The virtual trade show is much less expensive, and the number of people I can engage with at one time by multitasking means that I can potentially reach more people, at a cheaper cost. And the cost for that is a smaller close rate, because the personal interaction is missing. This is one of the problems facing email. As we progressively move to less and less personal forms of communications -- from handwritten letter, to targeted direct mail appeal, to email blast --we gain reach and increased ROI, but face the danger of disengaging from our customers.

Dear Email Diva: Since I've been seeing a decline in opens and click rates, I've been diligently researching ways to improve our newsletters. Should I be comparing our performance to industry standards? Our distribution list is on the smaller end and I don't know if we fall into the "average" category, so would it even make sense to compare to industry standards/metrics?

Reporting, and the nuances of how we should approach it, is an interesting topic. How many days post-drop should you check results? Should you look at standard metrics, opens, clicks and conversions? And how do you factor in variables such as messaging, segmentation, frequency and the impact of other channels?

To see how well major online retailers have been doing at managing their sender reputations -- which is one of the keys to deliverability -- we examined the sender addresses used by 95 retailers during the past 18 months. What we found is that a third of them used more than one email address to send their core email marketing campaign during the past 18 months.

If I was ever worried about the strength of the email marketing industry, those fears are certainly being dispelled this week. I'm in Indianapolis attending the ExactTarget Users Group meeting, and was completely shocked by the strength of the attendance.

Dear Email Diva: I had a quick question on the best way to reach out to bloggers in cyberspace to introduce them to a new product or service without sounding too pitchy or totally informal.

I don't think we have enough fun with email these days, so let's take a break from all the issues with the channel and get inventive. Considering we are coming up to the busy holiday season, I figured a look at the top five functional reasons to communicate with your customers would be an appropriate theme.

We talk a lot about how email is the one marketing medium that comes closest to a one-to-one conversation with our customers/subscribers, but we spend more time making sure readers see the message we want them to see and not enough designing the email so that it's just as easy to navigate.

Here's some impressive stats: Last week's email marketing report released by Shop.org shows email is delivering sales at a cost of $7 per order -- compared to $71.89 for banner ads, $26.75 for paid search, and $17.47 for affiliate programs. Ka-pow.

A stats novice -- "I've never paid much attention to any of my statistics" -- realizes it's time she learned. She asks the Email Diva for help. Which metrics should she focus on?