We are a product of our own success. The industry has masked scale problems and hidden behind terms like "attribution" or "optimization." The challenge is, we have the same amount of resources we had last year, and while technology has advanced and everyone's in the cloud (or their heads are), decisions have not gotten easier to make. It's not about big data, or the cloud, or even analytics, it's about making decisions faster.

Emails that remind customers to come back and finish checking out their shopping carts are some of the highest-ROI messages a marketer can send. So why aren't you deploying these high-value emails yet?

For years we accessed information via computers much the same way we consumed it via the old tube radios, which took up huge amounts of space and required us to make the time and effort to go to them. Thanks to smartphones and tablets, email marketers now find themselves at the same crossroads radio was at decades ago. Marketers must now adapt their methods and messages to stay relevant, or be left behind by the mobile consumer.

I know it's tough to plan a test; it takes a lot of work to generate a hypothesis, create assets and content accordingly, structure the test, send it, and measure and analyze the results. But each little insight you make adds up to a better understanding of your subscribers and their preferences. If you're committed to testing (and you should be), there is always something you can test, even in the simplest of campaigns.

Mobile open rates are rising faster than expected. If this trend continues, these rates will overtake opens on webmail and desktop email clients by the end of the year, or even as soon as this summer. Here's what I see as the three big implications of the boom in mobile email:

It takes all sorts of experts to launch a rock-star email campaign, and it's crucial to have everyone's eyes looking out for ways to boost the creative. Even team leaders without strong backgrounds in design or copy can effectively evaluate email creative to get campaigns into tiptop shape. Make these three steps part of your agenda before letting an email leave your desk (er, computer screen):

Before we get to the "how," let's explore the "why"? In today's age of rich media and social connectivity, multi-modal consumers reserve their attention for the most compelling, contextual experiences. With that said, how does a static medium like email survive as a marketing tool?

What are you focused on right now? What are the Big Kahuna issues that you are spending serious brainpower thinking about? In the last few months I've met with about a dozen companies, mostly in B2C industries, and, somewhat to my surprise, the topics we discussed were amazingly consistent from company to company. Not a single company wanted to talk about list/database growth. Rather, every issue or topic of concern revolved around approaches to maximize engagement and conversion among existing contacts.

Return on investment (ROI) is the metric marketers most commonly use to compare ads, campaigns and even entire channels. ROI makes sense for evaluating marketing when the primary input is external spending: buying media, printing expense, postage, creative costs or sponsorship fees, for example. Email, however, does not fit neatly into the same model. Because the monetary "investment" denominator in email is comparatively low, using a strict ROI calculation will always allow it to shine. That's fine with those of us in the email industry, as we always win the ROI contests. But it misrepresents what must actually be invested …

So I am hanging out on Captiva Island, Fla., this week at MediaPost's own Email Insider Summit. I have been attending these summits for many years now, and there are always stories that become folklore among us -- stories that always manage to bubble to the surface at inconvenient and embarrassing times. So, rather than wait for that moment, I figured I would 1) create it, and 2) turn it into email advice. Here goes: