The Email Wars

Barely beating Retail Email Blog, we entered on day one at 312. Now just to climb the ladder. Ad Age Power 150, here we come. There is quite a mix of stats to reach the 150 mark. Looks like I have some work to do. but thanks to you all for reading me and making sure that we stay on the ball.

Would love it if you would DIGG it, mark in it your Delicious bookmarks, link to it, or even tell a friend or co-worker about it.

There are some other contenders in the mix as well and I want to recognize them.

BeRelevant: 199
Vertical Response Blog: 217
The Email Wars: 312
Retail Email Blog: 319

See the whole list

Okay I am screaming it from the roof tops. Damn it why are we not in Miami today? We heard it from Google before we heard it from MarketingSherpa. Guess that they can send us our award but it would have been fun to be there to accept it. But with the power blackout in Miami today maybe it was better to be in Portland working on new client email marketing campaigns.

We are besides ourselves about the marketing community recognition with this campaign. It is downright amazing to win one award, let alone three in three weeks. It only makes us want to create even better campaigns for our clients that drive more success.

(Selfless Self-Promotion – Warning)
If you are on the fence with your email marketing campaigns, I think it might be time for you to call us. We are ready to do the best work of our lives this year, and I know you want to be with us. It only strengthens the time, hours, thought, and sweat we pour into our clients efforts. We really want to own these results and I think that with this campaign it really shows.

Here is the Award Category from MarketingSherpa.com

Best Promotional Blast-Direct Sale or Lead Gen Offer (Consumer) Gold: “Wacom: Power of Pens” submitted by eROI

Silver (tie): “Kodak – “Two-fer” submitted by OgilvyOne Worldwide
Silver (tie): “Windows Live Hotmail Incentivize Migration” submitted by VML Seattle
Honorable Mention: “Raptors – Oh My Bosh!” submitted by Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment

(more…)

The week prior after returning from the Email Experience Council event in San Diego we were asked to be interviewed by the local Portland NBC news station about how people deal with the volumes of digital communications they deal with during working hours. On average my sales and strategy team get between 300 and 500 plus email messages a day. Many of them are industry emails, alerts we set up to monitor clients and client competitors, as well as many campaigns we are opted in to to watch what is going on with certain brands we all follow for competitive research. I will be the first to admit that it is a little overwhelming on some days, especially when I have a day that is booked from 7am to 5pm with meetings and calls. Forget lunch, whenever that might occur is used to catch up. Are we information junkies, slaves to the industry, or simply information workers doing our jobs. I go with the latter. We have to be connected to excel in this industry and watching everything daily to do the best job for our clients and stay ahead of everyone else we compete against in the interactive marketing space.

(more…)

Well a week went by and we are very excited to have won a second award for the PowerOfthePens.com campaign we produced last Dec for Wacom. This award was from the American Marketing Association of Oregon for the “Best Web Campaign” of 2007. This is our second AMA MAX award in 2 years (Kettle Foods last year) and the second award for this campaign in 2 weeks time. The team is really excited.

Thanks to our GREAT client Wacom for allowing us to do such great work.

Watch the Videos on the next page!

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I love the sense of humor in this email from Dell this past February. The gift to those that they love was the gift of a subscription management preference center. They used the holiday as an unexpected date to release the news and give their subscribers MORE control over the types of emails they get from Dell. I appreciated not only the humor, but the fact that Dell like more and more brands are giving the control back to the subscriber.

The fact is you really don’t want to lose your subscribers if they are tired of getting emails on certain products or subjects that are not relevant, what you want it to keep them and allow them to tell you what they want. The preference center allows you to turn that control back to them and give them the ability to change it as they want to. In the case of Dell you might not be looking for a laptop this quarter but instead a printer, so you can let them know that. So refreshing to hear some big brands take this approach… now let’s just see how they pull it off.

Now you can stay in touch with email and marketing news on the go, on us.

eROI wanted to give marketers a new mobile tool to help them stay connected to the sites and blogs that they should be reading on the go. We have brought together a collection of some of the top sites as a starting point for you. We have also allowed you to add your own content from a library of sites and blogs as well as given you the ability to add any RSS feeds you might find useful.

This is a way to start thinking about mobile and what it means to you, your brand and your customers as you start to dip your toe into mobile marketing this year and next.

We can warn you that this application is addictive and will empower you to follow anything you are interesting no matter where you are.

If you have not had a chance to check out our new mobile RSS News Reader yet, you owe it to yourself. As a blog reader and marketer we are giving you your own copy of the eROI Mobile RSS News Reader. We have aggregated feeds from blog like:

The Email Wars, Email Days, ReturnOnSubscriber, EEC Blog, Mail Chimp, Mediapost: Email Insider, Retail Email Blog, Strongmail, Marketing Profs, MIT Ad Lab, Engadget, Springwise, TechCruch, Bronto Blog, Campaign Monitor Blog, Denise Cox’s Blog, Email Marketing Reports, Email Marketing Voodoo, Email Standards Project, ReturnPath Blog, Smith-Harmon Blog, Vertical Response Blog, What Counts Blog …. and many more.

Not only will you find these resources now on your phone, blackberry, treo or other mobile device, but you can add any others you would like to follow.

Go get a copy for yourself and move to the 3rd Screen today with the eROI Mobile RSS Newsreader.

I am a big fan of preference centers… when they are actually used. This example from Nordstroms is one that pains me as I had removed myself from their lists a few years back due to getting emails only for women. The fact that is killing me is that they have a profile management center where I selected ONLY men’s clothing emails. And still every other day I get emails selling women’s targeted items.

This is truly frustrating from a consumer experience and I wanted to find out if it was just me. So I picked up the phone and called some other guys I know and found a few that had subscribed to Nordstroms emails. They reported the same exact thing that I was finding. A few of them had unsubscribed just as I had before as they got tired of getting irrelevant emails.

Take a look at the profile center. It is well done, clear and sets the expectation as to what I am going to get in my inbox. Too bad that they are not delivering on it.

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If you are using a subscription center in your email opt in programs, deliver on what people are asking to receive. The worst thing that you can do it send things that they do not want. And in this case, I have seen my Nodstroms card bill and I know that they carry plenty of men’s clothes and have more than enough to share with men.

How many of you have run or entered a contest online? I bet the majority of you as contests are still like crack out there to the general population. But how many of you have never heard from the brand after the contest has wrapped up? So many contests fail to use the YOU HAVE NOT WON email to it’s full transactional potential. Many brands we see let the winner know but have a hard time seeing how they can use this as a “award” touch point to those that did not win.

Timberland’s example illustrates this well by using the event to “award” a 20% off gift code on your next purchase. Now it is not that they could not have sent this type of email out on it’s own, but the fact that they closed down the campaign full circle and did not leave people out to dry or wondering if they ever made the announcement.

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Think about this from a consumer perspective next time you run a promotion like this. Email is a great channel to keep delivering an incentive even when you aren’t the winner.

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FTC Reels In Web Sites Where Pre-Teens Send E-Cards

The Federal Trade Commission is now advising Web site operators that they should obtain parents’ consent before letting users under age 13 send an e-card that includes the senders’ e-mail address or first and last name. Previously, the FTC said site operators could allow children under 13 to forward items to their friends as long as the sites deleted the email address provided by the children. The revisions were posted recently in the FTC’s compliance materials to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.

Read Article

Well I just came to after returning Wed PM from the eec event in San Diego last week. The event was great. Good panels, speakers, people etc. But the weather went south, and not in a good way. Seems it snowed in San Diego once we left. 72 and sunny right.

Besides the event we had one of the eROI team taken to the hospital by ambulance from an allergic reaction to shellfish hidden in the apps; as well as a scuffle narrowly averted with the Australian special forces with one member of the eec hailing from NYC (I had to throw myself in the middle and used some quick limericks and sea shanty’s to throw them off his trail.) Other than that it rocked.

And I came home with the flu. It knocked me down for 48 hours and I am just getting back online. For those of you that know me, it takes a lot to get me away from my laptop, but I don’t think I have ever felt so bad.

Thanks to all of you that came to the event and joined our Wed AM Keynote on email blogging. I hope that you learned a bit about the bloggers behind the blogs and are now ready to participate in the discussion.

Cheers.

Now you can stay in touch with email and marketing news on the go, on us.

eROI wanted to give marketers a new mobile tool to help them stay connected to the sites and blogs that they should be reading on the go. We have brought together a collection of some of the top sites as a starting point for you. We have also allowed you to add your own content from a library of sites and blogs as well as given you the ability to add any RSS feeds you might find useful.

This is a way to start thinking about mobile and what it means to you, your brand and your customers as you start to dip your toe into mobile marketing this year and next.

We can warn you that this application is addictive and will empower you to follow anything you are interesting no matter where you are.

Do note that it does use data services, so you may want to adjust your settings to only connect when you want it to. If not it is always updating your feeds at all time. For those without unlimited data service plans on your mobile device, do take note of this fact.

We hope that you enjoy it and use it to stay up on industry news as well as things that you truly care about.

Go get it >>

PORTLAND, Ore. ( February 11, 2008 ), eROI, Inc ., a leading online marketing agency, today announced that MediaPost Communications, the leading advertising and media Internet portal, has selected eROI as their first email service provider (ESP). MediaPost will use eROI’s email marketing platform, emailROI, for broad use for over 30 MediaPost publications.

By using emailROI, MediaPost is able to continue creating and producing emails on their existing content management system, then send them to the emailROI platform (via the emailROI API) for distribution, tracking and reporting. emailROI allows MediaPost to better report with advanced email tracking for emails sent to their member base.

“We are proud to have MediaPost join our family of clients,” said Ryan Buchanan, CEO of eROI. “We continually strive to provide the best services for clients that want to communicate with precision and agility. Our customers have chosen to work with us because we make doing this easy and as effective as possible.”

Now delivering millions of emails a month to online marketers around the world, MediaPost and eROI have established this relationship to focus on getting the news, information and program notifications that hundreds of thousands of marketers rely on daily. “MediaPost ran emailROI through several tests and we feel they provide the most efficient and complete solution for our needs,” said Jeff Loechner, President of MediaPost Communications. “MediaPost sends out newsletters and notifications to over 100,000 members daily. It’s important that we have the ability to segment our members, then build, send and intelligently track professional email newsletters that look great across all major email clients.”

During testing to troubleshoot any issues that might arise from content and email reputation, eROI worked with its partner ReturnPath to do advanced email deliverability and content rendering. MediaPost relies on eROI to make sure their emails make it to their subscriber’s inbox.

According to Webcredible, a usability and accessibility consultancy, the most requested mobile service respondents wanted on their data-enabled mobile phones was email.

This is really of no surprise that 33% of respondents stated email was their most needed mobile utility. There are many reasons to have a data enabled mobile phone such as: keeping up to date with your schedule, supporting your social life, and being able to check traffic when driving to a meeting; but when it comes to getting business done, email is still where the rubber meets the road.

This also explains one possible reason that since the iPhone was released, it’s been the number 2 smartphone, behind Research in Motion’s BlackBerry. Road warriors use technology to enable us work from anywhere, and BlackBerry is simply made for email.

The number two most requested feature was social networks with 25% of the survey results. This tells us that many mobile phone users (and most web workers, we estimate) like to get their MySpace or Facebook fix in between all those business calls and emails. It must be pointed out, however, that more and more business relationships are being fostered by using online social networks. I expect that as this use rises, social networking will take over as the number one requested mobile feature.

As a last statistic, local information requests were third on the list at 20%. These requests consist of questions such as “what’s around me?” With services such as Google Maps My Location, which tracks your location in a GPS-like service, local information requests are of great value to on-the-go workers. Imagine a situation where you are going to meet a client to discuss a proposal at a coffee shop, but the intended coffee shop is closed. With a service such as My Location, you can quickly see other coffee shops in your vicinity and easily change your meeting location without having to take too much time away from your meeting.

Do you have your mobile email and how are you positioning your email campaigns for mobile? Get ready, as it is here.

Read the study.. and look for the eROI mobile system release we are giving away at the EEC event next week to all that attend.