If you live near this furniture retailer, the catalog probably seems as common as the phone book -- and at 374 pages, it's nearly as thick in some towns. Its 2011 catalog dropped (thunk!) into your mailbox last month. Customers may have known it was coming long before it got to them, because the catalog drop this year was surrounded by supporting media in multiple channels. Here's the scoop on this successful example of multichannel marketing, and the key factors that made it a success.

Multichannel marketing communications have multiple benefits, including a broader audience reach, multiple touch points to reach customers and greater amplification of your message. But the dangerous duo of spam and viruses that have eroded consumer trust in email marketing have now spread to mobile and social channels, as hackers and spammers become smarter about launching attacks on these channels. Companies must set themselves apart from fraudsters in order to build a relationship of customer trust across all channels.

Over the course of the years, I have penned a lot of content about the email space. In doing so, I have received both positive and negative comments about the context or the stories shared. The feedback provided seems to be on anything from my interpretation of a best practice all the way to the very personal -- like my parenting approach or my choice of careers; I suppose that's what I get for wrapping my stories around real life. We are nothing if we are not a passionate group of marketers -- a dysfunctional family, if you will.

Email, Facebook, and Twitter each provide marketers with the ability to compile a database full of customers and prospects. This ability to gather consumers into a visible list certainly looks like the familiar paradigm of database marketing. And given the fact these consumers are now part of "our databases" it seems logical that these would meet the criterion for retention marketing. After all, they are in our databases, so the job of acquisition is done, right? No. Because of research that looks at the differences in how consumers want to engage with brands through these three channels, I believe this …

The 2010 Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season includes a lot of predictions based on activity in previous years, but those predictions are all relatively safe. I want to go out on a bit more of a limb with a few additional predictions. Here are my top five:

While all the trends suggest there is a shift in the how consumers triage their email on a personal and professional level, email marketers still have the challenge of creating instances, albeit brief, that build value in the brand and buying experience. While we'll forever have challenges with the right message and the right context to send it, we are now facing more pressure focused on the inbox itself, the types of messages consumers will consume regularly and the impact on direct response that drives many of our channel goals.

Gmail's new Priority Inbox: Will this message classification and prioritization system become one of the biggest changes to affect commercial email and the inbox, or will it evolve into a footnote along with Google Buzz and Wave?

Personalization is poorly used in most marketing emails. The belief that "any personalization is good personalization," simply is not true. When personalization is overdone or done improperly, the email can come across as phony, contrived or downright creepy. For example, I recently received an email that used my name in the subject line: "Neil, Labor Day hotel sale going on now." Awkward. Best practices to ensure personalization works for your campaigns -- not against them -- include:

Words can lift our spirits, darken our moods, catch us by surprise and inspire us to take action. Words have the power to build lifelong allegiances or irrevocably sever relationships. This is important stuff we're talking about here. And depending on how you speak to consumers in your emails, you can either win them over or wind up in the trash folder.

As email marketers, we track and leverage data to inform elements of the programs we run: opens, click-throughs, conversions, opt-outs, heat maps, and so on and so on. But what about good old customer feedback? Not something you see in a report, but something you hear directly from the source? Not something upon which you base an assumption, but something that can be categorically accepted as fact because it came from the consumer's mouth?