Many observers are watching Groupon with hawk eyes as the daily deals player continues to grow. Among them is the Congressional Privacy Caucus (CPC), in particular, Massachusetts Democrat representative Ed Markey and Texas Republican representative Joe Barton. Lately, these two congressmen are perhaps best known for introducing the Do Not Track Kids bill to Congress, a proposed law aimed at providing better online protection for children.

Email marketing, when used strategically and in a way that appeals to (and does not repel) your readership, is one of the most profitable techniques to promote products and services. Unfortunately, many marketers repeat the same common errors that make email campaigns perform less effectively.

To honor the coming season of darkness and winter, let’s count down the following 6 ways to doom your email marketing to low click-throughs and obscurity.

A growing number of your academic and educational email campaign subscribers are accessing your newsletters on a wide variety of mobile web enabled devices. This percentage is growing so quickly that experts estimate that the majority of emails will be opened on smartphones within the next couple of years. In order to keep providing your services efficiently to your varied email subscribers, it is imperative that your emails display properly on as many of these smartphones as possible. Adhere to these top five ways to improve your email rendering on smartphones to ensure that the majority of your subscribers will be able to view your newsletters as intended.

An email marketing milestone this month - Notorious spammer Sanford “Spamford” Wallace aka The Spam King was arrested on August 4, 2011 after almost a decade of lawsuits involving his illegal spam activities. Wallace worked his way up from email spam to spamming on social sites such as MySpace and Facebook. As his spamming practices grew, so did the fines he levied. The government has cracked down on spam practices and Wallace’s time has run out. He was finally indicted and will be tried for his crimes.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have devised a macro-scale internet rerouting concept based on steganography, which is the hiding of an URL routing so that it is visible only with a specific cryptographic decoding key. The value of such a process is that, if universally applied, the nearly two billion people on Earth who currently have no option but to access the internet from behind various blockage filters could access any website anywhere. The implementation of this system would benefit some sectors of the online marketing community that would gain a vast additional audience… but there are drawbacks.