Going paperless at the cash register is beginning to spread beyond early adopters like the Apple Store to mass merchants like Old Navy. Aside from their store-level innovation, email receipts are essentially like any other transactional email: They're highly relevant; customers value and act on them; and they can give merchants another opportunity to expand or nurture a relationship. Judging by my personal experiences with digital receipts, however, many companies aren't capitalizing on that opportunity, whether they just launched email receipts or have years of online retail experience.

There are a lot of online conversations taking place on channels like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Through these channels, people are connecting with each other and also with companies and brands in ways unimagined just five years ago. These channels are a dream for marketers interested in easily expanding their reach. But for all the millions of interactions that take place daily on social media channels, not many are personal interactions. Email marketers often fall into the same trap of pushing content instead of building relationships. This is a real shame because email is especially suited for personalization. Personalizing emails …

Email writers who aspire to excellence can learn a lot from watching "The Next Food Network Star." Just like us, week by week, the culinary contenders are vexed and hexed by unforeseen challenges. They struggle with strange or insufficient ingredients, difficult working conditions, snarling competitors, and ruthless judges. The challenges email writers face are not dissimilar, and may come from a variety of sources:

A few days ago, my husband and I officially put the "For Sale" sign in the front yard and buried the St. Joseph statue in hopes that we can sell our house without the aid of a realtor. But we didn't just wake up one morning and decide to sell the house. There were months of tasks that led us here -- and we have the splinters and scrapes to prove it! According to a "For Sale by Owner" guide, "Preparation and organization will go a long way toward the successful sale of your home." The same could be …

The email world can be tricky sometimes. There are a lot of terms that might sound similar (bounced and blocked), but aren't. And many ESPs use different terms for what may or may not be the same measurement (accepted and delivered). So I'd like to offer an email glossary with some of the terms we see being confused most often. You can use this list to make sure that your reports and metrics mean what you think they are saying and that your campaigns are performing as well as you expect.

DzineBlog recently published some 2011 web design trends that are worthy of notice for email designers. When it comes to the cutting edge of design, DzineBlog tells Web designers to: "Think bold fonts, loads of sub headers, definitely lots of images, numerous articles and text; making it so much more inviting for a user to wish to read. Think magazine layout, think more users, and think hard work!" How is this relevant to those of us e constricted by the rules of the inbox?

What is the primary piece of data or primary key that will be used in the future to identify you as a unique person matched across all the other systems? This seems like a simple question, but I assure you it's not that easy by any means. Project to the future and think, will the mobile number be the primary key that is stable across all your lifestage event changes (buying a home, moves in early stage etc.) and the shifting of email addresses? I still firmly believe the email address is going to be king as the primary key. …