Good news on the email front this week, at least according to a study released by Forrester Research called "E-Mail Marketing Comes of Age." The report notes that email is now ubiquitous with 97% of all consumers, and 94% of marketers using email. This is up from a CMO Magazine study a year ago that stated 72% of marketers are using email as a marketing channel.

The Email Diva takes a detour from answering your questions to help spread the word about new research from the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and research partner Ipsos.

A lot of folks are jazzed up these days about doing sweepstakes, particularly in the context of list building. And list building is itself all the rage in the context of a shifting advertising and media paradigm. Despite the critics who think email is passé, email is hot, hot, hot. Everyone, it seems, wants an opt-in subscriber list, and they want it now.

As an email marketing journalist, my blog refers to lots of numbers relating to email -- click rates, opens rates, comparison rates to prior quarters or years. Do the numbers really mean anything, though? Sometimes I actually wasn't so sure -- until this past Tuesday. That's when I heard Pivotal Veracity CEO Deirde Baird maKe a simple yet amazing point: "The way we measure email is critical to proving the success of the channel itself."

My article last week on the lack of passion in the email industry itself provoked a lot of passion from the blogosphere. First up was Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path, in his blog OnlyOnce, where he took me to task for implying that CEOs of email companies are discredited from leading (in his words)....

Dear Email Diva: I need a reality check and basic education. I have a very small business. I recently placed a copy ad with text link in a content publisher's email with a subscriber base of 16,000 -- and received 50 clicks. Yes, 50 clicks.

We talk about best practices, we talk about learning but rarely do we talk about the fun the email channel brings us. It is a peculiar animal, primarily because it is used by practically everyone, and everyone has his or her own opinion of it. When someone asks me, "What do you do for a living?" my typical response is, "I run an email marketing business within an advertising agency." The expected tongue-in-cheek response is, "So, you're a spammer!"

There should be a minimum standard for invoking certain holidays like St. Patrick's Day. It's a minor holiday, to be sure -- as tracked by RetailEmail.Blogspot, less than 4% of the emails sent by major online retailers on St. Patrick's Day and the five days prior referenced the holiday -- but it's still a holiday that has a personality. Marketers need to make their references to holidays like this relevant -- or do as so many retailers did, and not bother with it at all.

The recent brouhaha in the SEO world has gotten me thinking about passion, or better yet, the lack of it in our little world of the inbox. For those who don't know, the SEO industry was rocked a while back by a comment from David Pasternack, co-founder of Did-it, that SEO was not rocket science. I find it hard to imagine a similar response coming from the email marketing community to a perceived slight. There seems to be a decided lack of any kind of passion in this industry for what we do.

Dear Email Diva: Just how do I go about convincing someone my emails are worth letting through? So far I've had limited success: where the admin has heard of our company it goes well, but those that haven't question why they should allow us through. Do you have any foolproof methods for how to strike up the dialogue that will end with my name being up there in white on someone's very own copy of Spam Assassin?