Lately I've been thinking about targeting and marveling at how far we have come ... and yet how far we still need to go. The concept of targeting is far from new. As an email marketer you probably consider yourself pretty savvy in this space. Our traditional database marketing friends have been doing it through direct mail, catalogs, and call centers for years. Retailers are getting better at cross/up-selling thanks to the proliferation of recommendation engine technology. And thanks to online data exchanges, media folks are feeling more confident their media buys are actually targeted. Yet, these are all only …

A few weeks ago on "Mad Men," the creatives at Sterling Cooper put together a commercial for Patio soft drink, using a scene from "Bye Bye Birdie" as their inspiration. The scene they chose happened to feature Ann-Margret singing the title song. While the final ad featured a dead ringer for Ann-Margret in the starring role, the client hated it. Why? Because while it looked like Ann-Margret and sounded like Ann-Margret, it simply wasn't Ann-Margret. So, what's the lesson here? Go for the real deal or don't go at all.

Hi, I'm Loren McDonald, and I'm a "he." You might not know that, though, by looking at the mail in my mailbox and messages in my email inbox. While I've never done an actual audit of my mail, I'm guessing that when a gender is inferred (e.g., Mr. or Mrs. Loren McDonald), one-third to one-half of my mail assumes that Loren is a female. So, how can you avoid or minimize potentially embarrassing and costly mistakes by assuming the wrong things about your customers and subscribers? Here are a few tips.

Recently there has been a great deal of buzz around the idea that "engagement" is a new metric used by ISPs and other mailbox providers to determine mailbox placement. However, engagement isn't new at all. It has been a part of the filtering mix for quite a while. The ISPs are simply adding clicks, opens and a few other measure of user engagement to the long list of other engagement metrics that have been in use for a while. All these metrics try to do the same thing -- figure out which messages are truly wanted by subscribers

We're on the cusp of the engagement-reputation era in email marketing, when the ROI of an email program will be much more closely tied to how engaged subscribers are -- and much less about the size of the list. Two big shifts are driving fundamental changes in the way that email marketing will work in the not-too-distant future....

My friend "Mary" is a single mom on the dating scene. Given that she is a single mom, she doesn't get a lot of dating practice, but she tries to find love. On a recent date, a gentleman told her that she exhibited two of the five signs that she is just not good enough for him, which is hurtful and crude regardless of what the actual signs are. Still, I hopped on to Google to find out what some of these signs are -- and they just translated so nicely I couldn't miss the opportunity to draw the parallels. …