The Email Wars

There have only been 4 campaigns I have seen to date that defy the rules of the horizontal scroll thus far in my life. And every single one of them I have loved. As we at eROI are about to release one like this for an ongoing client campaign I wanted to ask you if you have seen any others. I have seen Coors Light, Diesel, FHM and a luggage company. In every case the creative has rocked and the implementation has worked successfully. 

Well in our attempts I wanted to share some knowledge with you about what we have found. 

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With the pain at the pump being in the top of the news each day we are all tracking and feeling the effects of shopping, travel and driving. But now I have started to see email campaigns tied to this messaging. In my opinion it is effective. It made me stop and think about shopping online and maybe changing my travel habits to west coast instead of so many east coast trips. Now I say this as I am about to book 3 east coast trips here for work very soon. 

Even tonight on the news I heard that Amazon has reported record sales. Is this all part of the GAS effect?

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Today I was in a bind to grab some tickets to a concert up at the Oregon Zoo. I had no choice but to go online to TicketMaster and pick some up prior to the event. With the kids in tow I did not want to have to worry about standing in line, hence why the internet rocks. So I ordered my tickets, paid to print them online right then and there, all the while wondering why I would pay $2.50 more just for the convenience of not standing in line. Well I think I stated 2 kids under 6 makes it worth it. 

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How many amazing things have we seen over the years made from junk mail? We saw the shredder that automatically prints then shreds spam/junk mail. We saw SpamObituraries where a writer uses the sender FROM to write the Obit of the person. And we now have this art. I actually love it and it was shared with me from Tricia Pridemore. (Thanks!)

I have actually made one of these my background on my laptop today. Makes me laugh as they are good.

If you are anywhere like me, I love to check out the junk as much as the good stuff. Seeing how they bait people in with the From Lines, the subject line and the fact that you might actually trust this kills me.

Google has revamped the contacts section of Gmail to let users decide who’s on their A-list.

Gmail adds a contact entry for every e-mail you use, and previously showed either the full list or the “Most Contacted” subset Google chose. Now the service divides contacts into a “My Contacts” list that users can define and a “Suggested Contacts” list with everyone else.

What does this mean for email marketers? Well my initial take on this is that it should help with deliverability by automatically placing your email address for your campaigns into the address book of your subscribers… making you a trusted sender in some ways. There might be some ways in which this is going to help, but it is a little early to know the full impact.

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If you are familiar with Twitter, then you are very close with the Fail Whale. For those of you that have yet to meet the Fail Whale (and I think that the community might have named it such, not the brand) I have placed a image of it in the wild for you below. I can tell you it is much better than a animated GIF of a monkey banging on a server with a wrench and even a better user experience than a 404 error page. But what can we learn from the Fail Whale.

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Blog post from Fred Wilson - Union Square Ventures.

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/07/are-your-invite.html

I think this is interesting because Twitter is such a hot Web 2.0 company these days, and yet they’re facing the same issues that many other companies face, making sure that their emails get delivered to consumers’ inboxes.

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