Dear E-mail Diva, I have my own e-mail and try to watch my competitor's e-mails, but I don't always have the time to do good competitive analysis. I can monitor competitors' Web sites and use Alexa and Google trends for some Web site intelligence, but are there tools or methods for monitoring what the competition is doing with e-mail? </ p> --Mike Petit Miami, FL

You need to find qualified new customers. Are you considering e-mail lists, or is that a scary notion for you these days? E-mail consumers have become numb with all the consolidation of data files, the increased frequency of e-mail and the overwhelming misuse of e-mail by nontraditional marketers. So what is the best way to reach new markets and customers through e-mail?

I've become an Excel Pivot Table junkie over the last few days....

Last week The E-mail Diva went on and on about overemphasizing response data at the expense of the big picture. This week, I delve into the minutiae of a particularly vexing stat. Go figure.

You work hard to communicate with your customers through e-mail. But what if you can't get your message through to the intended recipients due to arbitrary blocking by ISPs, corporate filters, consumer filters, or junk mail folders? What does that REALLY cost you over time?

Recent case studies have shown that dramatic increases in click-through and conversion of retention-based e-mails can be achieved through list segmentation and by providing unique creative geared toward a specific demographic profile....

Is John Marshall of ClickTracks Analytics guilty of heresy? At the recent INBOX 2006 e-mail conference in San Jose, Calif., he posited the radical idea that interactive marketers are too focused on ROI. Despite the fact that I was there to moderate another panel on e-mail reporting and analytics, I had to agree.

I had some interesting discussions with Chris Baggot and Chip House of ExactTarget the other day, and they forwarded me an article on "Enterprise E-mail Control & Compliance." It spurred thoughts and validated some ideas about how people are applying governance to e-mail across their organization....

Last week I was honored to be the host of the first E-mail Insiders Summit that took place at Boulders Resort near Scottsdale, Arizona....

Some of the best in the business submitted samples to the E-mail Makeover Panel for review at MediaPost's recent E-mail Insider Summit. The samples were very strong. Turns out no one wants a bunch of "experts" (make that finger gesture for quotation marks in the air) to publicly slay one's work. Still, the panel had a few common issues among the submissions. Is your design guilty of the four sins?