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When you're in the campaign trenches and knee-deep in metrics reports, it's easy to lose sight of some broader issues concerning your approach to email marketing. Here are some reminders to help you step back and reevaluate your email marketing efforts.

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Clients and consultants alike usually dread fee discussions. Here are six strategies to help you preserve your profit margins and your client relationships as you work through pricing discussions.

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This week, the SWOT Team asks: What holiday marketing programs have worked for you? Are some holidays better than others to reach customers and prospects? Join the conversation! Also this week, read your answers to: Is a blog is right for your business?

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Although we cannot completely trust the psychology that underlies our advertising decision making, we can work to make it more reliable by lowering stress, institutionalizing skepticism, living in the moment, and training and preparing for friction.

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This week, add your two cents to the question: How can a poor marketing employee promote a product with little budget available? Also this week, read your answers to last week's dilemma: What makes for an effective marketing kit?

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For marketers in the services industry, it's important to understand the key factors that enable us to profitably acquire and keep customers. Here are four factors that represent best practices for marketers.

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Successful sites don't happen by chance. A compelling online experience geared toward women is developed with care and the understanding that she has to be considered from the very beginning of the process. To help your site take up residence in her bookmarks, here are suggestions for developing a Web presence that connects with women.

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More and more, we need to be connected to a network of resources for mutual benefit and growth. And although you need these contacts to support your success, the approach to building a valuable network involves giving—not taking. The more you give to your network colleagues, the more they will be there when you truly need them.

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From time to time, the marketing world is taken aback by huge, quick, unpredictable and seemingly inexplicable successes. These marketing "hits" are products or services, entertainment locales or vacation spots, shopping malls or specialty stores that enjoy puzzlingly immediate popularity. Believe it or not, there's actually a formula for these seemingly unpredictable marketing wonders.

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You must make very difficult choices if you want your Web site to work. You can't serve everybody. If you try to, you will serve nobody. The first step in developing successful reader personas is to decide which readers you are *not* going to focus on.

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Writing blog posts (and comments on blogs) is actually very simple. Keep your copy lively, factual, tight, clear, short and search engine optimized. Here are basic blog style guidelines to follow.

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Rapid commoditization of products and services is exasperating even the most skilled professionals. The solution provider is struggling to differentiate its unique products and services. Simultaneously, customers are putting the squeeze on margins and driving unique value to the lowest common denominator—price. How is this happening? Why is the trend increasing at an alarming rate? And how can you hold your price and get paid for the value you deliver?

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Advertisers spend much effort psychoanalyzing consumers, trying to understand why consumers make the decision they do. It is rare that they turn those same analytical tools on themselves—to understand why they make their own decisions, especially when those decisions have led to trouble.

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You want to keep up with your marketing reading. But there's so much out there that you don't where to start. Here are four of our favorites from '04. And these recommended titles are as good a place to start as any.

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Developing a great logo is a strange mix of art, science, psychology and (in most cases) a good amount of luck. Last week, in part one of this two-part series, we discussed some fundamentals of logo development and design. Here, in this final installment, we delve deeper into the nitty-gritty: How to choose the right logo, the pitfalls of a too-literal logo, and, yes: size does matter.

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With more and more companies wanting to integrate their products into the lives of celebrities, now seems like a good time to take a closer look at celebrity product placement. Here are three common approaches and a description of what steps you can take to encourage results.

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Developing a great logo is a strange mix of art, science, psychology and (in most cases) a good amount of luck. In this, the first of a two-part series, we'll explain what a logo really is (and isn't!), suggest how to start development, and ask a few questions you'll need to answer before you begin.

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Many wonder how a rainmaker reels in so much business while others can only shake their heads in amazement. Some suggest that rainmaking is a genetic predisposition and therefore beyond reach for all but a select few. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rainmaking is part skill and part mindset. Anyone who is willing to invest the necessary time and energy can become a rainmaker.

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While price can (and should) certainly be a factor in the SEO decision-making process, it should not be the primary factor. Unfortunately, many companies that think they are saving money when making SEO decisions find out later that the actual costs of doing SEO wrong can make the "savings" pale by comparison.

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Apple's iPod is a necessity with travelers, teenagers, fitness fanatics, students, business executives and, yes, even grandmas and grandpas. So did the iPod break the rules of staying with one target audience? How can you argue with one billion dollars in sales? Find out how the iPod looked at "target audience" in a different way. And how you can do not just the same, but actually do one better.