What's the biggest challenge in managing your email program? List growth? Privacy? Segmentation? Developing content? Managing frequency? Finding the right ESP? How about getting buy-in from the executive suite to do what you think is right?

Email marketers have a lot of opportunities to improve their opt-out processes. In the newly released Retail Email Unsubscribe Benchmark Study, I discuss many unsubscribe trends -- but here are the three that I think are most impactful....

Companies today spend millions of dollars to build trust with their customers. Why invest so much? Simply put: because if customers don't have a basic trust in a company, a marketer won't keep their interest for very long. Trust is developed from a combination of reputation and direct experience. So how does email and deliverability fit into all this talk of reputation and trust?

The next generation of email is at the gate, even as we speak. It is evolving into an even more highly optimized channel that pulls in customer data and offers services and functions now available primarily on Web sites. For marketers, this means that recipients will potentially be further down the purchase decision path when they click through to the site, giving you and them a shorter path to conversion, whether it's a sale, site registration, product download, demo request or completing an application.

It's springtime, which means it's open season for trade shows. With attendance down across the board at shows again this year, it's more important than ever to have a smart marketing plan in place that will help you reach attendees and also target prospects who cannot attend the show.

Those of us who subscribe to a range of marketing emails get much of the same daily inbox content. We all know the email superstars -- Apple, Anthropologie and Sephora, to name a few favorites -- but who else is out there? I polled the Smith-Harmon creative team to see whose email programs are dazzling subscribers while flying under the radar. Here's a selection of what you might be missing...

Most people reading this article will spend more money in 2010 for pet food, baby food, cereal, and detergents, and less on wines and vitamins. What if I said that you, reading this, had on average 150 or more LinkedIn connections, at least 100 followers on Twitter, follow at least 200 others on Twitter, have one or more Facebook accounts, and upload at least 50 photos a year to some social network site?

Today, I'm sharing with you the confessions of email marketers that I have had the pleasure to work with over the course of the last 8+ years, and the implications of those confessions on our industry. Don't worry, friends -- names and identities have been concealed to protect the innocent.

We do a lot of work with clients to help them improve reputation to improve delivery issues at top ISPs. In doing so, we find ourselves doing the same sort of analyses over and over. These three analyses are crucial for getting to the root of an existing deliverability problem and for preventing future problems from occurring

For better or worse, the email inbox is well on its way to becoming the nexus of all digital communications. Inboxes are also set to be able to do much more, reducing the need for subscribers to click through to take action. Future inboxes may also give consumers even more control over their email streams beyond eliminating unwanted email with a click of the "report spam" button.