Facebook has announced that it is moving all brand pages to Timeline at the end of the month, leaving marketers with only a few weeks to rework, redesign and otherwise recast their existing Facebook presences. So far, the brand feedback on Timeline is largely positive, though the new design does present some challenges to email marketers. Some new opportunities do present themselves, however -- not just for the branding and engagement opportunities that promises to one day justify Facebook's $5 billion valuation, but for resourceful email marketers as well. Here is how email

It's the age of the customer survey, or so you would think given the sheer volume of them cropping up in my email lately. The need for feedback and customer validation in this customer-centric era of marketing seems to have resulted in a rash of surveys, every time I turn around. Surveys follow purchase, hotel stays, air travel, customer service calls -- you name it. If a customer had an experience, there is likely a survey to follow. But in the attempt to solicit feedback, are we turning the customer off -- or worse, creating an annoyance?

In honor of Leap Day tomorrow, let's leap ahead four years to the year 2016. A lot has changed in the world of email marketing....

Holidays provide wonderful opportunities for email creative teams to break away from the routine and turn their imagination to witty tie-ins. Two factors are essential for holiday email success: the right timing and an appropriate message.

In my role as a marketing evangelist, I spend much of my time answering questions from email marketers, from the basic -- "What's the average open/click-through rate?" -- to increasingly more important queries, such as "How do we optimize our emails for mobile devices?" However, I'm still not hearing many marketers ask the tough, strategic or root-cause questions that address core business issues, analyze challenges or identify opportunities. Here are 25 questions (some with corollaries) that you and your marketing team should be able to answer, immediately or after some analysis or investigation.

At least one speaker at the recent MarketingSherpa Email Summit mentioned that today brands must deal with the "all about me" consumer. The implication seemed to be that this was something new, but I disagree with that notion. It's not that consumers' natures have changed. It's that the tools at their disposal to express their natures have, making it clear what it's always been about: them.

The Media Post Email Insider Summit is a unique event where the biggest brands and brightest minds caucus for a three-day whirlwind of island events and ardent discussions on the state of email marketing. Many of us have been going for years and couldn't imagine not being there. The programing committee is currently working to secure three keynotes and eight to nine program panels. In keeping with past events, we are looking to combine the expertise of known leaders in the industry with the best and brightest new voices in email marketing. And this is where we could use your …

A friend of mine recently shared with me an article that her office was sending around. Titled "7 Signs of a Dysfunctional Company," it was distributed by her company's executive management team, who asked staffers to comment, honestly, on how they felt their company fared against the criteria mentioned in the piece. As I read through the article, two thoughts immediately struck me. First, one had better watch out for the sorry suckers at her office who step in that landmine. I mean, c'mon. Executive management asking the staff if they meet the definition of dysfunctional -- isn't that, in …

A couple of years ago, the major conversations about privacy in the email world concerned list sharing: Is it okay to share your subscribers' email addresses with your sister brands? Is it okay to market to purchased lists? Now, with the ever-increasing interconnection of our subscribers' email habits and their other social networking sharing, privacy questions get more complex and expansive. We have multiple contact points with subscribers, reaching not just their inboxes but their mobile devices and their social networks. The lines have blurred.

By now nearly everyone in the email industry has probably heard about DMARC, a coalition of leading companies like Google, PayPal and Microsoft. The goal of the group is to create a standard for how email authentication is handled so that brand owners can safeguard their domains from phishing.