We all love the idea of viral marketing and the concept of our database organically building itself through loyal customer affinities. What impact can it have on your reputation if you relinquish control of the "send"? Here are two commonly used viral methods and my reflections about each.

For this installment of "Swimming in Data," I took a look at the subject lines of 2,235 unique e-mail messages sent in June in the casino market sector. The idea was to examine the words and phrases in the subject lines for this sector, in order to see which ones may or may not be working based on frequency of use.

Questions about the effectiveness of copy-intensive e-mails, and the concept of "lift."

Are you sending your customers, prospects, partners or employees too much e-mail? If your inbox looks anything like mine, the sheer quantity of e-mail we get each day is out of control....

My wife loves those shows like "What Not to Wear," where experts come in and tell you what not to do. Here is my version of it, called "How Not To Market To Your Customers."

In a perfect world, we could deliver Hollywood-style ads with highly engaging, fully streamed motion pictures, illustrating our offering with exciting audio and imagery.

What would an ideal complaint system look like? How would it work?

Dear E-mail Diva: How critical is it to personalize subject lines and open messages with a first and/or last name?

I've seen at least 20 new articles this year about e-mail newsletters and how to improve them--and now the Nielson Norman Group Report comes out on newsletter guidelines. Unlike all these reports, today's column is not another tactical list of things you must do to produce a good newsletter. Rather, today's column will take a more strategic approach.

It's a very normal first reaction to defend against complaints. E-mail marketers know something about the importance of complaints, and the value of keeping their rates down. Yet there may be some valid reason for e-mail marketers to complain about complaints, or at least the way they are calculated today and the systems in place for handling them. It turns out that the system of complaining about e-mail is actually quite broken. E-mail marketers have some justifiable complaints.