Earlier this month, the topic of permission spurred heated debate on Inbox Insiders, an industry discussion group in which I participate. One group argued that explicit, upfront permission is the gold standard and that anything less -- including eAppends -- is unethical. The other group suggested that it should be fine to send an email to someone who has chosen to do business with you and hasn't opted-out of communications. Putting aside for a moment the questions of ethics or eAppends, the real question seemed to be: "How explicit does permission need to be?"

You are browsing a website, you add an item to your cart to make a purchase, and your boss walks by. You instantly click out and go on with your day... Sound familiar? While looking for a new pair of shoes, you place multiple items in your cart from different stores to keep track of them while you search for the best deal... Sound familiar? These are just a couple of the many circumstances in which consumers might abandon their shopping cart.

For those of you who don't know me, I am an Apple Freak. Ever since my first iPod, I have been enthralled with the brand and its products. As an email marketer, I have often used Apple communications as examples of best-in-class email programs. However, today I must admit that there seems to be something lacking in the way my favorite brand communicates with me via email. If I'm truly honest with myself, the latest email programs I have received from Apple suffer from a common problem that plagues business-to-consumer brands. Let me paint the picture...

Guess what? If your company sent out a commercial email today, there is a good chance that some of those emails went to dead people. Not just "inactives" or "unengaged subscribers" or whatever term-du-jour we want to use, but real, bona fide stiffs. People who, God willing, are looking down from heaven and wondering, "What else do I need to do to stop getting emails from those people?"

After several conversations recently about "best practices," I'm convinced that the term is now meaningless. It's been bastardized in the same way that the definition of "spam" has shifted to the point that it has very different meanings to different groups of people.

The holiday season officially kicked off this week, and experts are expecting healthy retail sales gains this year. According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), 2010 holiday sales should rise 2.3% to $447.1 billion, which is good news for retailers after the last two disappointing years. Consumer shopping patterns are changing, and email marketers can play an important role in helping their company benefit from this shift. Here are a number of trends that will impact online marketers.

No, I don't believe that social media will kill email anytime soon. But I do believe that it is changing email marketing: both the content of the messages themselves and email's role and value within the marketing mix. Essentially, social media is forcing email to get real, to make the message more of a one-to-one conversation and to make the benefits that email drives more real and visible to corporate decision-makers.

Email remarketing is one of the ways e-commerce sites can help recapture lost sales. The basic flow is, visitors go to an eCommerce site, they add an item to their shopping cart and start checking out, but never finish. Once customers leave or abandon the shopping cart, an email is sent to them reminding them they still have items in their shopping cart and it may or may not include a discount to prompt the user to make a purchase.

Who are the masters of adaption, creation, collaboration and personalization? Well, according to Iconoculture, Millennials are! This group is finding opportunity in uncertainty and power in the connected collective. This is the "we" generation, after all! And isn't email, at its heart, about staying connected? I think with buying power in the region of $889.3 billion, the Millenials are offering us a huge opportunity. Now it is up to us to figure out how to reach them.

Most email marketers' days are probably spent either fielding last-minute requests to send an email to support an existing program that is under-performing. or as an after-thought. Whatever your situation, I am sure that at one point or another you have leveraged my favorite mantra: "A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."