The reason companies struggle to make money from email marketing is that many are not as clear and specific as they need to be. Do you know why someone joined your email list? Do you have specific sales funnels that aid in solving their specific problem, meet a specific need or fulfill a specific desire? Or are you just leaving it to chance that someone will buy?

A former waste disposal employee who left his job, taking information about previous clients with him, has been prosecuted and fined. Mark Lloyd emailed the details of 957 clients to his personal email address as he was leaving to start a new role at a rival company. The documents included contact details and purchase history of customers and commercially sensitive information.

The Royal Bank of Scotland Group has expanded its relationship with Lida, as it aims to position its customers at the centre of all its communications. The additional brief means Lida will lead the CRM strategy and major creative work for RBS, NatWest, Coutts and Ulster Bank. Lida replaces CHI & Partners' direct arm Rapier.

Marketers who are thinking about new ways to get closer to customers should study how the data-driven strategies used by direct-response marketers can be applied to other channels. That's the possibility that people-based marketing presents -- a possibility that is real and here today.

Users of Microsoft's email services are receiving a disproportionately high number of junk emails because their spam filters are breaking. Outlook and Hotmail email addresses have reported wide-ranging problems, with many inboxes overflowing with marketing and scam emails.

The email addresses of hundreds of women registered on a "confidential" database have been mistakenly distributed by the Prime Minister's department. The email contacts were confidentially registered on government database AppointWomen for those seeking appointment to government boards and bodies.

Before any outreach is done, it's important to consider a number of things. Marketers want to avoid paying for the wrong tool and later realizing they aren't able to do all the cool things they wanted to. Here are some questions to ask that reveal whether you have chosen the right email outreach tool.

Customers are actively showing appreciation for a brand by signing up, as well as their interest to hear more in the future. As a result -- and as eConsultancy's Email Marketing Census highlights -- almost three-quarters of fashion companies now rate email marketing as delivering excellent ROI.

Personal information from more than 65m Tumblr accounts has been discovered for sale on the dark net. Although Tumblr disclosed the leak -- which it says took place in early 2013 -- this month, the company did not previously acknowledge the scale of the database that was compromised. The database includes email addresses and passwords, but the latter are heavily protected.

Marketo, the marketing software provider that went public in 2013, is now being taken private again. PE firm Vista Equity Partners has acquired the company in an all-cash deal for $1.79 billion. The news ends weeks of speculation that Marketo would be snapped up potentially by the likes of Microsoft (which is a big partner of Marketo) or SAP.