When I was working at the Email Experience Council, I worked with some industry friends to come up with a number of email dares that we felt were worth testing -- or at least worth talking about. Most of them were pretty out there -- even radical -- so we figured we'd have to double-dog dare folks to consider them. Nearly two years later, some of these dares seem a bit less radical than they were at the time. In light of that, it appears that we need some new dares. So here we go. I dare you -- no, …

My wife and I just had our first child. Eva Claire Waldow entered this crazy world on March 23, 2010. As any normal person would do, I jumped out of bed six hours after she was born, grabbed my iPhone, and jotted down the following phrase: email marketing and newborn babies. Now I realize that relating this life-changing event to email marketing may sound like a stretch; however, to us email geeks, it's pretty much par for the course. So here we go...

Business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketers seem to exist in separate universes, each with its own sales process, marketing tactics and even marketing software, publications and events. But are they really that different? While selling to consumers differs in some key ways from selling to businesses, the differences are declining. Not only do B2B and B2C marketers share common ground, they also can learn from each other to strengthen their own digital marketing programs.

If you've ever written for a blog with any regularity, you know that comments are golden. Everything we try to measure with email is evidenced in the comments fields of blogs. Despite all our metrics and measurements, I'm not wholly convinced the equivalent sensation exists in email marketing. But what if email did have a comments field? I'm not proposing a technology innovation; rather, a strategic use of imagination. If the emails you write and distribute to your subscriber lists could capture comments as easily as blogs do, what would your subscribers say in them? And what would the comments …

Many of us spend most of our waking hours thinking about marketing email, and like to fancy our subscribers not only printing but also framing and hanging our work on their office walls J... But we all know that this isn't generally the case. Studies show that subscribers will spend just eight seconds on most messages before clicking through or navigating away. Your emails will drive the most dollars if you take on the eight-second challenge and use that time (or even better, less time than that!) to answer your subscribers' three biggest questions definitively, ideally in the preview pane...

I learned a new word today: transcreation. Transcreation is the art of translating and adapting your email and other marketing assets for use in other countries and regions. Any educated, bilingual person can translate your marketing message literally into another tongue. But can they capture the quip in your headline and render it creatively so it still tickles the imagination in France or Russia? Does your clever tag line - which expresses so much in just five or six English words - become a cumbersome paragraph when rendered in German?

Last weekend, my wife talked me into watching "The Bucket List," a movie I have been trying to avoid for quite a while. I'm happy to report that I liked the movie. I mean, come on, how bad can something with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman actually be? As I am sure many of you did after seeing the movie, I quickly compiled my personal bucket list. Once that was out of the way, I decided to create an aspirational, forward-thinking bucket list for email marketing. Here are a few excerpts...