The big news of the day comes as no big surprise to tech-geeks, but is significant nonetheless: RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, is one month away from releasing “Storm,” its first-ever touch screen phone.

What does this mean for email marketers? For starters, it means that HTML emails with images will soon render properly on more than just the iPhone. This is great news as it will allow even more customers (i.e. business folks who are loyal to the Blackberry) to stay connected with their favorite brands on the go. It also will open up the market for RIM to go after home users rather than just corporate email junkies and power brokers. 

Mobile email has already proven to be a great thing for marketers, but even more so for consumers. if you’ve ever needed that flight confirmation number at the airport, forgotten to clip an in-store coupon, or wanted a real-time direct deposit posting confirmation of your bank account, then you can see the value of email on the go. 

No word yet on the exact plans and pricing, but the best news of all is that the phone looks ready to be taken around the world where it can function on a variety of well-covered cellular networks.

File this one under hilarious: the folks at Google Labs have added a “Mail Goggles” feature to their popular Gmail web email application. 

What exactly does that mean, you ask? Well, if you’ve ever heard the expression “drunk dialing,” this is the email equivalent of that. Before the email is sent late at night on the weekend, the Google Labs feature asks the user a series of math problems that anyone in, ahem, a clear state of mind would be able to answer. If the user cannot do so, the email does not go out. Of course, Virgin Mobile was the first company to publicly take on this conflict in the mobile messaging service realm, while LG even went as far as to put a breathalyzer in its LP4100 phone, available in Korea.

For the good of the free world, I seriously hope this remains a non-issue for those of us in the responsible, permission-based email marketing universe!

Let’s face it: it shouldn’t take a national holiday like Mother’s Day or a major news event like the recent vice president nominations to remind marketers to be tactical in marketing to women. The simple fact is that women hold tremendous financial sway over the global economy, so they certainly deserve our undivided attention as responsible marketers.

Jake Swearingen of BNET has a short piece this week on “Some Common Mistakes When Marketing to Women,” with some handy quotes from Marti Barletta, president of the TrendSight Group. The article gives some tips that email marketers can certainly learn from, such as the impact of lifestyle images on female customers:

“Making it personal is more important to appealing women,” says Barletta. “They get impatient with theory. They want to know how it affects people…Women are interested in people and character,” says Barletta.

A great example of this tactic in action is the latest Vera Bradley campaigns featuring their Resort Collection of bags and accessories. In all three emails, we see their products in their appropriate context — vacation getaways — and in two of them, we see female models in carefree, relaxed poses. The imagery and copy make it clear how the products are beneficial to the end user in simple terms.

Vera Bradley’s “Resort Collection Series”
Sneak peek the new Resort Collection from Vera Bradley
Vacation in style with the new Resort Collection form Vera Bradley.
Dive into the Resort Collection from Vera Bradley.

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