As with many of you, I have been in the marketing technology space for a little while. During that time, I have heard (and certainly spoken) my share of buzzwords. In fact, I could probably throw together 500 words on email marketing buzzwords -- stay tuned for that blog post in the coming weeks! Anyway, two words I do not hear often enough in relation to email are "anticipated" and "appreciated." There are two interesting trends occurring in the email marketing space that make these particularly relevant: the flash sale and localized marketing.

Achieving high levels of deliverability requires the same sorts of diligence that improving your time on a 10K race does. Like improving a race time, it doesn't require genius, just diligence. The following is a list of tasks that someone in your organization should perform every day.

With summer well underway, now is a good time to take stock of this season's email program and look for last-minute opportunities to add more sun breaks.We consulted with some creative colleagues to collect tips on infusing your emails with summery feelings.

The summer season gives you the chance to achieve another objective besides working on your tan and a new strawberry mojito recipe. Now is a great time to take stock of your email-marketing program and look for opportunities to make both incremental and substantial leaps in performance before the holiday season kicks into gear. Here's quick checklist to assess your email program from end to end.

In 1998, the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan romantic comedy "You've Got Mail" was released. Buoyed by an infectious consumer enthusiasm over the freshness and marvel of instantaneous person-to-person electronic communication, the film grossed a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office. If you're in the email industry, you don't just remember the late '90s; you pine for them. People (they were just "people" then, not consumers or subscribers or -- gasp -- segments) genuinely liked getting email.

I've heard a lot of discussion about cadence lately. Everyone seems to want a magic frequency number that will cause stars and planets to align and customers to read emails in the kind of loving detail that you normally see only determined children attempt as they sound out dinosaur names. If you have subscribers clamoring for more email from you, consider yourself lucky. For the rest of us, here are some starting points for finding your own answers to the five most commonly asked questions about cadence:

We all have tasks we need to accomplish to make our organizations successful -- but when you are competing in the inbox for your subscribers' attention, considering the subscriber can take you far! It's a page out of direct marketing 101: Look to the customer. Consumers are savvy and smart -- and they want to be inspired by you. Here are three tactics to consider for motivating your subscribers:

The list growth challenge is solved through a combination of creativity and deep customer insight. In March and April, I directed an extensive series of focus groups, interviews, and surveys to understand the motivations behind consumers' engagement with brands online. Three important rules for list growth emerged from our findings:

I've always been alarmed by how heavy-handedly some retailers promote sister brands in their emails -- with the most disrespectful approach being to opt in subscribers of one brand to receive emails from all your brands without even being upfront about it. I still find it shocking that companies justify this kind of behavior by writing cross-brand permission into their privacy policies. It's well established that people don't read privacy policies, so including such statements doesn't protect you from spam complaints or brand damage. Yet there are ways to cross-promote sister brands safely. Consider the following.

Is there a better way to get people to sign up for your emails than using a form that looks like it was created by the Census Bureau? And is there a better way to assure readers of your good intentions than placing inches of tiny grey type in the legal section of the email?