Dave Hendricks posted an interesting article on ClickZ titled "Owned Data, Paid Succes", in which he talks about the risks associated with using data gathering via social sign-in on your website.

From the article:

Bringing owned data into paid media channels - sometimes referred to as data-onboarding - will revolutionize marketing like nothing seen before the invention of the Internet. But if you do not have rights to use "your" data in third-party channels, you are going to miss out on a big piece of the next big thing in interactive marketing: CRM retargeting.

You might ask, "How is my file not my owned data? I can email it. I can drop cookies on it and retarget it. I can even send terrestrial mail to it. That sounds like it's mine."

The data you collect via social signup is yours...to some extent. 

Continue reading here.

Gmail is making email marketers sweat again. In the last 12 months alone, the introduction of Tabs caused all-out panic, image caching recalibrated open rate baselines, and grid view caused rendering concerns. Now Gmail is following up with a partial rollout in March of a highly visible native unsubscribe link with a wider rollout, which they announced yesterday.

Now any sender that includes the list-unsubscribe header in their emails will have Gmail’s native unsubscribe link show up next to their sender name when an email is opened, whereas previously the only senders who were able to benefit from this offering were those with stellar reputations—which were the ones who needed it the least.

In this article, Chad White looks at the pros and cons of this new functionality and how best to use it.

A couple of articles I enjoyed reading recently:

• Email Benchmarks: Highest Open Rate in Years – Again!
• 39 Resources for Understanding the Science & Psychology Behind Great Marketing
• Email as a discovery tool? Try it, you'll like it!
• Landing Page Strategies that Serve Up Delicious Results
• What is marketing automation and why do you need it? 
• Inactive Email Addresses: To Mail, Not to Mail…or Something Else?
• What is DMARC and How Will it Affect Your Email Delivery?
• Yahoo! Mail bounces itself, or why using a webmail address is a bad idea
• Insights from MailChimp’s Send Time Optimization System
• How to avoid Gmail clipping your emails
• When, where & how are Internet users  interacting with their inboxes? (infographic)
• A Guide to Bulletproof buttons in Email Design
• 6 Gmail Changes Every Email Marketer Should Know
• Past the Pop-Up: 10 Email Marketing Tactics You've Never Tried
• How to Inspire Email Opt-ins in 5 Seconds or Less

I got an email from the folks over at Moosend this morning with some interesting and fun email marketing stats they pulled from their system and I thought you might find them interesting as well :-)