I can't help but feel queasy about how current economic conditions are going to affect my business and the email marketing industry as a whole. Not understanding the full ramifications of sub-prime derivatives, in January I predicted that a recession would be good for email marketing as companies increase their investment in lower cost marketing mediums with a strong ROI. Even with frozen credit markets and a shrinking GDP I'm confidently standing by my prediction especially since the volume of my email subscriptions has spiked exponentially over the past couple of months.

In these tough economic times, with consumer spending dropping and marketers' budgets being cut, it's more important than ever to properly position the importance and effectiveness of the email channel within your organization's overall marketing efforts. Unfortunately, many marketers are still guilty of basing overall email marketing success on simplistic notions related to campaign response rates and the low cost of the channel. While these types of metrics are important, what most marketers still lack are high level, comprehensive success measures and a comprehensive plan for more thoroughly integrating email into the marketing efforts of the organization.

We're all very familiar now with forward to a friend (FTAF), which allows your subscribers to share your emails with others via email. It's an easy way to empower your subscribers to influence others on your behalf. But that's the Email 1.0 way of sharing email content. In the Email 2.0 world, you should also give your subscribers the option of sharing your email content via social networks, social content sites and social bookmarking sites. Let's call it "Share with your network" -- or SWYN.

Sometimes it is valuable to step back and look at the elements in the marketing mix and how they interrelate. There are three that I call the troika of digital promotional marketing: email marketing, social media and search. Each of these in their own right is a powerful tool, but linking how you use these three allows you to take advantage of that power on a much higher level, and results in greater dividends as these media elements continue to grow.

Dale Carnegie's classic "How to Win Friend and Influence People" brims with time-tested advice for business success. The second part of the book, "Six Ways to Make People Like You," argues that the best and perhaps only way to win people's allegiance is to focus on their interests. We can understand this in terms of personalized email, our own attempts to present subscribers with what most interests them. Let's discuss how Carnegie's tips can be interpreted in terms of personalized messaging and when we should (or shouldn't) personalize.

was speaking at the Marketing Profs Mixer last week. While I sipped my fresh-squeezed orange juice in the lovely setting sun of Scottsdale, I started to ponder the things that make me scratch my head. What does an impending recessionary market, with many marketers scrambling for cover, bring for the bottom-feeding email marketers, with our 3% of the marketing budget?

Email industry experts constantly preach about best practices like improving relevance, designing emails for better rendering, but mainly as ends in themselves. What's also important is that when deploying the various best practices, they also contribute to making your email marketing program more trustworthy to subscribers. I believe trust in email will become much more crucial in these days of financial insecurity and a slowed economy. Email users might well become much pickier about whom they let into their email inner circle. Email senders that convey a strong sense of trust and whose messages reinforce this trust can expect to …

The success of most e-mail programs is judged based on either campaign-level metrics like open, click and unsubscribe rates, or list growth. Under this situation, goals such as "increase list size by X%" and "improve relevancy by increasing click rates" are often used as default key performance indicators. The problem is, list growth and campaign performance metrics are good diagnostic tools, but don't fully capture what should be the central focus of any email marketing program: maximizing the ROI from your list.

It's funny how in the early stages of a major paradigm shift we rarely see where the road will eventually lead us. Few notice when a major game-changing event takes place until months or years later. I doubt anyone at the time would have believed the effect the Boston Tea Party would have as a catalyst to the American Revolution. Today we understand it was a monumental tipping-point in history. That's my setup for this week's article; while certainly a far cry from such drama and sweeping historical significance, I believe we are currently on the brink of a major …

The plain text transactional email default may soon be a thing of the past -- or at least we can hope. But more and more brands are investing in transactional email projects, and bringing them up to the standards of their commercial email brethren. A newly released Jupiter report, "The Transactional Messaging Imperative," estimates that transactional email has the ability to generate an additional $2.9 million dollars annually for a retailer.