The Email Wars

After 5 years and 4 office locations, eROI has finally made the leap and built out a new office that will handle our growth and give us a place to call home… permanently. We are down to the wire on this move and will be finalizing details (tables, etc.), but we will have internet/email access, phones and power (yeah heat and running water too). This move will not have any negative affect on any sites, products or hosting facilities.

NEW INFO:
505 NW Couch, Suite 300
Portland, OR 97209 MAP
503-221-6200

While the phone number and emails won’t change, the address and the extensions will. One big improvement is direct dial numbers for everyone in the company so be prepared to reach out in email for updated contact information in our email signature files or use the dial by name directory.

Thank you all for your patience this Friday, as YOU are the ones that have helped this to happen.

We will be moving the office 8am to 8pm both Friday and Saturday so if there is a slightly slower response time we apologize in advance. We do not anticipate a delay, however moves can be unscripted. If you do have a problem and do not receive a reply in a timely manner please call your sales rep on their phone or email support AT eroi.com and it will hit our Blackberries.

The eROI Team

Love the creative coming out of Lenovo. They have been doing a great job of branding with email campaigns. The only flaws in this email are the amount of padding at the top, which shoves the creative lower in the preview pane of any email clients, making the actions and copy sink lower; and the subject line (although pricing attractive) is really confusing. What am I really saving? Do I have a calculator handy to figure out if I should open this email? And when did Black Friday become such a HOT subject line leader?

Email is a learning and testing experience. I make comments on so many of them as we develop them each and everyday. I find flaws even in the work we do at internal reviews and try to move the bar higher on our work. You should do the same. Test it internally and show it around before you send it. Get feedback and then evaluate what is going to work best.

Who knows, maybe this was a good lift in sales? Or maybe I am sticking to an Mac….

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So in the past I have shown you a few examples of emails that scroll the opposite way. This is one below is one that would have been PERFECT to go in this direction from Dell. They are promoting Going Wide Screen, so why not have some fun with it and make the user scroll side to side. Maybe a little risky for Dell, but man this would have been a great way to make me want to get a wide screen to enjoy it.

Now I have Dell wide screen monitors, two actually, one set up the standard way and the other I have flipped to give me full views up and down in one window, newspaper style. Makes taking screen shots of these emails much easier and helps me to see the whole picture.

Knowing that Dell reads this blog weekly, I am just putting it out there to you as an idea to test. I think it would make the call for widescreen a home run. Maybe next time.

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Having long been a fan of Diesel’s online marketing efforts and email campaigns I had to share this. They finally opened up an ecom store. Yeah I know must be nice being slow to move and still crush the sales numbers. Maybe respecting the channel/retailers came to an end here as they realized all the direct sales that they could generate online. Welcome to the 2000’s Diesel.

But I thought it was a clever show of product with a wish list that was timed for the pre-holiday shopping season. And my favorite… drum roll.. one simple call to action. “Click here to buy stuff” in a shiny read button. Task complete. Sales made. Next.

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I read this interesting article in the WaPo this past weekend. It was funny as I have opted in to all the candidates emails so that I could watch and see what they are doing. It is a machine. They are doing it differently than I expected. Some of them are actually making it really conversational. Others still go the traditional routes. I will be posting them later down the line as the heat grows.

Until then, read the article.

I was working on Thanksgiving, of course, and reached out to a friend with a question. I was not expecting an answer, but was dually shocked to see this auto responder. Should we all be taking less time in the inbox to focus on work.

“Greetings!

Due to a high workload, I am currently checking and responding to
e-mail twice daily at 11a Pacific, and 4p Pacific (weekdays only).

If you require urgent assistance (please ensure that it is urgent)
that cannot wait until 11a or 4p Pacific, please contact me by phone
(call or text).

Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and
effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more to serve you better.”

Could not imagine only checking my inbox twice a day. Can you?

Hard to believe it is 5 years this month that we started this company with three of us over coffee. Two of the three are left and we have really grown (over 43 people now) I want to give some thanks to the clients, the partners and most importantly the team at eROI that works to make us better in all ways everyday.

I cannot state that it has been without challenges, but these challenges have only made us stronger as a team, a company, a partner and to the community.

Here is to exceeding expectations and producing GREAT campaigns and projects for our clients and partners in 2008 and beyond. There will not be a party this week as we do have the move next Friday the 30th on the horizon to our new building at 505 NW Couch, the newly named Technology Arts Building, so we need a few days off to prepare for that. And then there will be a party Dec 7th for the employees, spouses, significant others to celebrate the end of the year and all that we have achieved.

Happy Birthday eROI and here is to many more.

This might be one for the books. Stupidest moves by a Judge I have seen in a long time. So IF you name yourself in a spam email (aka non opt in emails that ARE unsolicted, which under CAN SPAM would tell me are illegal).

What they hell is she thinking?

Judge: Spam Exempt From Law When Sender Names Self (From News.com)

A Washington judge has ruled that spam is “personal e-mail” exempt from anti-spam laws if it’s written in a style that suggests familiarity with the recipient. In the words of small-claims Judge Judith Eiler herself (via Slashdot):

“These are anti-spam laws, which imply that they are mail just sent out in huge bulks, which would be the antithesis of a personal e-mail. And here he puts his name, in fact this is the person that you directly sued rather than somebody that’s in a corporation or a company. The court does think that there’s some indication that this is a personal-type e-mail. While it may have gone out to a number of people, it doesn’t have quite the earmarks.”

This twit sits at the business end of the whole “legal spam” fiasco, wherein this nation “banned” unsolicited bulk email by outlining how it may legally be sent. Lawmakers are bought and paid for, but the ignorance and stupidity of judges like Eiler is far more reliable.

Following is the spam itself, addressed to “Dear Webmaster” and hocking a scammy link exchange scheme.

To: bennett@peacefire.org Subject: Reminder: Link exchange with your site http://slashdot.org X-PHP-Script: www.theeashblahblah.com/linkmachine/auto.php for 87.102.22.100 Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:34:26 -0400 From: Roderick Eash Reply-to: reash@tconl.com Message-ID: X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: PHPMailer [version 1.72] Errors-To: reash@tconl.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=”b1_b43cabef83c9f9123db7a78ef9a73362″ Dear Webmaster, My name is Roderick Eash, and I run the web site Work At Home Business Opportunities | Online Career Training: http://www.theeashblahblah.com/ The other day I wrote you to let you know I’m very interested in exchanging links. I’m sending this reminder in case you didn’t receive my first letter. I’ve gone ahead and posted a link to your site, on this page: http://www.theeashblahblah.com/linkmachine/resources/resources_home_based_business_41.html As you know, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising our search rankings and generating more traffic to both of our sites. Please post a link to my site as follows: Title: Work At Home Business Opportunities | Online Career Training URL: http://www.theeashblahblah.com/ Description: Your Source, and Resource for starting a Home Business, or Growing the One You’re In. Once you’ve posted the link, let me know the URL of the page that it’s on, by entering it in this form: http://www.theeashblahblah.com/linkmachine/resources/link_exchange.php?ua=_ua9&site_index=MTg4MTgwMjc%3D You can also use that form to make changes to the text of the link to your site, if you’d like. Thank you very much, Roderick Eash

I am not sure if anyone else has noticed this, I did by complete accident as I trouble shooting my wife’s email issues with Gmail ported to her Mac through POP3 (I know I should switch her to IMAP soon), but I cracked the email header file and saw that even her personal email has a domain keys record. I have never noticed this before. Has it always been there? Have any of you noticed it in the last few weeks or months?

What this tells me is the Google takes domain keys seriously and you should too. I took a look in the official Gmail Blog and the search did not bring back anything around this find. But there is an interesting post about how much better gmail is with spam filters than other clients.

So I dug deeper and went to Slashdot (the source for all super nerdy) and saw that they started doing it back in 2004. Where the heck have I been? And why had I not seen it before? They actually implemented it before Yahoo did in personal email.

Well chalk one up for email marketing history and make a point to get your domain keys set up as ASAP if you have not already.

Very interesting read that two of the powerhouses are going to use the email inbox to stage the social media platform. So is email the key ingredient to capturing interactions and the eyeballs? It seems that with this news it validates the inbox more then anything I have seen before. Email is the glue. And with social media use, email is the factor still bringing so much of this together.

But will this reduce the inbox in anyway? How will it look? What impact will it have on email in the inbox as it might now fight for even more attention?

Who needs InBox 2.0 when you can get Life 2.0?

Yesterday Mike Arrington noted the stories that both Yahoo and Google are planning to build social networks around their email services. But so far the plans seem to lack a certain ambition. TechCrunch UK has the scoop today on a new stealth-mode app which aims to map any social network against your email, be it Facebook, OpenSocial or LinkedIn, Outlook or Gmail, thus pulling out key trends and useful data. Right now Socialistics, is a Facebook app by Techlightenment - best known for developing the witty Bob Dylan app - which was interesting enough to win them an hour’s audience with Tim O’Reilly. Socialistics is now being ported to work with other apps and social networks. A recent test version on a Gmail account I have seen, brings up a slider which allows you to visually morph the themes contained in your email over time, and creates tag clouds of people and key words. Click on a word like “important” and you get a tag cloud and a graph about people most associated with that word. But Techlightenment is prepping a version which will map ALL your interactions with your network, including IM and VOIP phone conversations. In theory there will be no privacy issues as this information is meant solely for personal consumption. Not bad.

Well at least this is not a study in the US. Could I really spend more time on LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook and still have a job? I can’t fathom that I could nor would. But this does not really show me, as I am passing that 35 mark in a few months and going to be OFFICALLY off the hot target list. I mean I am lest apt to make low dollar widget purchases than I would have last year, or even want the latest band t-shirt.

But will this spread across the pond to the US? I am not sure. Maybe the Brits have more time to spend in social networks than we do, or maybe we just work more…. Ready for the comments guys…

This is what stood out “Younger internet users - those age 18 to 34 - tend to visit social-network sites more than they do web email sites, whereas the reverse is true for those 35+, Goad writes.” So this being said, will it lead to behavior changes in consumers in 3-5 years as the demo grows up? Or will they find that making a salary to cover the rent and feed the family is more important that my Top 10 friends on MyWaste?

The thing that is funny to me about this is I think email use is increased with all of these social networking sites. I can’t tell you how many “alerts” I get a day from Linked In and Facebook letting me know someone wants to join my “friends”, has posted to my wall, wanted me to recommend them, introduce them, or vote or share something with them. These sites, in my opinion, are using email as the hook more than anyone else.

Here is the chart if you have yet to see it and the article can be read here.

I am not going to state that I am bitter about this campaign, but I pitched some ideas in January 2006 and lost, but it has been going on for about 18 months and needs something new. 18 months is one of the longest email campaigns I have ever seen and maybe it is working so well they wonder WHY CHANGE IT? Well it is stagnant to me. I really don’t even take the time to read the clever prose at all, just file it away in my “watch box” (folder of campaigns/brands I follow).

With so many ideas and creative minds behind hotel chains, I would love to see this one retired with the last toll of the bell in 2007 and a fresh start in 2008.

Have any of you seen a campaign run this long? And if so, do you care anymore?

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Let’s continue how email is the driving force behind social media site growth. Not RSS, not widgets, not PR but email marketing campaigns launched by people’s personal address book when they dump it into a social media site, like LinkedIn. Now Stefan, don’t hold this against me for using yours, but it is honestly my favorite personal invite yet. Straight to the point and brutally honest.

And to set the record straight we did not get drunk on a plane, although I will now on the next flight I see you at. Maybe we need a linked in for frequent travelers to meet up in boarding areas, airport bars and on planes to pass the time. WAIT I think that there was an Idaho Senator not to long ago that had something like this going on… so forget that. Glad this email did not say foot tapping in a bathroom stall.

“Invitation to connect on LinkedIn
From: Stefan Tornquist
Date:November 15, 2007
To: Dylan Boyd
Status:Pending

Dylan,

Once a year I clean up Outlook whether it needs it or not, so sorry for another linkedinvite. At some point we’ve emailed, exchanged cards or gotten drunk on a plane, I promise.

-Stefan Tornquist”

Another great idea on creating an event. Now this is not an over the top idea, like the one I saw this past week for the Westin of a “BabyVersay” package (leading up to the birth of a child a trip for the expecting parents.. where were you 5 months ago?) but it is a anniversary sale that felt creative and special. It’s a party in an email is all I could think of when I saw this one.

As customers we are expecting you to do the unexpected to capture our attention in the inbox AND as a brand. So mix it up and win the sale. I am watching this holiday season close as the doom and gloom crew is projecting a slower holiday retail season, so I expect some clever ideas in order to stand out of the barrage we are all about to get.

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For all of you email marketers out there, get your nomination forms in for the eec award to be presented at the event in February. I am sure that many of you have done great work and are worthy of submission. That is as long as you have not ended up on my Worst of Email list.

The Email Performance Award Recognizes Superior Results in Email Marketing

Click here for the nomination form.

The eec recently created the Email Performance Award, which recognizes an individual or company that has created a campaign that demonstrates the full power of email marketing. Chosen by the members of the eec, the winning campaign will provide further evidence of email marketing’s unsurpassed return on investment and provide inspiration to others seeking to elevate the performance of their own programs. Entries will be evaluated for their marketing strategy, creative components and–most importantly–results. Campaigns from any industry vertical (B2B, B2C, nonprofit, education, etc.) are eligible, so long as results must have been achieved within the last 12 months and the campaign was entirely permission-based.

Nominations close on December 10, 2007.

The members of the eec will select the winner from among the Email Performance Award finalists, which will be determined by the eec’s leadership and announced in mid January. The winner will receive free admission to the Email Evolution Conference at the Sheraton Hotel & Marina in San Diego, where the Email Performance Award will be presented on February 13, 2008 at a luncheon sponsored by Merkle.

The winner of the Email Performance Award will also be placed into the semi-finals of the Direct Marketing Association’s International ECHO Awards. The Oscar of direct marketing and a much sought-after industry honor, the ECHO is the only comprehensive international direct marketing award recognizing excellence in strategy, creativity and results.