As the oldest tool in the online marketer's toolbox, e-mail marketing garners a fraction of the headlines generated by rising stars such as SMS, Facebook and Twitter. However, according to the DMA, commercial e-mail delivers an ROI of $45.65 in 2007 — more than two times greater than any other online marketing tactic, including search.

Today's e-mail marketers face a variety of technical decisions and creative challenges — deliverability, measurement, rendering and social network or mobile integration, to name a few. In this Guide, you'll find answers to many fundamental and high-level implementation questions.

Does your nonprofit have low response rates? High bounce rates? Spam complaints? Is your organization at risk of being blacklisted by major ISPs? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, consider this the season to clean your data.

With the holidays around the corner, holiday advertising is already jingling its bells. While many TV and print ads were made back in July, there is still time for developing and changing e-mail campaigns since response rates and production turnaround are quicker.

Targeted e-mails are better than batch and blast. One way to target and make things more relevant is through geo tracking, which allows a marketer to send messages based on a recipient's location.

According to Forrester Research, 80% of the more than 20 million U.S. Hispanics online today use e-mail, and a recent survey by Mintel Comperemedia showed that Hispanics welcome e-mail promotions more times per month than non-Hispanics (11 times vs. 7.4 times). Companies that want to connect with Hispanic consumers, or get more from their existing e-mail program, should consider targeting e-mail campaigns to U.S. Hispanics.

As Google touts the G1, its new mobile phone, and Nokia boasts about its soon-to-be-released answer to the iPhone, one thing is for sure: There are more options than ever for consumers to access the Web on their mobile phone.

Leveraging clickstream data in e-mail is shown to significantly increase ROI by delivering highly relevant messages. Observing users' online behavior, gauging their interests, and tailoring e-mail messages accordingly puts you on the path to delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

Over the past two years, the rapid adoption of social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace has transformed the way many consumers interact on the Web. Some customer segments, especially younger ones, now spend an increasingly large percentage of their online time on these sites and primarily use them to communicate with their peers.

Fast-growing marketing channels are creating chaos for those trying to expand and improve their online communications efforts. Dozens of point tools exist but these, at best, only solve a fraction of marketers' problems — and, at worst, exacerbate them.