Forget all the claims that one day or time is better than another to send messages to your mailing list. The ideal time to send e-mails, of course, is when each recipient is most likely to open and act on your e-mails.

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.

E-mail is as vital and important a part in the direct marketing toolkit as ever before. Competition for the scarce attention of consumers remains intense as marketers devise ways to make brand messages stand out amid cluttered inboxes. So, it is particularly vital that marketers take advantage of the consumer's broader media and communications ecosystem as part of the evolving role of e-mail marketing.

E-mail marketing service providers announced new platforms this week that take advantage of consumers' appetite for social media. For one, ExactTarget announced it will release a tool that integrates e-mail marketing capabilities into Twitter.

The Sidekick data loss incident is prompting questions about how safe cloud-computed data really is. Earlier this week, users of T-Mobile Sidekick phones with the Danger Inc. service lost all of their contact and system data, which historically has been backed up in a cloud system.