Could your email marketing program use a little chaos, disruption and messiness? On a recent flight home from London, I watched economist Tom Harford's TEDTalk presentation, "How frustration can make us more creative," in which he shows how inserting messiness and disruption into the creative process will usually produce a better result. Naturally, it got me thinking about how to apply his concepts to email marketing.

Anyone who has spent time in direct marketing for a brand knows there is no such thing as incremental budget. It's a world of trade-offs - or, as a mentor of mine would always say, "What do we not do to make this happen?"

If you're a retail email marketer today, you undoubtedly understand what's happening in the space. It's getting more difficult and costly to acquire customers, and even harder to retain them through repeat purchases. Here are three threatening trends in retail today that should compel you to be more consumer-first in your email marketing efforts and grow your brand's customer lifetime value.

For years, catalogers and other "traditional" direct marketers have shared customer-level information to drive better ROI from their marketing investments. This sharing has largely been performed through several large cooperatives. Most major postal-direct marketers are a part of these cooperatives, because the gains from joining a cooperative are so large. There are similar gains available to email marketers if they share subscriber-level data with other marketers. Marketers have a wealth of data that-if shared-can drive better email programs for consumers.

Finding the right email frequency is one of the many issues that email marketers have to figure out in order to have a successful email program. What happens when they change their email cadence, such as emailing on more days of the week or emailing more than once a day at different times of the year?

A recent survey by Harris Poll on behalf of data science company Feedzai found that Americans have serious trust issues when it comes to their personal and financial data. One in five Americans would rather break a bone than deal with identify theft.

With the fireworks of Independence Day behind us in the U.S., it's time to focus on getting your email program ready for the back-to-school and holiday seasons, sure to be here before we know it. Here are four audits you need to focus on this month to ensure you aren't trapped in crisis mode when your busy season hits:

"I know dynamic marketing is the right direction, but do we have the systems in place to do this?" My client, a brand-side marketing executive, and I were talking about incorporating dynamic marketing into his overall direct-marketing strategy. Here's a list of critical systems across databases and analytics that you want to have operational before you commit to dynamic marketing.