Useful Analytics By Arthur Middleton Hughes If you have an analytics person on your staff, you should always be looking for way for her to improve your marketing operations. For example, if you send promotional e-mails to registered customers, she should take advantage of the wilderness of numbers that can be analyzed with profitable results...

YourSpace May Soon Be YourInbox Too By Elie Ashery When people think of social networking sites they usually don't consider e-mail as part of the equation. However this will soon change, especially in light of recent announcements for upgraded social networking sites by Yahoo and Google. ...

E-Mail Confidential: Amy Africa Tells All By Beth Negus Viveiros What factors determine whether your e-mails will get opened, read and clicked on? Consultant Amy Africa of Eight by Eight, who spoke at the recent Direct Marketing Association Catalog on the Road Day in Cambridge, MA has the answers....

Ho Ho Or Ho Hum: Some E-mails Miss the Mark By Beth Negus Viveiros Up on the laptop, Click, click, click. Some missives inspired sales, While the others didn't stick. ...

Lazy PR People, or Improper E-mail Appends? By Tim Parry Sometimes I groan when a press release comes across my inbox. But I'm not about to go all Chris Anderson on the public relations people who send me things of no relevance to my publications....

Blocking PR People – At Long Last, Lazy Flacks Get Their Comeuppance By Len Stein You think Len Stein, the president of New Rochelle, NY-based Visibility Public Relations, is angry about Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's "had enough" moment, which involved posting the e-mail addresses of the PR flacks who fill his inbox with irrelevant press releases daily? He's not....

Special Delivery: E-Mail Marketers Look Ahead To 2008 By Ken Magill (Direct) Speak to e-mail marketers for any length of time about their craft, and sooner or later the topic of deliverability will come up. This year's e-mail roundtable was no exception as four top e-mailers outlined what they see as having the biggest impact on the industry in the last year and going into 2008. ...

Rolling Strikes: Who says the word "free" doesn't work with e-mail? By Ken Magill (DIRECT) Brunswick Bowling and Billiards has turned an offer of an hour of free bowling in return for e-mail contact information into a database of almost half a million e-mail addresses. Some managers say the database has helped them meet their sales goals for the year. ...

Call it E-RFM: Traditional Metrics See New Life in E-Mail By Ken Magill (Multichannel Merchant) Recent developments in e-mail marketing are creating new possibilities for an old set of direct marketing metrics: recency, frequency and monetary value....

Moving Pictures: Animation Makes E-Mail Come to Life By Amy Johannes (Promo) When Lake Champlain Chocolates wanted to boost holiday sales, it launched an animated e-mail. Sales jumped 49%. The chocolate maker, which operates a store in Vermont, has discovered new ways to make graphics in e-mails work. ...

Database Guru Hughes Eyes E-mailers By Ken Magill (Direct) Arthur Middleton Hughes thinks he may be able to teach e-mail marketers a thing or two. And he could be on to something. ...

E-mail's Image Problem: Should DMers Worry About Image Suppression? By Ken Magill (Direct) Developments surrounding blocked e-mail images and links have been causing a great deal of consternation among marketers lately. Experts, however, say the growing trend is nothing to get confused or worked up about....

See You in December: E-Mail Helps Ski Resort Stay in Touch By Ken Magill (Direct) Just because winter is over doesn't mean the marketing has stopped at luxury ski resort operator Intrawest. The firm stays in touch with skiers even during off months through a CRM program in which e-mail messages are tailored to their profiles. And, as is the case every May, its marketing department is busy promoting summer products and activities. ...

Metrics Mess: E-mail Marketers Still Lack Meaningful Ways to Measure By Ken Magill E-mail marketers lack standard definitions of fundamental metrics. Worse still, most don't measure anything meaningful at all about their e-mail campaigns, according to two recent studies....