The invoice was sent to members of the Scotland Supporters Club asking for a payment of GBP170 to be made by December 7. The email addressed "Dear Customer" claiming to be from the Scottish Football Association (SFA) accounts department and provided a link for the payment. The SFA have issued an apology and said a third-party email database had been "compromised."

You may ordinarily cater to multiple demographics, but for your holiday campaign, it's better to focus on one niche at a time. This will give you the chance to speak more directly, with more appropriate visuals, narrative devices, and wording in your campaign. This is especially important when you start focusing on empathy, which I address further down in this list.

"Like its Black Friday efforts, ASOS's Christmas emails are designed to effectively engage its young user base. As well as promoting continuing sales, it places a lot of focus on its gift guides, which is always a great incentive to get users clicking during the festive period. I particularly like the fact that it talks about products in relation to different budgets."

"Emojis are everywhere. They are a fun and effective way to communicate. Look at the last text message conversation on your phone and see how many emojis were used. Your email is going to be surrounded by several more in the inboxes of your recipients. Using emojis in the subject line is a great way to stand out, often pulling a much higher open rate when split-tested."

Rob Luke will join the ICO on 30 January. He was previously British High Commissioner to Malta. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said: "This is a time of change for information rights, but it is an exciting time. The new General Data Protection Regulation brings an opportunity to look at how we all do things afresh, and the ICO will be at the forefront of that."

Your subscriber's inbox is a hotbed of activity, with scores of other people's emails vying for his or her attention. How will you stand out so that you conquer the barriers to getting your email opened? To make your emails more value-added and memorable, they have to be relevant to the recipient, and this is what segmentation does: it groups people who have the same interests.

When an email specifically speaks to a customer's preferences, that customer is more likely to take action. Many of today's top email marketing tools offer the opportunity to direct email messages to certain audience segments. You can deploy one set of emails to customers who have purchased from you before, for instance, and another for customers who have shown an interest.

Chances are that your readers don't want to read about your wonderful products or services. They are actually interested in how they can solve the problems they have, so keep your email newsletter educational and make 80% of your content helpful and useful to your audience and keep the self-promotion down to 20%. The hard sell is dead.

With the increase in ad blockers, digital marketing strategies should revisit the power of email marketing. A healthy subscriber list is more stable than "followers" on a social media platform that could close up shop. According to MailChimp's 2016 report, regardless of industry, the average open rate is around 20%. Email reaches customers where they are on their desktop, tablet or mobile device.

If your email bounce rate is greater than 3-5%, consider it to be a sign that your email list needs a good scrubbing, according to the infographic. Emailing only to contacts who are likely to interact with your email campaigns is crucial, for various reasons. For example, if there are too many bounces, you risk getting blocked, or even blacklisted.