The right e-mail at the right time can be a powerful touch point with your customer. At its best, meaningful e-mail content can complement the salesperson in-store and extend the reach of their relationship with customers.

E-mail marketing services firm Zrinity is partnering with Pivotal Veracity to add its deliverability services to Zrinity business-to-business offerings. The partnership, reached earlier this month, comes as Zrinity is looking to connect data with better deliverability in real time.

I've been flying a lot this month, both for vacation and business, and e-mail updates for upcoming flights have made the experience smoother.

Gerard Lo Monaco, VP of technology and operations at Sony, and Sean O'Neal, chief revenue officer at Datran Media, discuss Sony's approach to e-mail marketing and holiday plans for e-mail.

Nike is promoting its annual Human Race series of 10K races, which take place October 24, by calling consumers to run in the races via a viral e-mail campaign with user-generated video. The goal of the campaign, which began in mid-September, is to increase registration for the Nike race.

E-mail marketers blend established best practices with new options, such as social media and embedded video, to engage consumers.

Though three-quarters of nonprofits gather consumers' names and locations when they sign up for e-mail communications, that's often where consumer data collection ends for those groups, according to a Return Path study, released October 20. Nonprofits are half as likely as for-profit companies to collect information beyond name and geographic location from their e-mail subscribers — 20% vs. 42%.

Using e-mail to cross-promote multiple brands can be tricky, but when done right, it can noticeably increase ROI. The idea behind any co-branded effort should be for both brands to partner in a clever way that makes the joint experience better than either brand on its own.

The most opened, read, and acted upon e-mails are automated e-mail campaigns. Marketing Sherpa reports an impressive open rate of over 50% on automated messages, compared to a typical open rate of 20% in 2008.

On October 19, Equifax and Strongmail announced at DMA09 they are partnering on a tool that enables marketers to target consumers not only by demographic and behavioral data, but also by social media influence. The tool has direct integration with blogs and social networks, including Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.