There's been a lot of debate about whether to target those who never open, read or respond to your email. Conventional wisdom would conclude that consumers who don't have a measured interaction through a channel in a given period of time would naturally be suppressed from future mailings. But the email marketing community doesn't give up that easily.

Black Friday has become a critical day and event for many retailers. For florists, their "Black Friday" is now: the period leading up to next Tuesday, Valentine's Day. For your business, it could also be an obvious event or time period such as Mother's Day, Halloween or ski season. More likely, however, it is probably a key trigger aspect of your business or marketing program that drives the majority of revenue or conversion activity. This critical aspect is the "fulcrum" of your email-marketing program: the point on which the rest of your email success depends. Following are four suggestions to …

For a while, the concept of email + social integration was limited to discussions about how to use email to bolster your social media programs, and vice versa. Fast-forward a year, and now there are bona fide integration tools hitting the market. It's easy to get drawn into the technology and spend hours poring over tracking reports that show what percentage of the clicks to that webinar promotion came from Twitter as opposed to email. That's the first step in adopting any new marketing technology: learning what you can learn. But we're email marketers, so the real appeal is not …

As we head into February of a presidential election year, there's no doubt that the political season is in full swing. And with the State of the Union address, primaries and debates, there are always a number of funny quips that get uttered. As I was conducting my research of the presidential candidates, determining positions and forming my own opinions about these folks, I came across my fair share of entertaining quotes from present and past presidents. And being the passionate email marketer that I am, I quickly realized that these guys had a lot to say to email marketers …

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.