No one, not even the search engine masters at Google, have managed to come up with a good way to address the shortcomings of email searches. The Microsoft Garage, Microsoft's catch-all Web site for experimental projects, thinks it has solved the problem in its latest release: Email Insights, an app for Windows 10 Anniversary Edition that indexes emails from Outlook and Gmail.

Far too many salespeople spend all their time crafting the message body of their sales emails, and then they quickly slap on a subject line at the last second. Instead, you should be laser-focused on crafting your subject line, and pay special attention to the very first sentence.

BT has awarded its consolidated direct marketing and CRM account to Wunderman in one of the biggest account wins in the sector in recent years. The telecoms giant launched a review of its direct marketing accounts for BT and EE in August. WPP's Wunderman was chosen after a shootout with Omnicom's Proximity London in November.

A quarter of marketers believe their companies are "unprepared" and a third don't expect to be compliant when new EU data laws come into effect in 2018, according to new data. The survey from the DMA finds that awareness of the EU General Data Protection Regulation is increasing, from 53% in June 2016 to 66%. However, 26% believe their companies are not prepared.

Not surprisingly given its popularity, email tops the list of lead-generating channels for the B2B marketers surveyed, with almost three-quarters (73%) indicating that email drives leads for them. Close behind, seven in 10 report that organic search is a lead driver, with fewer (54%) saying the same about paid search.

Email marketing -- a mainstay for grabbing customers' attention -- only works when it is not abused. Research shows that Internet users are most likely to unsubscribe from email lists because they get too many emails in general.

Consumers are being left vulnerable to increasingly sophisticated cybercriminals because major companies are not taking measures to protect them from plagues of fake emails, a leading cyber-crime expert has claimed. Billions of "phishing" emails purporting to be from companies, or banks, charities and even government departments, are reaching consumers' inboxes.

Email marketing is potentially quite rewarding, and an effective way to stay in contact with clients and with leads. As with many things, however, it takes some strategy and foresight if you want to steer clear of major obstacles -- and as far as email marketing goes, the most major obstacle of all is the spam filter.

FIfty-four percent of emails are read on smartphones compared to desktop. However, it's interesting to see that even though emails are ready on smartphones, they only account for 20% of online conversions. Smartphones are driving call conversions, so if you're not accounting for them in your email marketing ROI, then your email conversion rates are inaccurate.

One in ten marketers admit their emails aren't relevant to customers. Are we in danger of killing email with irrelevant content? While email remains "important" or "very important" for the vast majority -- 95% of marketers -- it's a curious paradox that fewer than one in 10 (9%) say all their emails are relevant to their customers.