I'm still on a high from the recent E-mail Insider Event in lovely Scottsdale, Arizona....

Major marketers are still coming to grips with viral marketing, it became clear over the first two days of MediaPost's E-mail Insider Summit...

SCOTTSDALE, AZ--As spam continues to aggravate Internet-savvy consumers of all stripes, and Internet service providers (ISPs) grow ever more leery of alienating their customer base, an email marketer's "reputation" is now the chief determinant of whether their emails will get through, a panel of industry leaders agreed on the first day of MediaPost's Email Insider Summit at the Boulders Resort and Golden Door Spa in the highlands of central Arizona. That's a marked shift from simple systems centered on the "authentication" of email marketers' IP addresses--a basic litmus test for establishing accountability that was the new industry's first gold standard. …

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an offensive phrase to many marketing executives. Many of you have experienced the woes of over-amplified CRM budgets, failed change initiatives, and over-promised technology....

Some are ranters. Some are doers. Jeanniey Mullen, who heads up e-mail marketing efforts at OgilvyOne, is definitely a doer. You may remember, back in November I delivered a rant about how trade associations were not getting the word out about the power of e-mail as a marketing tool. Jeanniey decided to do something about it.

A company begins its first-ever e-mail program.

Let me paint you a picture. You have just seen a demo of a cool e-mail system, and now you dream of being able to manage campaigns, lists, bounces, replies, dynamic content and reporting in a brand-new way....

E-mail marketing has come a long way since the days of batch and blast sending. If that is still the mode your company is in--or somewhere close--you are likely doing more harm than good with your customers, and with e-mail receivers. Your response rates and delivery rates are fractions of what they could be, because you are not taking the time to make your campaigns relevant....

If you're looking for a great viral marketing idea, perhaps you need look no further than the humble, under-funded customer service department, and the extremely un-sexy transactional e-mails that support them.

It's May, the peak of the trade show season, with Ad:Tech, Marketing Sherpa, eMarketer, the Authentication Summit, and OMMA already behind us. It's no surprise that there is a significant focus on e-mail at these events. But will we have the ammunition to get bigger budgets for next year, when all trends seem to indicate a diminishing response rate for BtoC and BtoB marketers?