Thanks. Those all valid points but has mentioned in the post, your millage may vary. Now regarding your point about the recipient (firstname, lastname): coming

Thanks. Those all valid points but has mentioned in the post, your millage may vary. Now regarding your point about the recipient (firstname, lastname): coming from a different culture myself (fr-CA), I truly understand your concern. In French, addressing someone on a firstname basis is indeed annoying (well for me at least and I am not that old:-). I would be really interested in hearing your alternatives. How to you circumvent this? HTML email is indeed tricky and I realize I should have mention it. However, there are interesting solutions out there to test both the rendering on various client and its spam sensibility. I have personally used service from Campaign Monitor which provided useful information. Check the following: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/design-guidelines/ http://www.campaignmonitor.com/design-guidelines/ http://www.campaignmonitor.com/testing/ http://www.campaignmonitor.com/testing/ http://litmus.com/email-previews http://litmus.com/email-previews http://www.email-standards.org/ http://www.email-standards.org/ I think your concern about up-sell technique could be legit for some B2C markets. However, my experience with B2B (and I have metrics to back my statement) shows that the negative impact of such up-sell is minimal in most situation while being straight positive in some others. I DID get up-sell conversions using such technique. But then again, I think this kind up-sell should remain as light as possible. Not really the in-your-face-billboard type. This is all about knowing your target audience and adapt accordingly. I am far from an expert though. I'm a hacker not a marketer :-) I just happen to be interested in such communication, unavoidable being an entrepreneur.