The Email Wars

Take our latest email marketing survey!

At eROI, staying on top of the latest in email marketing is always a top priority. In this new email marketing survey we ask you, our customers, “What are the elements of a great email?”
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To show our appreciation, all survey participants will be automatically entered to win one of a handful of iTunes gift certificates!

This survey should take just a couple minutes of your time, and we will share the results with you upon completion. At the end of the survey, be sure to download our new eROI Email Marketing Guide from our Resources Center, updated for 2008! You will be given a link to the guide upon the completion of the survey.

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If you did not have anything else to worry about this week, here you go… more domains. Okay, now that we are past that, you can breathe. It is going to be okay. In the past this might have been a concern, but really it is just Yahoo making a last ditch effort to slow the hemorrhaging loss they are having in trust and audience share in regard to people using email as a hook to the portal.

Yahoo is opening up some new domains that will deliver through the same delivery channels as you work on now for whitelisting and email deliverability, just throwing a new coat of paint on the outside. If you are dying to get an email address with your name instead of jimbob1234@domain.com you are in luck. And if you are reading this and thinking WOW this is great news, then maybe you are reading the wrong blog. This is a low hanging fruit play and not really that news relevant. 

So relax, work up that next email campaign, sip down that Triple Mocha Latte Quad shot extremely hot half whip beverage and breathe. Actually one thing to consider is that your ESP has a handle on it as some ESPs may not have these new domains as valid domains in their lists. It does happen.

Read the News Here>

Now I know that this is a morbid post title, but as I was driving today I had a thought pop into my head, What the heck happens to your email accounts when you die? Has anyone ever talked about this? Does your next of kin contact all the ISPs that you have email accounts with and deactivate them? Do they just live on getting more and more email? Does anyone know?

Consider this in the fact of your email list churn or non respondents. Have you ever once considered the fact that maybe the fact that they have stopped reading your email is that they have died? I can tell you I had never considered this as something to think about before this past week. How do you know? Do you send out an email with a subject line “Alive or Dead? Please confirm?”. That might be one way of taking a whack at this issue, but as we are growing the upward online demographic more and more each week, month and year we might need to start considering this in our inactive files. 

What this bodes well for is list hygiene and keeping your list in order. So many people have “dirty” lists where they are not taking the actions to cull or move non active emails to another list. They simply continue to mail to them come hell (no pun intended) or high water. So what are you doing? Are you keeping on top of your list and working on segmenting addresses based on inactivity? I hope so as unless their next of kin took a liking the the email address they had or got access to it, you are simply mailing into the ether.

For many of you that we not able to make the eROI Annual party last Friday, I wanted to share with you some photos from the event. To sum it up… it was crazy.

We had 3 DJs, a live hip hop band, 12 local fashion designers, 60 models (3 of which were eROI employees and in my opinion were the best of show), and we estimate somewhere between 1200 and 1500 people in attendance. Wow. Maybe next time you should think about making it. 

Here are some photos from the event for you to enjoy:

So with a release a few months back from GoDaddy telling people that they now offer an email marketing platform for GoDaddy Domain owners, they release this… basically if you get a spam complaint and you host your domain with them, they will charge you $200 and $75 to get your domain back. Now everyone (trust me here) deals with a spam complaint every now and then as consumers feel it is easier to mark as spam than it is to unsubscribe. So are they now going to hold brands and companies hostage for pay anytime some marks an email as spam or junk? Or just when they file a formal complaint? I really don’t know but I think this is a bonehead move. Maybe it is just to scare their own customers hwo are using their email marketing service whom host with them as they could be non educated email marketers just happy with paying $7/mo to send emails?

From Deliverability.com

Don’t host domains at GoDaddy if you do email marketing (who doesn’t?)
A reader forwarded this GoDaddy message to me (I have anonymized it) asking for advice. Apparently GoDaddy is now charging for handling spam complaints and has a $200 “spam tax” for clients that do email marketing. If they receive spam complaints against you, they are claiming that they will hold your domain ransom unless you pay $75 to release it.

Basically, GoDaddy is saying that if you do email marketing or have affiliates that send emails linking to your site, they don’t want your business.

http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/06/dont-host-domai.html

Some of you might have already noticed that this blog went live this week. It was a little premature as I still had things to change and add to it, but none the less, here it is. Now it is not a completely new look, just an updated look on a new blogging platform. We are in the midst of shifting all of our blogs over as well as adding 3 more blogs. I think you will like them as our blog network unfolds over this summer. 

Thanks for your patience while I was dark for a short time. We had the honor of winning Battle of the Portland Ad Fed bands last Wed, we were awarded the 36th fastest growing company in Oregon on Thursday, had our annual party on Friday (look for a post with pictures from the madness) and then I was in NYC Sat PM to Thursday AM in client meetings and speaking at the Digital Publishers Conference. 

Busy week. I will be back at running my mouth next week, don’t worry.

In light of only being 12 posts away from the 1000 post mark, I thought it was timely to go “dark” and reflect on why I am blogging, do you care and what is next for The Email Wars. Well here is where it is going…

Look in the next week for a completely new look, look for a new Twitter feed at Twitter.com/eroi to be feeding in content and updates as they happen, look for new content, new snark, new weekly email recaps (redesigned) on Thursdays at 10am PST (Weekly Frequency automated by emailROI’s legendary RSS to email platform), and feeds that contain MIND blowing email marketing and new marketing ideas, stories, hate mail, reviews, industry gossip, where to snipe me at the next speaking event, awards we win, non profits we volunteer for, parties we throw and yeah, email stuff on delivery and the Email Wars we all fight each and every day.

I am even thinking of publishing the longest blog post I have ever written on a crazy story I want to share… need some encouragement here to be really transparent…. but it will be worth it.. I think.

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Before you hit send on that next email, Seth Godin advises us run down this list, just to be sure. There are some things in here we can take into consideration in email marketing campaigns. And a list like this might be a good idea for you to create if you are either in charge or email campaigns OR have a team working with you on them.

1. Is it going to just one person? (If yes, jump to #10)
2. Since it’s going to a group, have I thought about who is on my list?
3. Are they blind copied?
4. Did every person on the list really and truly opt in? Not like sort of, but really ask for it? So that means that if I didn’t send it to them, they’d complain about not getting it?
See #5. If they wouldn’t complain, take them off!
5. That means, for example, that sending bulk email to a list of bloggers just cause they have blogs is not okay.
Aside: the definition of permission marketing: Anticipated, personal and relevant messages delivered to people who actually want to get them. Nowhere does it say anything about you and your needs as a sender. Probably none of my business, but I’m just letting you know how I feel. (And how your prospects feel).

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Very excited to see Campaign Monitor continue to share with the email marketing community. Our designers love them for the help that they provide to the design community.

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In the last year, we’ve seen some changes in the email client market. Webmail usage continues to grow significantly while new versions of popular desktop clients have been released. In an attempt to stimulate some improvement on the CSS front, we’ve helped launch the Email Standards Project.

While we can hope for future improvements, it’s the present we need to design for. The time has arrived to again poke and prod the major email clients to determine just how much (or how little) support they provide for using CSS with HTML emails.

Last year’s report focused on the unique challenges of Outlook 2007. In 2008, Outlook is still an issue, but there are encouraging signs in other areas.

The release of Entourage 2008 (the Mac equivalent of Outlook) made great improvements with CSS support, bringing it on par with Apple Mail’s excellent rendering. Proof that perhaps Microsoft has been listening and we can only hope that the next version of Outlook will follow suit.

Get the PDF of the CSS Chart for email clients at the link below.
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

I know that many of you that read this email marketing blog might relate to what I am about to share with you. The names have been removed to protect the crazy. Now not saying that this person was crazy, just passionate about getting off a clients opt in list. Every once in a while we get people that do not want to use the unsub link or reply to the sender to remove them from their list. So what do they do? They look at the headers of the email and find out who the email service provide (ESP) is and send us the email.

I know many of you have got these. We take them very seriously and reply immediately and take action even faster. But this one illustrates the fun in the ESP world we get to experience. Totally transparent with all of you here.

I have actually written a post some months back that I am still on the fence about posting from an amazing phone call I got from a guy that got an opt in email from one of our clients. Still don’t know if I will ever post it. We will see. It is insane, as was the caller.

But here it is in all of it’s glory. Is it clear what this person wants? And how long did it take to create this email? If I take the rules of clarity in copy writing into practice, this person nailed it. Consider yourself removed. But what client were you emailing about? Love this industry?

I have been watching surveys in email lately as more and more brands are frequently using them. The fact that they are asking is great. How they are asking and the method of taking the surveys are another story.

Many of the things that I found to be issues are:
1. You must log into your account to take the survey. Lost me. Will lose most people
2. You must log into to your account to manage your email preferences. Now this is not unsubscribe, but why can’t you click from a link to do this? They have all the info to pass already.
3. There is no action to take on the thank you pages to get me to go somewhere or make me an offer for the time and information I just gave you.
4. The sender email address is not the brand. The from field is, but everything else is from a 3rd party.

All challenges to goal completion in my book.

Apple:

The creative is nice and clean. Expected from Apple. But the sender email address is from a 3rd party survey company ghosting the Apple name in the sender field. Red flag to me. You?

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Big Props to eROI Design team for winning our first ever Logo/Brand design award, really it is titled “Best Logo Design”. It was for a massive rebranding project we did for our client Perkins Accounting. We did the site, email, business cards letter head copy and even, yes, the logo.

Here it is in ALL of it’s glory in our Portfolio, don’t be shy…

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AAM Marketing Achievement Awards
AAM-MAA Forty Awards Distributed to Honor Top Marketing Tactics

San Diego, Calif.. - The Association for Accounting Marketing distributed 40 Marketing Achievement Awards (AAM-MAAs) to 30 different firms to recognize their outstanding achievements in the areas of accounting marketing and communications.

A panel of judges, including professionals in advertising, consulting, professional services and marketing, judged nearly 250 entries in 19 different categories. Accounting firms from all over the United States and Canada competed in two divisions - under $15 million in revenues and over $15 million in revenues. Categories included Web site design, collateral/identity materials, niche business development and print
advertising for CPA firms.

This was the 14th year the annual awards were presented. Winners were announced at the organization’s 19th Annual Conference, AAM Summit 2008, Wild on Marketing in San Diego, Calif. on June 5, 2008.

Internet Strategy Forum Summit 2008
July 17-18, 2008
Governor Hotel, Portland, Oregon
http://www.internetstrategyforum.org/summit

Internet Strategy Forum Summit attendees will gain actionable insight into smart enterprise Internet strategy as they engage with VP and C-level keynote presenters* from leading global companies such as eMarketer,Forrester Research, Disney, Nike, Intel, IBM, WebTrends and Fandango, who will share their experience and ideas on how to best leverage the Internet and integrate it into your overall business strategy.

The event covers a diverse array of important and complementary strategy areas, including: general digital strategy, social media, integrated marketing, e-commerce, email marketing,customer metrics

Presenters include:
* Geoffrey Ramsey, Co-founder & CEO, eMarketer
* Nancy Bhagat, VP of Sales and Marketing Group, Intel
* Daniel Stickel, new CEO, WebTrends (formerly with Google)
* Charlene Li, VP & Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
* Chris Shimojima, VP, Global Digital Commerce, Nike
* David Placier, VP, Consumer Insights, Disney Online
* Shane O’Neill, Chief Technology Officer, Fandango
* Mike Moran, Distinguished Engineer, IBM, author (highest-rated speaker at
2007 Summit)

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If you are in NYC June 25th and looking to learn from some people much greater than myself, come to the Digital Publishing Conference. http://www.dpaconference.com/. Should I be scared? Nope, I am ready to rock this!

A Case Study: The ABC’s of Digital Publishing: The task of managing and delivering your content into a digital form can be a daunting task. Just about all publishers and content companies have an online and digital presence today, but are they headed in the right direction? Do they have an A+ distribution strategy, use of advanced technologies, the right online approach to connect with and engage their audience? What is the right mix of web, digital magazines, email, podcasts, video, online communities, and mobile to fuel growth? And what digital advertising solutions, formats, and integrated sales strategies are they using to please advertisers and increase their revenue? Find out about the ABC’s of digital publishing from the leaders in the field who are winning the hearts and minds of their audience and their advertisers.

Moderator:
Tim McHale, Managing Partner/Editor, Madison Avenue Consultants

Speakers:
Chuck Cordray, VP General Manager, Digital Media, Hearst
Christy Tanner, VP, Marketing and Editor in Chief, TV Guide Online
Ben Mosse, Director, AP Mobile Product Development
Rich Murphy, SVP, BPA Worldwide
Dylan Boyd, VP, eROI

eROI featured in the Wall Street Journal this week. Nice to see us and others like Vidoop and Jive Software getting some national coverage. With Oregon hit so hard with the downturn in jobs in many sectors it was great to see smaller companies like the ones above help to offset the job loss.

If you have not heard, Portland rocks. Our new Neighborhood in Old Town PDX is bringing all sorts of tech companies back to downtown.

Bring your company to Oregon today and become a Portvangelist!

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