If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. Do you know what you want from your e-mail marketing investment in 2006? Now is a great time to take stock of what's happened in 2005 and develop your plans for next year.

Every six months I go through a process I call the "Ostrich Effect." I pick a few e-mail partners on whom I feel I can bank my reputation, and then bury my head in the sand for half a year. I typically surround myself with technology partners, service partners, niche partners, list partners and analytics partners that can support my practice. Yet twice a year I pull my head out of the sand and take a fairly close look at the partner landscape, to see if I'm getting what I think I should be getting.

If you're a small-business owner, you may find that other interactive marketing channels just aren't a viable option.With a properly managed e-mail list, you open up a dialogue with your customer. The ability to upsell, cross-sell, and develop a small army of repeat customers is only available through e-mail.

URUE. You are the User Experience. At the recent Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) Conference, the group's CEO, Andy Sernovitz, discussed this simple phrase that says so much. It made me consider how subscribers perceive their experience with a company's e-mail program: does it feel like a disjointed barrage of marketing messages, or is it a positive experience? Here are a few ways to move from the former to the latter.

Although views of Customer Relationship Management have evolved over the years, there was great insight and logic in what some of the early visionaries of this practice preached. One such set of experts wrote a white paper for Gartner in 2003 in which they coined the enduring concept of "Five Value States" for Enterprise CRM. ("Management Update: The Evolution of Customer Relationship Marketing"-- G. Herschel, J. Radcliffe, K. Collins; Gartner, Inc., December 2003

There is something going on in the e-mail space--something dramatic. One sign is the recent purchase of Bigfoot Interactive by Alliance Data Systems for $120 million, on $30 million in sales.

I've always thought of a customer list as a leaky bucket. While you are filling the bucket with fresh new customers from the faucet, old customers are dripping out the bottom.

So you've tried just about every attention-getting gimmick, tactic and approach to raise response through e-mail, and now you are at your wit's end. As I've said many times before, there are only so many variables in e-mail that you can test, including open rate, click-through rate, subscription rate, conversion rate, transaction rate and viral rates.

I got an interesting response from my last two columns: A brand manager wrote to tell me that there were even more reasons why many brands don't use e-mail. The reason he cited was lack of control of the e-mail creative.

Is your institutional memory fading? If you're like many busy e-mail marketers, reviewing and reporting on past campaigns is a very low priority. But if you're not looking, you're not learning, and you'll miss the subtle lessons all that data can teach you.