New analysis from Yes Lifecycle Marketing is worth a review from anyone who wants to understand and improve email marketing effectiveness. Among the key findings in the new report, milestone and remarketing triggered emails lead to 600% more purchases than the most common trigger campaign -- welcome emails.

Truth be told, email marketing never really ever went anywhere. In fact, it has managed to trend upwards across multiple generations, and Millennials are leading the charge. According to Epsilon, 43% of Millennials have opened and read marketing-driven emails more often in the past six months than the rest of their older counterparts -- all other consumers came in at around 32%.

There are many ways marketers can connect with Millennials, and email marketing should be a key anchor of their outreach strategy. According to a survey from Adobe, 58% of Millennials say email is their preferred way to be contacted by a brand. With this in mind, there are several tactics email marketers can implement to build a strong connection with the Millennial generation.

CRMs are intended to be much more than a glorified contact management system, and if used correctly, can greatly increase business productivity and effectiveness. CRM software often have a multitude of features. While some are overly complex or not fit for every business, there are key components that can deliver tremendous value if you can get your sales team over the initial learning curve.

This year will be the year when companies use all their different avenues of marketing in the most targeted way to communicate the most relevant and powerful messages to their customers. This will include contextual emails, responsive Web sites, mobile marketing, social media, ambient proximity and Big Data to create the truly connected customer.

While having a large subscriber list may seem ideal, it's not the number of total subscribers that counts -- it's the number of active subscribers. You should constantly be trying to refine your email list. Send a break-up email to members of your list who haven't opened one of your emails in a while. If they don't reply to the break-up email, you know you can safely have them removed.

"When did spamming become part of a burgeoning industry of "lead generation tools"? The increasing volume of these unsolicited emails I receive is becoming comical. Some are just plain garbage and irrelevant, others are annoying, and still others are just sad. I can no longer stand idly by, watching my inbox get assaulted, and not ask: "Isn't this spam?"

The Information Commissioner's Office has express its partial satisfaction over how some of the questions raised by its working group on the US-EU Privacy Shield have been addressed. The ICO points out that the agreement will need to be reviewed again in a year. The agreement replaces the previous Safe Harbor arrangement that allowed EU citizens' data to be transferred to the US.

Europe's data protection authorities will hold fire for one year on the new Privacy Shield agreement, withholding any potential legal challenges until mid-2017. The Article 29 Working Party (WP29) noted it was still unhappy with the final text of the agreement -- which replaces the previous Safe Harbor agreement between Europe and the United States and covers transatlantic data flows.

Jobs site Glassdoor accidentally outed hundreds of users seeking employment in new pastures when it despatched an email and failed to use the bcc button. The missive was sent to users to update them on the company's terms and conditions. One user said: "They later sent a follow up email saying sorry but it was pretty generic and didn't sound especially sorry at all."