We marketers are living in a revolutionary age, where technology, customer expectations and an explosion of new communication channels are transforming everything from the way we do our job to our roles in our company's success. Despite this upheaval and flavor-of-the month pressures from the C-suite, email remains the workhorse of our digital marketing strategy: delivering consumer value, brand engagement, cost savings and revenue. While some like to lament email as boring and "so last century," in fact many of the trends that shape this new marketing paradigm are also helping to fuel email marketing's continued relevance and vitality.

It's shocking that so many email marketers don't design their emails so they look good on smartphones and so the content can be used by smartphone apps. I can't count how many times I have referred back to an email for a phone number or address. With my smartphone, I can call someone simply by clicking on the phone number. Likewise, I can map an address by clicking on the address. You'd be surprised how many marketers leave this information off their emails.

Picture the jungle. Surrounding you is dense vegetation. It's a cheetah-eat-cheetah world out there -- and only the fittest survive. Now picture your inbox. The density of unread emails darkens your Outlook view pane. Whichever way you look at it, email marketing is competitive. While the jungle analogy may seem aggressive, the truth is -- email marketing is a competitive space. It's a jungle "in" there!

Does swapping business cards at a networking event, meeting, social function, etc, give people the right to add you to their database and start sending you their e-newsletter? This was the question posted about a month ago in the eMarketing Association Network LinkedIn group. As I write this, there are 267 comments (now 273 ... 278). Before I dissect the answers, I think it's time to clear up some confusion about email vs. email marketing. Sending an email is not the same as executing an email marketing campaign.

So, it has happened: For the first time since 1961, the Chicago Blackhawks have won Lord Stanley's Cup. As a hockey fan here in Chicago, it's hard to focus on anything other than last night's victory this morning. On the drive into the city, I listened as local radio stations reported the whereabouts of the Blackhawks...after landing at 3:47 AM at O'Hare airport, they moved from bar to bar and are now grabbing some breakfast at a "joint" by the United Center. While they have been celebrating, I, of course, have been thinking about email marketing.

The Microsoft Hotmail Team just released a new version of Hotmail that has important implications for marketers. The main purpose of the release is to "address inbox clutter" -- which seems to mean mainly marketing email. Microsoft has even coined a name for the non-spam, but unwanted mail that the company wants to help subscribers avoid -- it's called "graymail."

I was recently struck by all the analogies used by my fellow Email Insiders: Email is like the Olympics, like baseball, like a a newborn. I knew there were even more great analogies out there that would help us better appreciate and understand email marketing, so I asked folks on Twitter for their best #EmailAnalogy. Sixty tweets later, we had some great ones. Here are some of the ones that stood out to me:

A 12-year-old pianist sat down to play before a venerable musician and an audience of 50 or so observers. The young performer played classic after classic, from Mozart to Chopin, and he was note-perfect. One of the observers leaned over to the older musician and said, "Isn't this amazing?" The musician replied, "This kid is great at playing the piano. One of these days he'll learn to make music." To make music with our channel, you need to consider a few things that will directly impact how you operate and thrive in the future.

As many of you know by now, Stefan Pollard, one of the email marketing industry's most beloved figures, died recently. The best tribute I can give Stefan is to let his words speak for themselves. Following is a sampling of Stefan's views on some frequently debated topics that raged in various industry forums:

Now might be a good time to rethink the fixed-width template wisdom. This is clearly a convention born out of Web design best practices, but at odds with the way email was designed to work. Just compare the newsletter and marketing emails in your inbox to the correspondence emails from your contacts. If you are on a mobile device, the difference is obvious. If not, just narrow your window and compare. See how most of the correspondence emails nicely adjust to the change in width, while the others do not.