HerbalBuddy.com, an online distributor of Herbalife products in the United States, has increased its e-mail sales conversions by 50% after it streamlined its e-mail communications.

You feel ready to launch a sophisticated campaign, leveraging the low cost of e-mail to saturate your active file. But do you realize that every consumer or business receiving your e-mail has an e-mail profile that they use to segment incoming mail? That most companies sending e-mail either don't know their customers' profiles or ignore it with their "spray and pray" campaigns?

Skin care brand Philosophy has teamed up with e-mail service provider Responsys for a viral e-mail campaign that lets online consumers design and send personalized e-cards to their friends and family. In a time when the inbox is stuffed with marketing messages, the brand is letting consumers create their own e-mails branded with the philosophy company, in a move to get consumer attention and to help build its list.

It's 10am. Do you know where your executives are? If not, rest assured that I do know one place that they aren't. They aren't somewhere talking about the finer points of your e-mail marketing strategy and how it plays an integral role in customer retention and loyalty.

This holiday season, nonprofits have been working hard to help raise money for their causes — and using e-mail to do so.

The social inbox is continuing to get more user friendly. Last week, Bebo announced its Social Inbox, which aggregates feeds and updates from Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, YouTube and AIM; as well as access to Gmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail into one home page stop. This week Yahoo has its own user-friendly inbox, deemed the "Smarter Inbox."

A good e-mail reputation is not just good manners. It's good for business, according to a new study by Goodmail and Jupiter Research. The study, called "The ROI of Rendering," included the responses of 202 senior level e-mail marketing executives, and found that e-mail marketers that use some kind of e-mail certification have an average of 38% more profits than those that do not.

Last month, saw an interesting turn of events in the spam wars, as spam levels went way down. According to the December 2008 monthly spam report from Symantec, spam levels actually dropped 65% in the 24 hours after the shutdown of the ISP McColo, which was allegedly hosting a large amount of bot-net command-and-control systems from the 24 hours period before the shut down. This is a huge coup for anti-spammers and proof that working to stop the mailing of illegitimate mail is worth the fight.

Merging best customer marketing and e-mail marketing creates an explosive combustion of results. This includes higher revenues, profit margins and customer retention. Best customers are usually multichannel customers, and e-mail marketing, on a cost-per-touch basis, remains cost effective for reaching this group. Best customers purchase higher volumes, purchase more frequently and prefer e-mail.

Online personalization services firm Sitebrand has teamed up with e-mail service provider Silverpop in a move to upgrade their e-mail product offering for online marketers. Sitebrand works with retailers including the Bank of Montreal, Roots and Legendary Deer Gear for Web personalization. Under the terms of the partnership, Sitebrand will integrate with Silverpop's e-mail marketing platform into its Segment&Serve personalization tool making e-mail a service within its platform.