Jumping into an email marketing program without doing the necessary planning is a little bit like waking up married in Vegas: It seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight you've made a big mistake. Email marketing -- like a wedding -- takes planning to be truly memorable.

History is littered with partnerships that transformed their genre. Would Fred Astaire have made such an impact upon the world of dance without Ginger? Would Apple be where it is without the camaraderie of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak? And would Jack Bauer in "24" have been able to pull of what he did sans Chloe O'Brian? E-mail is a major driver of social media activity; in fact it is the major driver. But the relationship works both ways.

While we're still basking in summer rays, seasoned email marketers can already feel the flurry of winter holiday campaign planning. Gretchen Scheiman's insightful post last week (check out: "Retailers: How Good Are Your Holiday Plans?") delivered some awesome suggestions for planning targeted, relevant holiday email programs. We'd like to second her list and chime in with few more ideas for smart and successful 2010 holiday campaigns.

Yesterday, I read a great piece on social CRM from Gartner titled: "First Steps for Social CRM: The Gartner CRM Team's Perspective." In addition to explaining social CRM in a clear and concise way, the document made a few recommendations about social CRM strategy. As an email marketer, you'll find that Gartner's recommendations for social CRM execution will read like the best practices whitepapers you have been publishing within your organization for the past year. This is not because Gartner's insights are old or lack insight; it is simply because email marketers have been executing a version of social CRM …

In my last article for this column, I provided a daily checklist for deliverability. By following this checklist, you may find that you've run into a deliverability problem. In today's column I'm going to help you determine why you have a delivery problem.

Back on Jan. 18, 2007, I wrote my first Email Insider column. Three-and-a-half years later, I've now written over 100, sharing insights from my research, giving advice on strategy and tactics, and commenting on industry trends present and future. It wasn't all 24K gold, but I'm proud of everything I've written and hope that my columns got you thinking and occasionally sparked changes that made your email program better. Here are a few of the columns I'm most proud of:

Targeting online behavior works. The real questions you must ask are: What do you really want to know about your customers, what types of information will you take action on, and what is your threshold to actually build and maintain programs with this source of data?