Target is testing a new discount service called Cartwheel in a move to drive shoppers into stores. Cartwheel gives Target customers access to 5%-25% off deals. The retailer presents the deals on Cartwheel.Target.com by topic. Target will promote this new feature across digital channels, including emails to its credit cardholders, messages to Facebook fans and through its website and mobile apps.

Online retailer ProFlowers was one of many e-commerce flower companies to use personalized emails to sell flowers for the Mother's Day holiday. The company sent an email on May 4, adding mom's name to the subject line thanking customers for past purchases and offering a big discount for a purchase this year.

More than half (55%) of companies earn 10% of their total sales through the email marketing channel, according to the latest report from Econsultancy/Adestra Email Marketing Census. According to the study, 18% of respondents reported that email accounted for over 30% of their total sales.

Digital marketing services company Responsys recorded $48.5 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2013 which ended March 31, exceeding expectations. The company reported its quarterly earnings this week revealing that reported sales were 27% higher than the prior-year quarter's $38.1 million.

Motorola has brought its IT and digital marketing teams together in a move to drive collaboration. "Technology is a business enabler," Eduardo Conrado, senior VP-marketing and IT at Motorola told Ad Age. The teams work together on strategy and on digital platforms to help streamline the company's approach to digital communications, be it social or email, for both internal and external communications.

For PR professionals, managing communications across many social channels and email for various different clients can be a challenge. Dana Humphrey, owner of Whitegate PR, uses Vbout to help keep it all under control. The tool that lets companies manage their various social media profiles, their email marketing efforts, and online reviews through one dashboard. "You can use it the same way you would use Constant Contact or MailChimp," Humphrey told PR Week. "I'm still working on integrating my clients' Constant Contact and MailChimp accounts into Vbout."

Democratic Senator Mark Udall from Colorado said that he is "extremely concerned" over revelations that the FBI reads citizens' emails without a warrant despite the fact that a federal appeals court ruled this action as unconstitutional. Udall's comments come in response to new documents shared this week by the ACLU which revealed that the FBI and believes it can access emails without a warrant if the email was sent or received through a third-party service.

Think email is dead? Think again. RebelMouse, a state of the art new media tool which pulls content from from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+ into a custom social front page online, is using email to engage its users. The company works with MailChimp to send out daily email newsletters. "As much as we're told e-mail isn't sexy, no one sends more e-mail than Facebook or Twitter," Paul Berry, the CEO of RebelMouse told Wired.

Brennan Carlson, SVP of products and strategy at Lyris, has outlined six different factors that he thinks email marketers need to be thinking about when considering the future of email. One of those is that email will become a location-based marketing channel. "For example, by creating check-in programs, promoted via email, it presents the opportunity to cross-promote other goods and services based on where the subscriber is located," he writes in an opinion piece in Direct Marketing News.

Emails with social icons have a higher average click through rate than emails without them, according to new metrics from email marketing services company GetResponse. According to the report, emails without social buttons have an average 2.4% click through rate but those with social sharing capabilities have an average 6.2% click through rate. According to the report, in 2012, 29.4% of email marketers included social sharing icons in their emails, up from 18.3% in 2011 (a 61% increase).