Kirkland, WA-based Celebrate Express (Nasdaq: BDAY) reported net sales of $18.8 million for its fiscal second quarter ended Nov. 30.

Flexible mailing frequency, event-driven messages, and the growing importance of the “from” line are among the trends in e-mail marketing that practitioners should be aware of, according to ExactTarget, an Indianapolis-based developer of e-mail marketing solutions.

List management

Mainstream marketers looking for new sources of names should consider the gay and lesbian marketplace. According to Jon Pogact, vice president of Brewster, NY-based list firm Mal Dunn Associates, the gay and lesbian population accounted for more than $485 billion in buying power in 2003. That amounts to $27,000 per person in disposable personal income after taxes.

Marketing to gays and lesbians presents some interesting challenges, however. For starters, while there are more than 15 million identified gays and lesbians in the U.S., only about a third of those names are available for rent or exchange.

It’s no secret that many catalogers use historical customer information to create elaborate predictive models. But Scott Nuernberger, lead statistician for Lanham, MD-based database marketing services firm Merkle Direct Marketing, says that without a prior plan to influence customer behavior, all the modeling wizardry in the world will fail.