This morning my inbox was packed. It seemed that all of humanity was urgently trying to reach me.

One of the biggest topics marketers wrestle with is how many emails are too many. Successful email marketing is a balancing act. You must create interesting and useful content, and communicate with your audience often enough to generate engagement, but not too often. One of the most important things to determine in any email marketing plan is the frequency of email. The most successful email marketing campaigns find the perfect balance—contacting potential users often enough that your brand and message are familiar, but not so often that users tune out or are driven away.

Metrics are a useful guide to determine how many emails are too many. The following three metrics are vital in helping you determine just the right frequency for an email marketing initiative.

Consumers want mobile payments. Mobile wallet usage has been rising steadily among consumers. For many, it's more convenient than having to use cash or even a credit or debit card. Gartner estimates that mobile payment volume will nearly triple in the next three years.¹ A mobile wallet lets a consumer choose between payment methods on the fly and the ability to control all of their payments through a single device. Banks and financial institutions’ marketing teams that want to take advantage of mobile payments and the mobile wallet trend will need to act fast to capture this growing segment of the market.

A successful marketing campaign is often measured in terms of the return-on-investment (ROI) it yields. Although digital marketing has expanded into a wide range of channels, the most successful channel still tends to be email marketing.

Email marketing is a topic that is well studied, with many facts around what works and doesn’t work. The reality is, however, there are many popular myths and misconceptions in the marketing industry that are masquerading as email marketing facts. Here is a list of 7 email marketing myths and email marketing truths.

Successful email marketing campaigns rely on a cycle of continuous improvement. An ongoing process of measurement, analysis, testing and implementing learnings is the key to long-term success. Your email recipients are constantly evolving. New technology, devices and capabilities impact their expectations, behaviors and preferences, which directly affects email engagement. In the absence of testing, you can speculate about your email recipients but lack the conclusive data needed to drive creative strategy.

Have you often wondered what is considered email spam by the user? In this case, I’m not referring to actual email deliverability. This article hypothesizes about emails that end up in a user’s email inbox, but is a communication that the user considers as unwanted email.

Business-to-business marketers often ask us, “What makes successful email marketing?” They also often ask, “How are consumer and business-to-business emails similar and how are they different?”

Building a successful email marketing campaign requires that marketers achieve relevancy in their marketing communications. I’d argue that successful email marketing programs in the future will leverage data to create relevant email marketing campaigns. The success will lie in leveraging data to create meaningful campaigns. My hypothesis is that data-driven campaigns are less likely to result in marketing fatigue if messages are considered relevant and valuable by audience.

It’s easy for marketers to take for granted the inherent value of email as a research tool. Much of this has to do with the relative speed with which it can be executed. Some marketers move so fast they short-change the discipline necessary to think about what they want to learn. Many times this isn’t uncovered until after the campaign period and it’s too late to go back.