Merkle is "one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing providers of data-driven solutions that enable organizations to maximize the results from their marketing investment." (No, that’s not language generated from this page , it’s from their press release boilerplate.)

Put your Buzzword Bingo card aside and click on through to this press release on their site, which trumpets the new 2008 version of their annual email study, View From the Inbox. You can get the .pdf file over here .

DMNews leads their coverage of the report with the factoid that "88% of consumers feel mostly or completely in control of their inboxes." Count me among the 12, but that’s another kettle of albatross.

I think the most interesting information in the report has to do with the reasons why your email list may not be growing as quickly as you like.

Why are people unsubscribing from email lists? The emails aren’t relevant (73 percent), companies are sending email too often (66 percent), they never signed up for the list in the first place (64 percent) and the emails weren’t what they expected when they signed up (63 percent).

Takeaway for marketers: You’re working hard to build an email list. Don’t fool your customers on the front end to get them to subscribe and be sure to give them what they want once they have subscribed. Remember: It’s about what your customers want, not about what you want your customers to want.

Gerry McGovern nails it over here on the Giraffe Forum .

Takeaway for marketers: What it says in the headline … unless, of course, you have infinite money to spend and you don’t really care about your customers.

“The best music, you can seek some shelter in it momentarily, but it’s essentially there to provide you something to face the world with. ”
—Bruce Springsteen

Stay alive . For a startup company, it’s that simple. And that difficult.

That would be a Chief Blogging Officer. I thought Chris Locke had that title locked down, but it seems to be spreading to no less a publication than AdAge, where Beth Snyder Bulik penned a good article the other day about corporate blogging beginning to hit its stride.