The Email Wars

I was hinting last week that we were going to go horizontal in an email campaign. Well after a few weeks of testing and finding out what can and can’t be done in all the email clients… we threw the long ball… the whole width of the field. GO LONG BABY was heard throughout the offices.

We wanted to present the weekly RSS fed Zinio blog email in a way that stood out, as Zinio as a publisher of digital magazines is doing just that. It was part tribute, part marketing, part torture, but pure fun. And voila here we are, radical email marketing.

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Let’s think about this expose in the NYT last week about Goodmail. Now I could agree with them in some ways, but rather if someone has a program that 1. qualifies for Goodmail and 2. Wants to pay for delivery then why is there a problem with it? Truly if the individual has opted in for your email programs you should be able to make sure that it is going to get to the inbox. If this means using a pay for delivery system (now it does not work at all ISPs as of now) then go for it. 

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Well we want you to tell (Us, aka Me) what you think about each post. Now we are not going to ask you to comment, as well that could be a SCARY thing to do on the interWeb. I hear sharing your opinion and social media are just a fad anyway, so why waste your time commenting on a post right? Right. (more…)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..

1. Viagra

2. XXX Fun

3. Nigerian Bank Assistance

Spam Lit (also known as Lit Spam and Literary Spam) is defined as snippets of nonsensical verse and prose embedded in spam e-mail messages. Some of the snippets are made up, others are passages from public domain works (such as Edgar Allan Poe and The Bible), and others are conglomerations of several creative public domain works, which can often be copied off the web and included in e-mail messages hawking software, male enhancement pills, and computers.

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Do you have some questions for the omnipitent ruler of Yahoo Mail? Well here is your chance. You have a 4-5pm Window on the 30th to fire off your questions to Mark. I will be on the beach about that time just thinking about not working… again. (It is a repetitive process to take me away from work and like any good 12 step program takes repeating things to yourself). 

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The other morning I was forwarded the email opt in from another ESP by a co-worker at eROI. Now I am not going to share it at this point as it got my juices flowing. I started to wonder… if all of the ESPs out there are stumping on their soap boxes about best practices, studies, and how people are not doing A-B-C of the basics of email marketing… then are they following these rules themselves. 

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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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Yes, we have it going on our here in Portland, Oregon. The Tech scene is rocking and the companies are moving here from all over the US. But enough about PDX and more about what is going on here this fall. Year TWO of the Inverge Conference is coming up Sept 5-6th. If you need any more reason than that well that week is one of the all time best weeks each year for weather here. 

And here are ALL the awesome speakers >>

If you need more reasons than this… here is what else is going on. And NO we are not talking about email marketing at this event. 

+ Time-Based Art Festival (performance : dance : music : new media : visual arts)

+ MusicFestNW (over 100 indie bands)

+ First Thursday Gallery Walk (an evening of art, wine and music)

+ Portland Creative Conference (focused on design across categories)

I was growing tired of my subscription to MarketingExperiments from Marketing Sherpa. It was not due to the frequency or content as whole, but that the stuff that they kept sending did not feel relevant and I was not ever engaging it. So it was not a break up but more like a “It’s me, not you” type of thing. Well maybe it was a little bit of them. Still love the Sherpa.

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