More retail marketers sent holiday-themed emails in 2015 than in 2014, but those more recent campaigns generally had lower levels of engagement, according to recent research from Yesmail. General holiday campaigns (emails that referenced the season without specifying a particular holiday) were most popular, with 90% of brands deploying them in 2015.

Blogging and email marketing are two of the most effective digital marketing strategies. Both are great ways to increase brand awareness, build a loyal customer base, and in the end, generate revenue. No matter who you are targeting, loyal readers are always the ones who buy the most.

Social media has firmly cemented its place as a vital marketing tool, and email marketing has become more important to marketers and has the highest return on investment of any channel. Both email marketing and social media have their strengths and benefits, and marketers need to focus on how to make the two work together rather than prioritising one over the other.

When optimising your email marketing campaigns for conversion, testing is your best tool. Monitoring your email open rates, your click-through rates, and your conversions can help you gauge where you are being successful and where you can improve. A/B test to optimise individual emails. Test changing up the frequency of a campaign. And test the types of emails you send in your campaigns.

Testimonials can have a profound impact on the back end of your funnel if they are leveraged properly. They will provide you with an opportunity to demonstrate social proof with your products and services. The more testimonials you use in your email sequences, the more established credibility you will have with your audience.

Others may be making the most of the last rays of summer, but for marketers the festive season is already in full swing. Months of pre-planning go into the emails that hit inboxes come December -- and with overall email volume increasing by 25% during the festive season, it's clear that marketers have to work harder than ever to engage customers.

According to Mailjet research, if a brand pushes a message that aims to alleviate FOMO, such as something consumers "don't want to miss," Brits are 39% more likely to engage with a brand. Humour also makes an appearance on the list of elements that will get people to open your emails; particularly when it's at someone else's expense.

Bjorn Borg has increased its revenue by 66% by improving its email marketing strategy. The retailer, which sends almost 20 million emails annually to hundreds of thousands of subscribers across 12 markets, realised it needed to ensure that its messages were targeted at the right consumers.

It's commonly known that when you send an email, it doesn't always reach the intended recipient. Between the sender and the recipient are intermediaries -- namely the Internet service providers (ISPs) and email service providers (ESPs), which use a mix of internal algorithms and outside filtering technologies that combine to make a decision on each message that comes into their mail servers.

A bunch of lawyers have persuaded Yahoo to keep scanning e-mails for advertising and pay their fees. The class-action case was launched in 2013, and finally got the formal green light to go ahead last year. The Purple Palace wanted to scan e-mails passing through its systems in order to deliver targeted advertising to those still running a Yahoo.com e-mail address.