I always say, I get more done before 9 a.m. than I do the rest of the day. But with email, it's a continual stream: it's the first thing many check before they brush their teeth, have coffee, or breakfast.

The beginning of an email marketing relationship is the most important. Not only are subscribers more engaged and more likely to convert, but optimizing the experience of a subscriber's first month or so on your list can extend the overall time they remain engaged with your brand via email.

For many companies, revenue or conversion activity mirrors something similar to the 80/20 rule, with 20% of their customers/subscribers contributing 80% of revenue. No matter whether your company sees 90% of your revenue coming from 10% of customers or 70/30, a small percentage of your database is likely doing all the work. What implications does this have for your email-marketing program? If you are like a lot of marketers, you focus on filling the top of the funnel in an economical manner and increasing your mailing frequency to your entire database. Why not? This approach works to deliver more revenue. …

Mobile-enabled email has truly been the topic du jour for 2013 so far. A recent article says it best in its title: "Mobile Email Opens Now 41% & on Pace to Surpass PC by End of 2013." Whoa, that's huge!. So that's the "why" of using mobile email; now let's focus on the "how." There are three components that marketers should consider when creating mobile emails:

A hundred emails are sent, and 95-98 of them get delivered. 30-40 are actually seen, 10-15 of those on a mobile device. 5-15 of those that received it will click through and if you are lucky, 1-2 will buy something. This process, repeated weekly over a year, can add up to a lot of effort to reach less than half your audience. Do you know what your aggregate reach is for this email audience? If so, what are you doing with the other half that just don't engage, or engage infrequently?

As email marketers, we are guests in the inbox of our customers. We have been invited to enter into their personal world and, much as you do when visiting a friend at home, you need to respect their personal space. Taking the analogy even further, when you move and enter a new neighborhood (which I did not too terribly long ago), it's important to get to know and understand your neighbors. There's already an existing dynamic there; having a firm understanding of it helps to determine the role you play in that ecosystem.

When I've argued in the past that marketers need to understand more about their competitors' email programs, I inadvertently left out one small detail: Many don't know who their competitors really are. They think they do, but things are different in the inbox.

In my meetings with marketers, a common frustration I hear is that they lack the budget, people and time to get things done. Well, I've been hearing these complaints over and over - and have uttered them myself - in my nearly 30 years in marketing. But you have to do more than complain about your challenges to move your program ahead. Take charge instead. Create a new way of thinking among your email teams and reset the process for getting things done. Below is my prescription for getting off the hamster wheel, shaking things up and taking your marketing …

As consumers, we all get too much email. That means as marketers, at least collectively, we are sending too much. Now I know it's easy for any brand to point at its own ROI metrics and insist that email is still working very well. Yet you only need to look at the proliferation of inbox management tools to see a universe of email users struggling under the deluge. Our metrics tell us one thing, but studying user behavior provides some contradictory insights on subscribers' appetites for just one more message.

How can your brand make the most of birthdays: a prime opportunity to do something thoughtful and premeditated, and connect a consumer to your brand? Is yours one of the 50 birthday emails that are sitting in someone's inbox the morning of? Here are a few ideas for planning your next-generation birthday or recognition program: