Busy readers skim emails. Help them figure out what yours is about. Include headings, bullets, graphics, and links. They're a lot more inviting than a wall of paragraphs. Dump the jargon and just say what you're looking for, in simple terms. If you're writing to customers, they will appreciate a description that's designed to help them, not intimidate them.

In email marketing, your success is defined first by your open rate, so it's important to learn the tricks to boost it as much as possible. One effective way to do this is to personalise the email. There are two ways to do that best. Start by using your personal or company name as the "From" address, in addition to the fact that this looks better than an anonymous email.

"You don't need to sit down and talk to each employee individually, but you must make every reasonable effort to alert them to what you're doing. Set out what's being monitored, how long it will be retained, how it will be used and who will have access to it. You must give business-related reasons, such as detecting criminal activity or unauthorised personal use of business resources."

In 2015, mobile phone messaging apps were used by 1.4bn consumers, and eMarketer predicts that by 2018, the number of chat app users worldwide will reach 2bn, representing 80% of smartphone users worldwide. In a nutshell, it's only a matter of time before everyone and their granny, in practically every country on the planet, are using IM.

The average person checks their email about 15 times per day. But a recent study from researchers at the University of British Columbia found that when people were limited to checking their email just 3 times per day, their stress levels decreased significantly. The folks who limited their email checking also felt that they were more able to complete their most important work.

MailerMailer recently released a report analysing 49,000 email campaigns comprised of almost 1 billion messages. Among its findings: messages with medium-length subject lines exhibited the highest average open rate. Messages with longer subject lines claimed the highest average click rate, meaning that a recipient clicked on a link within the email.

Statistics suggest that 1 in every 5 emails fail to land in the inbox, which means 20% of opportunities to connect with customers are being missed. Having great deliverability is what every marketer strives for, but it's something that has been difficult to define. Often, what marketers believe to be a measurement of their deliverability is in reality the proportion of emails that were "accepted."

The use of emojis in marketing is up 557% from last year. Seven hundred million marketing messages with emojis were sent last year, compared to just 145 million the year before. And these marketers are onto something -- 56% of brands report experiencing an increase in open rates when emojis are included in email subject lines.

Marketing automation has emerged as a supposed panacea, yet despite years of propaganda from vendors promising the world, many who have bought marketing automation are finding that it is not the silver bullet they expected. Econsultancy's Email Marketing Industry census surfaced to show that only 7% of respondents deemed their in-house automated campaigns to be "very successful."

Email marketers are, in my experience, pretty awesome people. They are the unsung heroes of digital marketing departments. And yet, they're often ignored when bigwigs talk about "digital marketing." despite email delivering awesome ROI.