Marketing via email, text and push notification may be an effective way to grab customers' attention, but strike the wrong note and brands are at risk of being deleted by consumers who resent the intrusion of irrelevant communications. Two in five consumers feel "overwhelmed" by the volume of brand communications, according to research from marketing analytics company Aimia.

Mobile devices are steadily becoming more important in driving increased email engagement and revenue. Compared to desktop, studies find that more people are reading emails on their mobile devices (35% more, to be precise). And revenue from mobile devices is also starting to grow each year.

When a digital platform reaches the saturation point and overwhelmed users begin to automatically tune out content, what's a marketer to do? We are about to see exactly that happen in the realm of B2B email marketing, a format that may soon be seeing shrinking returns as recipients, inundated by dozens of marketing emails bombarding their inboxes on a daily basis.

Yahoo has downplayed a report that said it had scanned millions of its users' emails on behalf of the U.S. government. Reuters made the allegation on Tuesday, saying Yahoo had created special software to comply with a classified directive. The tech firm said the article was "misleading" but did not explicitly deny that it had carried out such an order in the past.

Personalising messages through targeted email marketing creates value in customer communications, but sometimes brands can get too personal. Finding the right balance when sending personalized messages to recipients can be tricky. But understanding purchase behavior, knowing when to withhold information and looking beyond opens and clicks helps find that sweet spot.

A new book, "Unsubscribe: How To Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distraction and Get Real Work Done," claims that email addiction is a time-wasting epidemic in the modern workplace and aims to help those who feel overwhelmed by their inbox and waste hours each day trying to get on top of it. Several recent studies bear out this theory.

In April 2016 research conducted by email personalisation company Sailthru and Forbes Insights, 32% of executives polled in Europe and the US said their customer retention efforts were instrumental in creating sources of referrals and recommendations from existing customers. Another 19% mentioned that customer retention efforts were important in driving incremental purchases.

Being successful at one-to-one, personalised email marketing comes down to faith in the quality of your customer data, according to Naked Wines' marketing leader, Lachlan Murphy. The crowdsource funded online wine retailer has been operating in Australia for the past three years and now boasts 50,000 subscribers nationally.

Time spent checking email increased 17% from a year ago, according to a survey by Adobe. Tech vendors such as Slack are trying to minimize or eradicate the use of email with some progress, but not much. The push to ditch email rhymes with the advance of the so-called paperless society. Paper is still here. So is email.

Campaign Monitor, provider of email marketing and automation software for businesses, has announced plans of the opening of its European headquarters in London. The California-based organisation has also revealed it will create 100 new positions in the UK over the next two years, which will be in support of its fast-growing customer base of 25,000 already based within the UK.