruse behind it dates back to at least 1588. Known then as the "Spanish Prisoner Scam" the concept was the same advanced-fee found in millions of inboxes today. As to why the scam has endured for centuries, a spokesperson at the Nigerian Embassy in the US offers perhaps the most credible explanation, saying "there would be no (email) scam if there are no greedy, credulous and criminally-minded victims ready to reap where they did not sow."