Senior BuzzFeed "Newslettertarian" Dan Oshinsky reveals: "When we started sending newsletters at BuzzFeed, each new product had a specific recipient in mind. Even when we were sending an email to tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers, we wrote the newsletter with that single person in mind, because we wanted every email to have the personality of an email you'd get from a friend."

Phishing not only tarnishes your reputation, it also damages the deliverability and engagement of your legitimate email programs. Phishing also has a direct impact on marketing-generated revenue. If you aren't authenticating your legitimate emails properly, they could be considered spam by mailbox providers and result in reduced deliverability -- or be rejected outright.

Email marketing automation is most likely to be used by large companies, according to UK senior marketers surveyed by email service provider Mailjet in April 2016. Companies with at least 250 employees were about 69% more likely than their counterparts with fewer than 100 employees to automate email marketing campaigns.

Marketing automation lends itself to personalized experiences, and Mumsnet, the largest parenting site in the U.K., provides one of the most inspiring examples out there. If you find out you're expecting and share your due date, Mumsnet will send you email newsletters throughout your pregnancy to help you learn about the different stages, based on how far along you are.

Often, users are interested in only receiving mail of a specific type, like daily or weekly deals, newsletters or certain notifications. Cater to this by creating a link to the preference page within your email for users to easily opt out of and into the emails they wish to receive. Recipients are much more likely to remain engaged if you allow them to control their inbox.

The latest research suggests that with more than a third of email users not seeing images, best practice guidelines are overlooked by marketers who rely on graphically rich email templates. Most email marketers still prioritise open rates when it comes to measuring the success of their campaigns -- but they really should be focused on optimising their click-through rates (CTR).

Sometimes campaigns don't perform well simply because they're being sent out at a time when users aren't able to pay close attention to their mailboxes or the content inside them. Pay attention to what time of day has historically resulted in the best performance for previous emails and use that as a precedent for when you should be sending your emails moving forward.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, the ROI for email marketing is around 4300%, bringing in GBP40 for every GBP1 spent. Email outperforms search, display and social media marketing. The reason for such a high ROI is that email gives marketers a platform to build customer relationships on an ongoing and direct basis.

As marketers look to make emails mobile friendly, new statistics show that the efforts are necessary as customers are using their smartphones more often to read marketing emails. In fact, the "2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study" from IBM has found that 49% of emails are now read on mobile devices throughout the world.

Persado has some big clients, and its approach is like old-school direct marketing on steroids. Email marketing is one specialty. Its machines can generate subject lines in vast quantities, and go on doing it long after any human copywriter would have given up and gone to the pub. The subject lines are just the start. The whole message can be put together by machines.