Kris Zimmerman, a marketing analyst at Under Armour, says the company is trying to refashion its image as an apparel provider for muscled, well-shaped, “sweatyâ€� athletes. And it’s increasingly targeting the “young competitor,â€� and his or her parents. “It’s the aspiring athlete … not quite as burly anymore,â€� she said on a panel at MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit. Baltimore-based Under Armour has redesigned the look and feel of its emails, partly to advance the new image. Zimmerman said the company began emphasizing email marketing as a customer retention tool about three years ago and recently invested in building …

SearchIgnite released Tuesday SearchIgnite 4.0. The upgrade supports several major enhancements aimed at making the process of managing high-performing paid search campaigns easier. One addition includes return on investment (ROI) forecasting. The company says the ROI Forecasting feature lets marketers create their own forecast charts to predict campaign ROI at varying budgets, accurately predicting how much revenue search campaigns will generate at different levels of spend.

Day 2 of MediaPost's Email Insider Summit began with a keynote by Orbitz CRM chief Ted Wham. Online travel company Orbitz hopes to find a way to use a customer’s social media behavior to generate email marketing targeting them. Perhaps if there’s a run of Twitter discussion about going to the World Cup this summer, Orbitz can then send emails with hotel deals in South Africa to soccer fans. “Social has to be incorporated into our system and we’re still struggling with the strategy around it,â€� Wham said. Orbitz uses Reponsys as its ESP and Smith-Harmon as …

I was delighted to hear both Yahoo! and Hotmail strike a very cooperative and collaborative tone for working with marketers and other senders today, as the two major global mailbox providers discussed plans to expand their inbox products and spam filtering. Carlo Catajan, Product Manager for Yahoo! Mail and Daniel Lewis, Sr. Product Manager for Microsoft Windows LIVE Hotmail, both said at their Email Insider Summit panel today that priority number one is to make sure that only messages that are welcome and valued by end user subscribers reach the inbox. That is very different from the early days …

Marketing budgets are up this year, but the email channel may or may not see the benefit. It will depend on the tenacity of email marketers and the level of integration with both customer acquisition and retention innovation. This is my take on this morning's opening keynote from Bruce Biegel, Managing Director of Winterberry Group, here at the Email Insider Summit in Captiva Island, Florida. If 2009 was the year when the inexpensive and high ROI email channel was expected to carry a larger share of retention and customer up selling, even with no new budget, Biegel seems …

Google’s PR team could be in for a long day Tuesday. That's when regulators from Canada, France, Israel, Netherlands and Spain will meet in Washington in order to "share their growing concerns about the privacy practices of Google Inc. and other online companies," according to an announcement circulated to the press on Monday.

In advance of its f8 developer conference on Wednesday, Facebook Monday formally unveiled its new “Community Pagesâ€� for people to connect with others on the social network who share similar interests. The new Community Pages, soft-launched earlier this month, will serve as an alternative to the official Facebook Pages for businesses, organizations and public figures. The aim is to let people create unnofficial pages around favorite products, brands or other topics that don’t fit into more narrowly-tailored Facebook Groups. The new initiative still in beta will allow Facebook users to link information from their profile pages directly …

Yahoo just named Microsoft veteran Blake Irving as its new chief product officer. Irving fills the void left by Ari Balogh, Yahoo’s CTO and EVP of products, who said earlier this month that he was leaving for “personal reasons.â€� During his time at Microsoft, Irving led the back-end development of its Windows Live platform. Irving “retiredâ€� three years ago -- shortly before a major reorganization of Microsoft’s online operations, according to paidContent. More recently, he serves as a professor at Pepperdine’s business school. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said she liked Irving’s “large scale internet expertise from a mature company.â€� …

Why is Adroid’s app marketplace growing so much faster than Apple’s iPhone app store? Two reasons, according to The Times’ David Pogue, include willpower and deep pockets. Likening Google’s efforts to Avis car-rental’s old slogan, “We’re Number 2. We try harder,â€� Pogue posts a letter from one developer who was offered an olive branch (and a free Nexus One) by the search giant. “It shows that Google is actively recruiting developers to their platform, using the enticements of free hardware and open communication,â€� the developer pointed out. “Contrast with Apple’s approach: it took us about three months of resubmitting …

Well, I received a second notice that Apple received my order for the iPad with 3G. The first email notice came shortly after I placed the order when the iPads went on sale. The email from Apple explains the iPad will ship later in April. It's nearly the end of the month. So is this second email order notification foreshadowing an email ship notification? Sure would like to get it by the weekend.