Kaizen has been a buzzword in the corporate world for decades. It's a Japanese philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement and is engrained in the cultures of top companies like Toyota. Volumes have been written on this subject, but simply taken on its surface it's very powerful and inspiring.

E-mail service providers (ESPs) are getting more and more hands on with their clients. Whether it is CheetahMail focusing on its client services, or e-Dialog detailing its role in strategy for each and every e-mail campaign, it seems like the ESP is becoming more like an ad agency for e-mail. Following this note, this week StrongMail Systems UK has announced a new branch of its company called StrongMail Strategic Services.

Action sports brand Body Glove has selected Lyris Inc. as its e-mail marketing agency. Under the terms of the partnership, Body Glove will use the Lyris HQ suite to help manage its e-mail campaigns and newsletters.

When e-mail marketing began, the possibilities of reaching new audiences through electronic means and getting real time results made marketers absolutely giddy. Today, many of those marketers find themselves wondering why they can't raise their conversion rates. That's because those marketers define e-mail as a contact strategy rather than a key piece of the overall interactive marketing strategy. While e-mail by itself remains effective, its uses have evolved. Marketers need to think of it as one tool in an arsenal that leverages other tools and disciplines to make it more effective.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from a person looking for a job. I didn't open this unsolicited e-mail from this unknown person regarding a subject that I'm not currently dealing with, i.e. Human Resources. Assuming that the e-mail was spam, I only read it in my reader without opening it up and found that it was from some alleged person looking for a job in an unspecified area. Again, pretty fishy, but not surprising.

Maybe it's all the back-to-school advertisements I've encountered the past month or so, but I thought it would be fun to give a quick refresher course on email deliverability. There has been a lot of discussion on the subject in the past, and I wanted to share some important suggestions to help you receive an A+ in your e-mail marketing campaigns.

Restaurant.com, a site that sells discounted restaurant gift certificates, has teamed up with ESP ExactTarget to run its e-mail program and to sell its offerings to the ExactTarget community. Under the terms of the agreement, Restaurant.com is using ExactTarget's e-mail tools to make its e-mail marketing efforts more targeted. In addition, ExactTarget clients can now add customized restaurant gift certificates as incentives to their interactive campaigns for wholesale prices.

DMNews editor in chief Cara Wood sits down with JupiterResearch's David Daniels as well as e-mail experts from StrongMail, Wetpaint and eHarmony at the DMA 08 Conference & Expo to discuss best practices and the importance of relevance when considering transactional e-mail.

In e-mail marketing, reputation is everything. Users are able to make a decision about your e-mail without even opening it — if they don't like what they see in the "Subject" or "From" lines, the delete key is never far away. Marketers also must contend with the negative connotation of "spam" — consumers apply the term to any unwanted e-mails, even if they are legitimate marketing messages to which recipients have opted in. To top it off, ISPs — always looking to streamline their networks and respond to customers' frustrations — create their own barriers. Our experts examine the ways in which e-mail marketers can manage their reputation.

With explosive growth of social media sites also has been a rise in intra-network communication, a growing alternative to personal e-mail. Our experts debate the effect on marketing.