Email marketers are so focused on explicitly revenue-generating campaigns that we often forget about the little guys: program enrollment confirmations, lost PIN requests, invoices, account update notifications and the good ol' password reset. But transactional messages such as these are some of the most highly opened and read messages -- and as such, have huge potential to drive incremental revenue with the inclusion of promotional messaging. As we position ourselves for a profitable 2014, it's time to give our transactional emails a once-over.

Shopping cart abandonment emails are among the most powerful messages a marketer can send, but they could be even more powerful. Recent research into cart abandonment emails shows five clear opportunities to strengthen them:

If we all drive the same type of car, with the same size engine and the size type of tires on the same track, it would be rational to think that one's competitive advantage would be the driver's skills. If we all send email the same way, at the same frequency and with the same engagement strategy, isn't the only competitive advantage simply the size of the list and the strength of the brand? In the email space, I rarely see any companies that see email marketing as a means of creating a competitive advantage.

Email marketers spend so much time on where their emails are positioned in the inbox that they ignore the more important positioning: in the consumer's mind. Don't misunderstand. Deliverability and inbox placement are foundational and the first step to getting your emails read and acted on. However, as the recent hysteria over Gmail Tabs showed, many email marketers are focused on the wrong things.

As DMARC celebrates its second birthday as the most prominent anti-phishing breakthrough to date, it may be on the verge of creating an uncomfortable situation for email marketers. More than 80% of typical U.S. email users can be protected by DMARC. Some of the world's biggest email senders, including Facebook, Twitter, eBay and PayPal -- and scores of others -- are reporting impressive strides toward protecting consumers from scams conducted in their names. But there's mounting evidence that as these senders make it more difficult to use their brands to dupe consumers, phishers are concentrating their efforts on brands that …

When email marketers think about logic, they typically jump right to dynamic business rules and how data can drive unique experiences inside their email communications - which is exactly what we are talking about in this post. But the conversation here is less about getting your hands on a large volume of data and more about applying the proper logic to the data you already have.

Today, the true challenge for marketers is driving engagement and conversion across every imaginable variety of consumer, including the one-eyed, flying shopper. The common theme with consumers is that they're incredibly distracted, moving fast and looking for a clear, very personal, present-tense value proposition to inspire action. As one of these distracted, on-the-go consumers, I can share personal examples of one-eyed, flying conversions.

Despite the occasional apocalyptic prediction, email continues to be the cornerstone of email marketing. But it is increasingly difficult to execute great campaigns: those that look beautiful, render perfectly across desktop and mobile clients, and ultimately drive strong response. I recently pored through thousands of email campaigns to compile the top 100 into an eBook. During the course of that project, a few themes common to great email marketing emerged.

Clients who are adding potentially dozens of automated email messages to their marketing program often ask, "How am I going to come up with all that extra content when I still need to move multiple broadcast messages out the door?" Good news! It's not as daunting a process if you follow a content strategy built around this five-step framework:

Email marketing is at the core of developing a power brand, a compilation of impressions, experiences, and concepts that work together to create a position in the mind and sentiment of consumers. Power brands are created through a number of initiatives: planned media, press coverage, key-influencer usage and endorsements, word-of-mouth, reputation, and consistent delivery on the brand promise.