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Were you prepared for the recent arctic blast? For West Coasters, what about those above-average temps? I'm not talking about whether you were ready to shovel your driveway or if you had a fully stocked beach bag waiting by the door, I'm talking about your ability to leverage these newsworthy weather events in the inbox.

Remember the days when all we had to worry about was one channel? Those days are long gone! Today, to succeed in our complex omnichannel world, you have to be in front of consumers at the right time, in the right place, with the right offer. Yes, it's a very complex world out there, but if you're up to the challenge it can pay great dividends.

Offer great customer service, make sure your messaging is personalized, and have a single view of the customer are some of the best ways to create brand loyalists. These were a few of the key takeaways from a panel discussion on customer retention that took place at the eTail West conference last week in Palm Desert, Calif.

Contests can be a very effective email acquisition tactic, however, you need to put some thought into it to be sure you get high-quality email addresses, not just a high quantity of addresses. The key to success here is what the contest offers. You want to make sure that the contest prize has a broad appeal to your target audience, but isn't interesting to those outside it.

CVS has announced an overhaul of its already top-rated mobile app. The company says the new CVS app provides customers with a more intuitive mobile platform so they can easily access a variety of health management and shopping tools straight from their iPhone or Android devices. The CVS/pharmacy mobile app empowers users to perform key pharmacy and shopping tasks on the go, including refilling prescriptions, checking for potential drug interactions, and choosing to redeem personalized coupons and rewards digitally by sending them to their ExtraCare Rewards cards with the tap of a finger.

Ever bent on competing with everyone, Amazon.com launched an email service yesterday called WorkMail. The new service is exclusively for the workplace — not personal use. Amazon will be charging subscription fees of $4 a month for each account on WorkMail, prices that are in keeping with both Office 365 and Google Apps for Work. Additional features include calendaring, calendar sharing, tasks, contact lists, distribution lists, resource booking, public folders and away messages. The subscription will give users 50 gigabytes of email storage as well.

2014 was a transitional period for the retail industry. It was the year when mobile and online sales exploded, and retailers worked harder than ever to fuse their physical and digital stores. It was peppered with a number of high-profile CEO exits, including American Apparel's controversial Dov Charney and

The 2014 holiday season is upon us and, as the saying goes, it's the most wonderful time of the year. With just over three weeks left in the year, make it count by boosting your email marketing efforts to raise online sales and profits. According to the Direct Marketing Association's National client email report 2014, 77 percent of return on investment comes from segmented, targeted and triggered email marketing campaigns. So despite popular misconceptions, email is — and always has been — the proven workhorse for driving online revenues. Now is the perfect time to make your list (and check it more than twice) for ways to optimize your email marketing to increase sales. Here are some tips to get started:

Email volume will continue to trend downward over the next couple hours followed by a mid-afternoon bump. Are your remails ready? Here are a few last-minute tips to make the most of your afternoon remails without the need to redesign your emails:

Say it ain't so! I was actually sad when I read in MarketWatch this week that Seattle-based online retailer Zulily’s shares plunged more than 21 percent after it presented a weaker-than-expected sales forecast. And to think it was partly due to an email marketing mistake.