Email management company Boomerang used grammar-checking software to spot errors in 250,000 emails and tracked those emails' response rates. Error-free subject lines received a response 34% of the time, compared to 29% of the time for emails with one or more errors. The more errors an email subject line had, the less likely the email's recipient was to respond.

An ALT tag is coded text that is visible to the user when an image cannot be displayed. Think of ALT tags as your backup plan. When images don't download automatically by an email client or the recipient chooses not to open your email, the alternative text will be displayed instead.

2016 marked the 10th anniversary of Econsultancy's Email Marketing Industry Census. In an online survey of 1,150 marketers in February and March, 73% of respondents ranked email marketing as 'excellent' or 'good' for ROI. Increasing from 66% in 2015, this meant that email marketing was ranked 9% higher than SEO (organic search).

The French government is right in a couple of important respects. First, email and other forms of digital communication, from corporate social media to messaging tools such as Slack, can erode the boundary between work and personal life in harmful ways. Second, it is a collective challenge: it is hard for one person to ignore emails as long as others keep sending them.

French companies are now required to guarantee their staff a so-called "right to disconnect" from emails when not at work. The overuse of mobile devices outside office hours has been blamed for causing a series of problems for employees, from sleeplessness and burnout through to relationship problems. The move is aimed at protecting people from the "always-on" work culture.

Contextual emails stood out last year in terms of email marketing best practices. There is growing proof that personalising your email content increases engagement. With more and more emails being sent to subscribers' inboxes, how can marketers ensure that our emails will get noticed? Create contextual emails!

What marketers may not know is that almost all major providers of email marketing functionality rely on email infrastructure software to actually deliver all that email, and report back metrics on not just delivery but also engagement -- i.e. opens and clicks. Email infrastructure software can be installed on-premise, or increasingly delivered through the cloud.

The idea that the mobile device represents a single channel is a common misconception among marketers. Rather, mobile devices contain a variety of channels - with apps for email, messaging, and social media, among others - and consumers seamlessly transition between them.

The beginning of the New Year is the perfect time to review your email marketing strategy -- and purge and segment your email marketing lists. Reviewing your email lists is important, as it can help you see who is actually responding to your email campaigns. You can then delete subscribers who have not engaged in over a year, which will help you maintain a healthy online reputation.

It's a dangerous mistake for brands to underestimate the changes that email has undergone over the past couple of decades, as it sets them up to be not agile enough to cope with the coming changes -- some of which are tectonic. Before discussing the trends that are currently brewing, let's quickly look back over how email has evolved since just the 1990s.