Read the full story here, as reproduced in the Journal’s blog on lobbying and advocacy, Under the Influence.

But even if you aren’t sending out those first “think of us for gifts” type email marketing messages, there’s plenty of prep work you can do right now to make your holiday email marketing campaign more effective so you achieve better email marketing results.

Smith Harmon’s Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season has practical suggestions for gearing up, both by collecting more information about what subscribers want to get in their emails from you, and by having excuses to reach out to them, helping you be top of mind without starting the holiday shopping message too early.

Their email marketing suggestions include:

• Having subscriber update their preferences so you can increase your relevancy during the holidays, using a preference center
• Or get the same insight via surveys
• Update your Web site and improve the functionality, then email your list to publicize the improvements
• Request product reviews during the summer and fall so you can use them as part of your holiday email marketing campaign. Hint: You’ll want to offer an incentive too to increase the likelihood that people will contribute reviews
• Encourage subscribers to buy now to earn a discount during the holidays
• Promote your credit card or loyalty program

All of these suggestions are either good ideas or simply email best practices, and none are overly complicated. Too early for holiday email marketing? Maybe, but it’s never too early to prepare for it!

Download the full report here

Marco is an acknowledged expert in e-marketing with over 15 years of experience in the field. Before helping to found ClickMail, he held key marketing positions with CyberSource, eHealthInsurance, DoveBid and IBM Canada. Marco’s strengths and experience are varied, including demand generation via direct marketing, email marketing, and database marketing.

Marco, with co founders Russ Cerminaro and Michael Kelly, started ClickMail back in 2000, with a vision to turn ClickMail into an email marketing vendor  that offers the nation’s largest selection of email service providers. They have succeeded with that plan! Now Marco is at the helm of this rapidly growing company, guiding ClickMail through growth to become a key player in the email marketing industry. Somehow he also finds time to contribute to the ClickMail email marketing blog and to leading publications such as DMNews.

Immensely proud of his Italian heritage, Marco loves Italian cars (especially Ferraris) and is fluent in English, Italian, French and working on his Portuguese.

And in June, Marco finally married the beautiful Cida. Need we say more?

As an email marketing vendor, we work hard to help educate email marketers through this blog, our newsletter, our participation in email marketing conferences and webinars, our email marketing library, and by simply paying attention to opportunities to learn, especially those that require a little less commitment, whether financial or time. That’s one reason whitepapers are so popular: You can read them when you want to. It’s a little harder with webinars and other scheduled events that require you to set aside a particular time.

That’s why we’re glad to turn you on to a webcast that’s free to attend in two ways: no money required, no time commitment required.

Lyris HQ (formerly EmailLabs) is offering an on-demand webcast on the future of email marketing. Featuring Jeanniey Mullen of the EEC, Cathi O’Sullivan of Lyris, and Anna Maria Virzi, of The ClickZ Network, the webcast addresses how email marketing has changed and what you need to know in order to be successful.

To view and learn from the webcast… at your convenience.

It’s not a new concept. I once read that the idea of Christmas in July came from Victorian times, when women would start making gifts in July, giving them several months to get their projects done. (Makes you wonder what they’d think of our Christmas shopping these days, on the Internet on December 20th, shelling out an extra $25 for rush shipping charges to guarantee delivery by Christmas Eve!) But it translates wonderfully from needlepoint on a pillowcase to email marketing campaigns because they both take planning and time, and the more you have of both, the better your results.

With that in mind, this email marketing vendor is going to (surprisingly) abstain from dishing out yet more holiday email marketing advice and instead point you to reliable resources as we become aware of them. And who better to guide you through the coming months than Mark Brownlow with his own constantly updated post on this very topic? See Mark’s start by clicking here and check back often for new links to new resources.

Now is the time to be focused on email best practices and your email marketing budget and making sure you’re making the most of both for the best possible email marketing ROI.

It has been an uncertain year for many in email marketing. Let’s get and stay on top of the holiday season, just like those Victorian ladies, only without all the thread and needles.

It’s not an easy question to answer because it depends on your business, industry and more. But eMarketer’s Monday report on email marketing and click-through rates helps, so take a look and maybe even keep a copy so you can benchmark against these industry standards.

The data is drawn from Epsilon’s “Q1 2009 Email Trends and Benchmarks” report. You can see how email delivery, open and click-through rates are faring over time. But more importantly, you can drill down to see open and click-through rates for your industry specifically.

As we’ve mentioned before in this email marketing blog and in our email marketing newsletter, metrics matter but only if you’re measuring the right data the right way. If you’re in the retail apparel business, you’ll only be discouraged to know general financial services has a hefty open rate of 31.4%. But seeing that average email marketing result for your industry is only 14.3% gives you a more realistic metric to benchmark against.

Your email marketing metrics can go through constant refinement, just like your email marketing techniques. This eMarketer report will help.

And if you have questions about your metrics, how to measure better and improve your results, always feel free to contact us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com!

Wouldn’t it be great if potential customers just surfed the Web, looking for email newsletters and campaigns to subscribe to? You could just sit back, put your feet up on the desk, and watch your in-house email list grow and grow and grow.

But we live and work in the real world. That means people aren’t sitting around online signing up for emails from you. In fact, the opposite is true: They’re probably ignoring your requests. You don’t have to be an email solutions provider like ClickMail to know that people are extremely reluctant to give you that precious piece of personal information.

Growing your in-house email list can (and should) be a multi-faceted effort. But at its core, it is probably an option on your Web site, an option that has to work really, really hard. And that makes the wording on your Web site critical.

And what’s in a word? Everything. Keep in mind that different words have different connotations, and choose the word that will both most accurately reflect what you’re offering in exchange for that email address, and will most likely appeal to that Web site visitor. Consider the following possible words and their implications:

• If you ask someone to subscribe, that sounds journalistic, and implies they’ll get an email newsletter or something else wordy and content-oriented.
• If you ask someone to sign up, it begs the question, sign up for what? Are they signing up for specials? News? Spam? Be clear on that.
• If you ask someone to join, that might sound exclusive like you’re letting them into a community or club, but on the other hand, it might set the expectations high and you might not deliver.
• If you ask someone to register, that sounds like a real commitment, like registering for an event. On the other hand, it can have more perceived value.

What word do you use on your Web site to grow your in-house email list and drive your email marketing ROI? Let us know which word and how well it works at blog@clickmailmarketing.com. We’ll blog about it here in our email marketing blog.

ESPs aren’t moving away from email. But they are responding to market demands, as our CEO Marco Marini points out in his article just published in DMNews.

“Email is the basis for the platform,” says Marco, “and all these other things tie in.”

As he points out in his article, ESPs will be the hub used to disseminate SMS, social media and the like. But that doesn’t mean the same rules apply to all mediums. What you do with email isn’t necessarily acceptable with Twitter, for example.

But all of these marketing means and how you use them share one common—and key—factor: relevance. Just as we’re constantly preaching the importance of relevance in email marketing, Marco makes great points about the importance of relevance in social media too.

Read Marco’s article click here.

Email solutions provider ExactTarget has already proven people prefer to receive marketing messages via email, not social networking sites.

And a new report from Forrester also backs up our claim that email marketing still prevails. In fact, the new email marketing report claims email spending will reach $2 billion by 2014. People (and businesses) vote with their pocketbooks. That’s a lot of money to spend on a marketing tactic who’s future has been in question in the media. If all those businesses are betting on email marketing, you can bet this email marketing vendor is too.

A few quick email marketing highlights from the report:

• Retention email will account for three quarters of the spending
• Email remains a low-cost way to communicate
• Even in a down economy, people keep their at-home Internet connection
• The number of active email individuals will grow from 145 million in 2009 to 153 million in 2014
• Transactional messaging will be the biggest growth area for email spending between now and 2014

People spend money on what they believe in and where they see results. With spending on email marketing on an upward slope to $2 billion, obviously businesses still believe in the power of email marketing!

On the down side, Forrester predicts companies will waste $144 million on emails that never make it to the inbox in 2014. That’s sad to think that in 5 years email marketers could still be that behind on email best practices that get you into the inbox! Don’t be one of those email marketers! Keep reading this email marketing blog!

Read about the Forrester report by clicking here.