Hoping to hit the jackpot with an e-mail program that makes all your hard work behind the scenes worthwhile? Of course you are. Then you need good creative execution. With so many options to test and so few good creative strategists in the space, where do you start? Here are seven areas of focus to improve your e-mail creative.

Whether generating demand for technology products or driving attendance to an event, third-party e-mail lists can provide access to a potentially lucrative audience that internal files fail to reach. This week's column will concentrate on selecting the right third party lists for business-to-business campaigns.

I always love the feedback I get from these "Swimming in Data" articles. Half of the responses are along the lines of "Hey, that's great. Keep it coming." The other half is "This stuff is useless unless I have the exact click-through and conversion numbers." Of course it would also be great if Bill Gates would tell me what companies he was about to buy so I could buy stock as well, but I don't think that is going to happen.

Lask week, Michelle Madhok of SheFinds.com--a fashion Web site that "shops the Web so you don't have to"--asked for advice on growing her e-mail list with a viral campaign and wondered whether long e-mails were affecting her churn rate. I focused on the issue of converting site traffic into subscribers. In this follow-up column, I continue that discussion and address the length and viral issues.

Congratulations, you've just acquired a new e-mail subscriber! Now what do you do? How do you capitalize on the attention of these newly interested individuals and get them engaged with your brand and products?

This week's column is about planning your e-mail disaster recovery. What do you do when a good e-mail campaign goes bad?

Deliverablity. This is the main topic of discussion these days in the world of e-mail marketing. But I wonder if we spend nearly the time we devote to white listing, ISP relationships, and Goodmail to actually thinking about what is getting delivered in the first place. There is a decided lack of creativity that goes into our electronic epistles, with rare exceptions.

The Diva advises a fashion Web site whose "e-mail list has stagnated at about 20K people."

To borrow from a famous ad slogan, "nobody doesn't like" the idea of being able to correlate direct response marketing with online behavior. At its most visionary, e-mail is a channel that offers a personalized, timely outreach, which, combined with online behavior tracking, can tell you a great deal about a customer's actions and interests.

Whether you actively manage it or not, you have a "sender reputation"--and it's central to consistently reaching the inbox. The content you send also impacts your reputation.