Last week I published the 6th annual Oopsy Hall of Fame, which highlights email errors from top retailers. Pretty much every retailer I track contributed to the list, so it's less about the names and much more about the kinds of errors being made. Every year the hotspots for errors shift; my hope is that marketers will continually refocus on where errors are costing them the most. Here are three error-prone areas that were hotspots during 2011:

Marketers for years have tried variances of mapping response to timing and trigger messaging. It absolutely makes sense in some cases. Yet if it's so successful, why isn't response modeling and behavioral targeting through email more pervasive in the space?

If you want to make 2012 your "Think Big" year, as I've been encouraging in my recent Email Insider columns, adding or expanding the number of behavior-based triggered email programs you deploy should probably be on your list.

It may be late January already, but any steps you take to improve your email program are always timely and will pay off throughout the coming year. In considering my advice today, I thought about how pertinent the average person's New Year's resolutions are to email. Without further ado, here are some resolutions you might adopt to improve your program's results.

Ahh, it's that time of year again. The time when we look at our travel schedules and realize that it is Email Marketing Conference Season! The season kicks off with MarketingSherpa and wraps with Media Post's Email Insider Summit -- four months of immersing yourself in learning and innovating the email industry, one conference at a time!

I'm on a bunch of interesting email discussion lists for email marketers, for email technologists and for anti-messaging abuse folks. From time to time, someone raises a question that really gets my mind going. This past week, someone asked (I'll paraphrase) "Are the demands of email marketing antithetical to the practices required for good delivery?" This is a really great question.

One of my favorite aspects of email marketing is that we have a distinct advantage in getting performance metrics immediately when we send a campaign. I jokingly refer to it as "design by the numbers." We get the instant gratification along with the long-time lessons associated with weeks and weeks of metrics reviews.

I think most of you have been a part of an Email Service Provider RFP or RFI process at some point. For years, the RFP trend was a two- to three-year virtuous cycle, a long draw-out process with a lot of people chiming in who didn't really know much about email or technology. The frequency of switching was mostly attributed to either the need to compress costs or the advent of new people (email professionals had a two- to three-year tenure in roles). If you've been on one side of the other of these processes, it's painful for all involved. …

In my previous Email Insider column, I urged you to think big in 2012: to identify the most critical aspect of your email program and focus on ways to improve it so that you can drive greater success and take your program to a higher level. This, of course, raises the perennial frustration among marketers: "How can I work on this big, important project when I'm already stretched thin on the work my boss expects me to do every day?" Below are several approaches to help you win over management, not just to get them to see things your way, …

I was working at the Interactive Advertising Bureau a decade ago when I first heard the term "Chuck Fruit Moment." Chuck Fruit was the head of marketing for Anheuser-Busch in 1979 when he agreed to a meeting with a group of entrepreneurs set to launch the first all-sports television network: ESPN. Where others would have seen risk, Chuck Fruit saw a huge opportunity -- for his brand to own all of sports. He signed a $15 million deal to be the exclusive beer sponsor with the fledgling network, a move that is credited with not only launching the venerated cable …