The Email Wars

So after a few weeks of letting this stew with legal and PostNet Canada, seems that they are good guys. We got word back that they had NO idea that there was a product named emailROI that had been in existence and use by some of our Canadian customers since 2002.

But what is amazing is that the agency they hired to create the brand mark never took the steps to look before presenting it to the client. I really want to know who this agency is and if they will ever get hired again.

Here is the response from our law firm:

“Here’s a win for the good guys! I just got off of the phone with Rob Anderson, President of PostNet Canada. He got our letter and wanted to apologize for their use of the “Email ROI” mark. Apparently, their marketing company didn’t complete any diligence at all to make sure that no one was already utilizing that name in this space. He said that they will immediately cease all use of the mark.”

Thanks Rob for realizing this mistake and taking the high road on this. I know that it is going to be painful to pull all the collateral and other elements that are out in all of your stores already, but hey good news… you guys are in the printing business. I bet you can make more.

Well hypothetically I am in Mexico this week drinking up the sun and time away from the internetZ. This is IF I can stay off the wifi there. I anticipate that there will be bets at the office. We will see.

So I have made sure not to let you down and set up some posts to keep you engaged during my absence. Hope you enjoy them and I will be back next week in the flesh, although I hope it is tanned and not crispy.

Just realized tonight as I was putting together posts for this week that I have been diligently writing and posting to this blog for 3 years this month. Wow if I added up the hours spent on this I might actually had time for a few more vacations.

Overall we have been actively blogging since July 1, 2003 which makes it 5 years almost. Long time. We mothballed the two first blogs out there, and moved to this one, EmailDays, and ReturnOnSubscriber. In tribute to this work we are adding 2 more blogs this summer. One from our NYC office and the other from the Creative team at eROI. Should be fun.

We have new designs that are in production for the 3 current blogs and I know you will like them. They are well designed of course and I think will allow you to get more information from our collective noggins.

Thank you for your steady readership as over 1000 of you are reading it almost every day and 1000s of others are jumping in a few times a week. Makes me feel like the time is worth it if I am a good resource for you.

Really???

You want to create a product called emailROI and roll out as a new product at the FedEx/Kinkos of Canada (PostNet) called emailROI? Guys, ever thought about doing a Google search let alone trademark search before naming a product that purports to be EXACTLY the same thing? OMG these are some dumb SOBs. Sorry if I am offending the smart Canadians out there but this is insane.

Wait, if you type it with a space (email ROI) instead of as one word (emailROI) it must be completely different… right? I have been sitting on this for a few weeks but still cannot wrap my head around this. Guess sending it over to the lawyers is all we can do now.

Tip: Go to Google, enter desired word or name, see what comes back. Revise product names.

Apr 08, 2008 08:29 ET
Email ROI (Return on Investment)
PostNet (Canada Post’s Authorized Business Centre) Launches New Business Product
TORONTO, ONTARIO–(Marketwire – April 8, 2008) -

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=841224

ATTENTION: Business, Technology/Printing, and Marketing Editors

PostNet locations are set to launch Canada’s only in-store business support centre email marketing service Email ROI, allowing its clients quick and easy email marketing solutions.

Email marketing in 2006 had the highest return within the communication medium, an averaged $51.45 return on investment (ROI) dollars for each $1 spent (Canadian Marketing Association).

“PostNet has seen a significant increase in small to medium businesses choosing cost effect online marketing in conjunction with traditional direct mail approaches. The demand for PostNet to implement e-marketing was too strong for us not to move forward,” says Rob Anderson, President of PostNet Canada.

Email ROI promises to offer small to medium sized business owners a wide variety of cutting edge full & self-serve online marketing solutions that will help entrepreneurs take charge of their email marketing and communication efforts from start to finish.

Email ROI changes the way e-business is done.

Email ROI is unparalleled in its appeal to consumers by literally cutting costs of printed materials, postage and time. Through Email ROI, business owners can directly maximize their online marketing initiatives – from organizing, managing and growing your lists; to customizing messaging and deployment (98 per cent delivery rate); to measuring recipient response through unique Email ROI open rate statistics and click analysis; to studying audience reaction and fine-tuning positioning to better suit their needs.

The addition of Email ROI not only provides PostNet customers with tailored e-marketing campaigns but also re-affirms PostNet as Canada’s boutique business solution centre.

About PostNet
PostNet is the ultimate business support centre. The company has grown to more than 900 franchises throughout North America and abroad and is working towards a goal of 1,500 global franchises within three to five years.

For more information, visit www.postnet.ca.

As a creative interactive agency, we buy images from online sources for web design and email campaign projects. But we don’t always opt in for the email newsletter from the check out. I am sure that this is also the case for you and even for your own customers. So you can message them around transactional emails, product updates of products they bought and even ones like this that ASK them if they want to get on the newsletter list. If you do it right you can have a good lift into your house list. But automatically placing them on an email newsletter list is not the right thing to do and you will end up losing them or at the worse end of the spectrum, offending them.

So here is a good example of what Corbis did to reach out to me. Does not hurt that it is pretty to boot.

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Over on the Yahoo Mail Blog they stated they have been doing work on Yahoo Mail classic, and of course, anytime they do work, there are bugs.

http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2008/04/24/update-to-yahoo-mail-classic-has-resumed/

The postmaster and development teams at Yahoo have been using the blog to communicate changes, and actively read comments from users. If you are experiencing problems, it is a good place to post or read comments from other users to see if they are already aware of the issues.

Comments from the WEB on this:

Someone was asking about problems with Yahoo yesterday. I use Yahoo Classic for my personal emails and I noticed yesterday and today that it’s making emails that I haven’t opened as read. If I mark those as unread, it then marks other unread emails as read. So perhaps there’s not a deliverability issue but one with open and click rates because subscribers are not reading messages because Yahoo is telling them that they’ve already looked at the emails. Anyone else seeing this?
————

I’m seeing similar problems in the new version of Yahoo Mail. Over the past week, in my personal account:

Previously read & deleted emails have returned to my inbox as unread
The inbox has failed to load & generated JavaScript errors
Individual messages have been failing to load, generating internal Yahoo error messages to try again

It seems as if they may be doing some behind-the-scenes work that’s negatively impacting the user experience–and, in some cases, making select messages unreadable for a period of time.

I wanted to share with you another client that is doing a good job of using our RSS to emailROI system to help them get timely content out in an automated manner. Sure they could use RSS, but their audience really does not grasp RSS as a whole. So the solution was to create a blog that could feed by RSS categories into an emailROI template without duplicating efforts.

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Why is this important? Well you have 10,000 things you are doing this week. Blogging could be one of them. Most likely adding content to your site is the primary task in most cases as static web sites do not bring your customers and prospects back to you. So instead of copying and pasting to create another email that would be using content you have already spent time placing on your site or blog, we give you our system that automatically grabs the content, builds the HTML and Text versions, and then lets you know when it is ready to go at the pre-defined time you set. Simple? You bet it is. And effective. Instead of rushing to put together a campaign, you can sit back and let the campaign build itself from your content fed by RSS.

I can tell you that it is a time saver for many organizations that are eROI clients.

And take a look at how nice it comes out. On brand, relevant, timely, and we throw in an RSS feed from that campaign to boot if you have folks that subscribe to newsletters by RSS.

Interesting article, but let’s take a peek in the email marketing space. Just who are our bloggers? Are they in line with what is reflected in this study?

It seems to me that the email marketing blogger community is not reflective of this study. Maybe we are all just above average?

Gender seems to be evenly reflected.
I would go out on a limb and state that many are around the age found in this study as well.

(more…)

Over 500 marketers were surveyed about the subscribe/unsubscribe process. While these processes are improving, they have yet to reach what we would call exceptional.

You can get the whole PDF in our resources section (Quarterly Studies tab)/ but the call outs below are not in the PDF.

High Level Thoughts:
- Email marketers are not matching up other marketing efforts like they should. Email, search, DM, Print, Call Centers, and sales teams need to get on the same page.

- Email marketers are not monitoring feedback loops and complaint rates. Are they counting on the ESP to do it? Many ESPs like eROI do this, but some do not. Does yours? Or does your program if you run it in house?

- The thank you page, prime visitor real estate is being wasted. There are so many opportunities to be testing the thank you page with Progressive Profiling and offers. As well as setting expectations.

- Not surveying subscribers at opt out. Remember high school when someone wanted to break up? Didn’t you ask WHY are you leaving? This still holds true. Exit surveys are key to finding out why you have churn.

- Not allowing frequency changes. Subscribers should have access to change preferences of frequency just like they can manage a profile with your programs. Do they want to hear from you monthly, weekly, daily, as things that are important to them change? Listen before you speak.

(more…)

In the world of viral email I am often not that impressed with the value of the “viral” pre-planned ability of a campaign, but in the meat of the campaign. IF it is truly something that is authentic, credible, transparent and worth sharing for cred or value… then it has legs to be “viral” or sent on to someone in the peer group of your subscriber. So many times I hear companies, service providers or agencies talking about how they will make it viral. No secret sauce here, you all have the abilities to give your subscribers the content that will help them spread your meesage.

Church of the Consumer had an inspiring post about this below:

How free goes viral – By Jackie Huba
Michele Miller posted this on SWOM. It’s so good I wanted to repost it here:

One of the hottest videos on YouTube today is the Free Hug Campaign – one man giving away free hugs and the effect it has on the people around him.

It’s a perfect parallel to building a viral campaign for your business.

Watch the video and observe:

(more…)

If you have not seen SlideShare, it is something you might want to learn more about. I was looking through it the other day and found some great email marketing decks that are loaded up there. It is a good resource for presentations you might have seen, and an even better one to give your old PPT decks some extended reach and life.

SlideShare allows you to load up your deck, add audio and embed your presentations into sites and blog posts.

Take a look at a few.

From Ken Magill on DM News. Worth the read. Will the state by state insanity ever stop? Can’t they involve the marketers, ISPs and ESPs when they go to create a new bill? We all want it to stop, as it would only benefit our double opt in, above board clients.

Not Again: Anti-Spam Bill Being Crafted in CA
A bill is working its way through the California legislature that supporters contend would strengthen its anti-spam laws and could go in to effect as early as this fall, the San Francisco Chronicle reported last week.

Why is it that so many anti-spam activists refuse to understand that spammers are generally breaking about 142 laws every time they hit “send” already, and that a 143rd magical piece of legislation will do nothing to fix the problem that can’t already be accomplished with existing law?

Click here to read about another misguided effort at trying to legislate spam out of existence.

In tribute to Earth Day here are some gifts from Zinio and VIV Magazine. We all live online, why not start reading your magazines this way? If you have not seen how this works, you need to check it out. For long flights, being offline and even being able to read them in a better format it makes sense.

What is so cool is how it is tied into email as the vehicle for delivery and how the triggers work during the run time of each edition. Something worth checking out.

With over 850 Publications like BusinessWeek and others using it, it will only be a matter of time till we all consider this this standard.

VIV: VIVmag is packed with hundreds of pages of dynamic, fresh, actionable content you can interact with exactly as YOU choose. Discover what’s new in awareness, beauty, fashion, fitness, health, nutrition and travel in the March/April 2008 issue of VIVmag, the first exclusively digital, interactive women’s lifestyle magazine.

ViV Free Issue

Digital Classics: Zinio’s new Digital Classics Library features 100 available titles on a scrollable bookshelf where users can simply click on the spine of a book to open it in their browser. In addition to reading online, consumers can search for content within the books, share titles with friends or save books to read offline later. Your special access to the digital library lets you be one of the first to choose from great classic books such as Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and many more!

Digital Classics Library

Enjoy.

Amazon’s Jeff Barr has admitted to being one of those folks with too many unanswered email messages piled up. But unlike some, he didn’t declare email bankruptcy. Instead, he’s worked out a systematic plan for getting out of trouble:

- Don’t get further behind
- Set aside time to work on the backlog
- Track your progress

What makes this method work – with email or any other giant backlog you’re trying to clear up – is the tracking. If you actually get the daily numbers down where you can see them, it becomes impossible to fool yourself about whether you’re making progress – and you get additional motivation to get to zero.

Try it yourself if you’re in a similar situation!

According to a new report released by trade group Shop.org, conducted by Forrester Research, online sales excluding travel are expected to hit $204 billion in 2008, an increase of 17% over last year. The top three categories will be apparel at $26.6 billion, computers at $23.9 billion and autos at $19.3 billion, according to The State of Retailing 2008 Marketing Report.

Online commerce is expected to account for 7% of all retail sales in 2008, and will top $300 billion in five years, the report said. In addition, 53% of online retailers’ marketing budgets are spent on customer acquisition compared to 21% spent on retention.

The top customer acquisition tactic for online retailers is paid search, which accounts for 35% of new customers on average, according to the study.

The second highest source, attracting 18% of the new customers, is Organic Web traffic. Affiliate programs and e-mail were tied for third place, accounting for 7% each, according to the study.

Though paid search is the top acquisition tool, e-mail to house files is the top online marketing tactic as 92% of online retailers said they use it. 79% say Paid search will be an increased priority this year.

Nearly half of online retailers said they send print catalogs and 46% said they plan to make them an increased priority in 2008, the study said.

Online retailers report popular promotional tactics in this order of preference:
85% say they use free shipping with conditions, with it, the study said
82% use percent-off promotions with saying they use it
69% prefer dollar-off promotions
68% like gift with purchase
67% support online-only sales

For more information, please visit direct magazine here.
http://directmag.com/news/online-sales040808/