Last summer I wrote a piece about trends, following the Internet Retailer Conference and Exposition (IRCE). And now the first real summer of wearables is upon us.

In the first half of 2015, my travel schedule has taken me to meetings at companies in various industries from India to Sweden and the U.K. to the U.S. Although the perspectives and priorities varied somewhat among the groups, the topics discussed were quite similar from one meeting to another. In almost every case, company representatives confirmed they were either focused on a particular trend or issue or planned to take it up soon.Here are the 10 topics that came up repeatedly:

Google recently coined the term "micro-moments" to express how people experience their lives and interact with brands. According to Google: "Mobile has forever changed the way we live, and it's forever changed what we expect from brands. It's fractured the consumer journey into hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro-moments. Each one is a critical opportunity for brands to shape our decisions and preferences." An example could be a single parent needing supplies for a sick child and a pharmacy delivering those items to the home to create a "didn't-plan-for-this" micro-moment. I'd like to explore how to get started in leveraging email, …

I believe trigger marketing is how everything will run in the future. Some think it's about intelligent, predictive communications based on 1:1 events. It is, and then some. As we begin to explore new devices that aren't as "smart" as our mobile phones, we will be deluged with signals that mean something - but, left alone, are simply signals that tell an incomplete story. The possibilities are simply endless, but the principles of applying, delivering and optimizing interactions and triggers based on some behavior won't be. So you'll need to start thinking about this strategically.

While I was in India on a business trip, Mary Meeker presented her much-anticipated annual list of Internet trends for 2015 in which India plays a major role as an emerging mobile marketplace. Coincidence or not, reading Meeker's insights while in Goa, Mumbai, New Delhi and Agra gave me new perspectives on the future of digital marketing and where innovation will come from. (Hint: probably not mature markets like the U.S., U.K. or Japan).

The optimum length of a subject line has been debated as long as companies have been sending email. Marketers, consultants, and agencies have labored over distilling pitches to a handful of words or characters, aiming for the Goldilocks "just right" length. We recently sifted through more than eighteen million subject lines sent to more than two million subscribers to find out whether subscribers' actual read rates pointed to an optimal length.

One of the things that baffles me about our industry is the wide variation of how email marketing and cross-channel teams are managed within organizations. More specifically, it seems there's little consensus on whether or not to centralize teams in large companies with multiple brands or lines of business (LOBs). In this post, I'd like to weigh in on the benefits of each approach.

Predictive analytics improves email marketing results. That's hard to dispute, but it's not quite right. Relevant messaging and attractive offers improve email marketing results. Predictive analytics has the "potential" to help. It's only potential because there is so much involved in doing it right.

Consumers are becoming more and more comfortable sharing information in exchange for apps, service, access and convenience. With that said, we also have a new generation of consumers that are much more savvy with their digital lives, data and how it's shared, all with the goal of improving their lives.