In any marketing medium, referrals are your best source for business growth and vitality. One person who spreads the good word about you to their friends and family does an agency's worth of your advertising, marketing and public relations. When your "talker" is a solid-gold trusted source, you can see why you need to do everything you can to encourage your readers to talk about you.

What happened the last time you scored an email marketing home run? Maybe you tripled your open or conversion rate, or boosted the average order by 20%. What was the most likely response from your boss?  “Great! Let’s send it out again!”

It seems to me that marketers have lost their way when it comes to their email marketing. It’s as if, for them, effective email marketing has become a bit of a lost art. Those of you responsible for your successful email marketing campaigns know that in many ways, it is an art. But there is some science to it too - and guidelines that should only be broken by the most daring of experts in the most unusual of circumstances.