While each organization is unique in its needs, cultures, budgets and focus on the email channel, I've seen so many types of email teams put together -- from cobbled-together teams infused into marketing groups, fully functional email departments and then the "one person show." The exact organization isn't as important as the chemistry and responsibilities within each role. Let's think for a minute about all the roles needed to properly manage an email program, and talk about them in terms of personas rather than ambiguous titles.

Okay, I don't actually love them. But I have learned to appreciate them for what they are: instruments in the democratization of modern marketing and perhaps the most authentic measurement of customer dissatisfaction we have.

The virtual trade show is much less expensive, and the number of people I can engage with at one time by multitasking means that I can potentially reach more people, at a cheaper cost. And the cost for that is a smaller close rate, because the personal interaction is missing. This is one of the problems facing email. As we progressively move to less and less personal forms of communications -- from handwritten letter, to targeted direct mail appeal, to email blast --we gain reach and increased ROI, but face the danger of disengaging from our customers.

Dear Email Diva: Since I've been seeing a decline in opens and click rates, I've been diligently researching ways to improve our newsletters. Should I be comparing our performance to industry standards? Our distribution list is on the smaller end and I don't know if we fall into the "average" category, so would it even make sense to compare to industry standards/metrics?

Reporting, and the nuances of how we should approach it, is an interesting topic. How many days post-drop should you check results? Should you look at standard metrics, opens, clicks and conversions? And how do you factor in variables such as messaging, segmentation, frequency and the impact of other channels?

To see how well major online retailers have been doing at managing their sender reputations -- which is one of the keys to deliverability -- we examined the sender addresses used by 95 retailers during the past 18 months. What we found is that a third of them used more than one email address to send their core email marketing campaign during the past 18 months.

If I was ever worried about the strength of the email marketing industry, those fears are certainly being dispelled this week. I'm in Indianapolis attending the ExactTarget Users Group meeting, and was completely shocked by the strength of the attendance.

Dear Email Diva: I had a quick question on the best way to reach out to bloggers in cyberspace to introduce them to a new product or service without sounding too pitchy or totally informal.

I don't think we have enough fun with email these days, so let's take a break from all the issues with the channel and get inventive. Considering we are coming up to the busy holiday season, I figured a look at the top five functional reasons to communicate with your customers would be an appropriate theme.