Tough love happens in Email Marketing too. An often-overlooked conversation email marketers have is "should we get rid of this email, or why have we not eliminated this underperforming email with no synergy to our strategic goals?" Or maybe its time to consider adding new newsletters, promotional or just plain innovative email campaigns.

Tricia Robinson of Accucast has some advice in this area:

To remove email campaigns or not to remove email campaigns, that is the age-old email marketing question. And the answer can be discovered when you begin to track and manage your bounces, open and clickthrough rates.

Successful email marketing relies on good, clean data coupled with relevant information. While you do need some critical mass to be successful with email marketing, think quality, not quantity.

Verify your customer preference data every six to 12 months, and trim recipients who have become inactive or disinterested. Your list size may shrink, but the quality of your database will increase dramatically and so will your delivery rates.

Once you have updated your database you can evaluate the content and timing of your current email campaigns. By understanding when recipients are opening emails and what information they are receptive to, you can develop an email marketing strategy that will fit their needs.

Would your customers benefit from an e-newsletter that provides best practices, tips or ideas? Ask them. Polling customers on what type of information they are interested in or how often they would like to receive that information is a perfect way to customize the information to fit the recipients' needs. Your organization will not only be seen as a vendor, but as a trusted source of information.