The Email Wars

Yes Virginia there is no Santa Claus… and while we are at it there is not an email marketing fairy sitting over your shoulder at work either. Am I sure you ask? Well if anyone had a magic fairy it would be the marketing machine of IKEA. I have seen free boats in NYC to Brooklyn, Cars, Ads, Online and everything else they do rock and actually be creative in many places. But what bit them the other week… email personalization. 

I am fairly confident that I have covered this quite a few times as it is one of the trickiest beasts out there. Many of you might think… “Why is this so tricky? It is just a variable you associate with a subscriber data point that exists in your system that dynamically loads that HTML, offer, copy, image, subject line, link, etc into the email one at a time at a rapid rate of speed.” I hear you there but do you truly feel that is is an easy event? What have you forget when loading the coal aboard the express train to Hades? 

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Why the head of Vladimir? Well why not. He was a great revolutionary that would love the Wars we are fighting for the best email campaigns out there. So that being stated, I don’t want his head. I have 24 of them. Yes I buy random things that bring me some sort of joy or inspiration (stop by my office sometime). I have 24 of these Heads of Vladimir Lenin that are Cola Flavored Pops… and one of them can be yours?

Really you can have one? Yes and here is the deal that will get me to drop one in a special cola flavor sealing envelope and ship it right to you. 

1. You need to find an email campaign

2. It can FAIL or it can Exceed Expectations

3. It can be your own or one of someone else

4. You need to write up 150 words of why it was a success or failure and send it to me via email. Those that want to submit should COMMENT (I know soooo scary, but it is ok as I will not publish them all if they don’t need to be published to communicate with me) and I will email you my info if you do not have it already. 

Contest ends when I run out of pops.

After I get them all, I will read through them, share them with some of the eROI team and then select and present the winners. Note employees of eROI you are open to enter this contest as well and will be judged the same as anyone else. BUT I will not ship you a lolly. I will bring it to your desk.

That is all for now Comrades.

Interesting that Pizza Hut would take this approach. It is sorry we F’d up email, but they sure do alot of appologizing. Why not take that opprtunity to say sorry, and then give them the pickle (old saying about give them something that they don’t expect by a famous ice cream parlor owner) which would be order one now with an extra topping or save $1 on your next order with us. 

What is trying with this opt in process is that in order to place your order online for a pizza you HAVE to opt in to email from them. Not sure when that became the standard. It is an aggressive strategy and has been written up on blogs like The Consumerist and others. 

Try to do what you would like done to you in this situation if you ever come up against it. You only have one time to have a bad customer experience while giving people the best treatment over and over again keeps them coming back. 

Here is the email:

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When Do You Check Your E-Mail?

I might not be like you and you might not be like me. I know two people that actually wake up, roll over and the first thing that they do is scroll through the blackberry. Sick? Maybe. But it is their routine. Personally I check mine before I head out the door to work, look for breaking news or fires that might have sprung up overnight, and then drive in to work… where I will check continuously throughout the day. 

I will also be driving, yes hate me but I swear I have a 3rd eye in the middle of my forehead, and at stop lights and check emails then. I need to stop that behavior. But really where do you check email that is odd or where do you check it that is normal? Do we know best times of day when people are showing that they are ADDICTS?

Do we care? As it seems that people are checking email everywhere and at all times of day and night. Even from places like the bathroom and in locations that they might have not reported. 

Is this a sickness? Do we all need to chill out a little bit as addicts? Or should we embrace it as email marketers (aka dealers) and sling them what they want when they want it?

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How often do you get emails spoofing or looking to be from a brand name that you trust? I get them every now and then but this one had me double taking, looking at the headers, and opening it up to code to see what or who it was really from. Now when you go to this length to use a brand like CNN and deliver creative that makes even me think, it has to impact your brand.

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IBM to release Lotus Notes for iPhone - From The Email Standards Project

Now if they could just fix the desktop version so that it was not the biggest pain in the arse to render emails in correctly. I would really appreciate that one. It is one of the most challenging email clients to work in. No?

I had the “pleasure” of using Lotus notes at a prior company for years and as an internal email marketer and web marketer it was frustrating to make things work uniformly in the email client. I can only hope that this version works and does not cause us all mucho frustrations. And back to my earlier thoughts… can they just make the Lotus Notes desktop client more akin to other rendering engines? 

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Daily Search Engine Users Closing in On Email Users

(NOTE: I am blogging this for you in the back of a cab after a red eye, on the drive into Manhattan for meetings. Not easy)

According to a recently released PEW Internet study, the percentage of internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of 49%. The number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60% of internet users who use email on a typical day.

Underscoring the dramatic increase over time, the percentage of internet users who search on a typical day grew 69% from 2002 to May 2008. During the same six-year time period, the use of email on a typical day rose from 52% to 60%, for a growth rate of just 15%.

Get the Pew Study PDF here

Read the rest of this article here at Mediapost

WIth the 2008 Olympics in full swing I wanted to highlight two examples that I got right around the start of the opening ceremonies. Now why I am sharing both of these is for the fact that they are from the same company, but they manage the shopping experience for NBC online. They do a good job of tying in the sale of merchandise to a real life event and use the creative, products, and subject lines to capture your attention. 

The first one from NBC does a good job EXCEPT they failed at the above the creative personalization techniques. Why if they know my name do they call me “Dear Olympics Fan”? That to me is dropping the ball on the 3 yard line when you are heading in to score a touchdown. 

The creative is nice but the header is a little to fat so that it causes you to lose the rest of the email in the preview pane. They could mix in a salad in the design to think about how long the email is and how it renders when quickly reviewing it before fully opening it. They take the bronze here. 

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I wanted to share with you a dialogue from last week that I had with a subscriber to our double opt in newsletter list. We had a campaign go out to subscribers that really had not engaged much with our last few months of newsletters and guide/email marketing study releases. The email chain is posted below in reverse order so that you can see the end and read down to what occurred. 

At eROI we take subscribers seriously and we respect email opt in to the nth degree. When I see people that make changes to a profile or subscription with bogus info or setting us up for a spam trap or complaint I react immediately to see why they would take this action. The below was not an unsubscribe, but an individual making a change to a mailinator.com email address as opposed to just opting out. Why would someone do this? Well read the rest of the post to find out. 

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If you have not noticed the new header on this blog (look at the top) you will now notice that we have added the updated blogs to the masthead. We have redesigned ReturnOnSubscriber and moved EmailDays to eROIDays.com as it makes more sense. 

Look for the launch of an East Coast (NYC Office) and West Coast (PDX Office) blog soon with the daily rantings, finds, and culture of eROI from the whole team. It is a cool new blog that changes coasts based on the last post. Makes it more competitive. 

Ryan Buchanan, our CEO, is working on sharing more about the Company eROI, his thoughts on things that reach his inbox and the industry as whole. 

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BREAKING NEWS: 

Just work to find in my inbox some news of ReturnPath buying Habeas. WOW. Nice work Matt and team. This consolidation is great. I am excited to see how this plays out in the integration of your teams and tools. 

Cheers. 

—- FROM the Release —-

Return Path & Habeas: What It Means For You

Today Return Path is announcing that it has agreed to acquire Habeas. We think this is an exciting day for anyone who cares about the email universe. The combination of the two leaders in email reputation management and deliverability services means more innovation for both email senders and receivers. 

Of course, you are probably wondering what this means for you as a current Return Path client.

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Gmail is having a systemwide outage affecting multiple countries, and a whole bunch of its 100 million users are screaming about it on Twitter. Around 20 million people visit Gmail each day, according to Comscore, and they’re all seeing the same message. The first outages were reported at about 2 pm PST, 44 minutes ago. The Gmail blog is silent on the outage, instead giving readers some useful tips on customizing web clips.

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Have you ever noticed the power of lists for driving readership of newsletters, email or any PR online? We as marketers long for more bullet points and ways that we can quickly take away some knowledge in small bite sized chunks. But I have also noticed that smaller lists have a greater impact? 

Why, well I think that it is simple… smaller lists address the problem and the solution while longer lists seem to just throw things up in the air for you to choose the solution. Here are some examples:

3 Ways to Solve Your Issue

100 Things You Can do to Combat Your Problem

When you say here are the 3-5 things in a short list, it seems that you know how to fix what is wrong, while when you have a list of 20-100 things you are just giving ideas to problem solving. 

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That’s right boys and girls… a new Email Marketing Guide in the Resources center @eROI. And not just one… but 3 new guides. And hold tight… wait for it… wait for it… wait for it… now - Look next week for the RESULTS of our latest email study there as well. 

I know you say this is TOO good to be true, like the Flowbee or the GoateeSaver, but it is not it is 4 for the price of 1 visit. I know these guys at eROI really go above and beyond to think about what is working in email marketing and how to share this knowledge with the world. One would think that they are a 3000 strong global force of Ninjas and Revolutionaries (we are but less that 60 with 2 offices) but alas we just like to make you smarter to do your job better. 

Now if we share like this with everyone can you JUST imagine what we share with our clients and customers? I would wager that some AWESOME ideas come out of here and some campaigns that rock. 

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This might be one of the funniest video parodies I have seen in a while. We users of Twitter are still in love with it EVEN with the outages, the lost friends, and all the comp that has risen up. This video using some old movie footage of all people Hitler is Hilarious and really tells the story of Twitter. Now this is either going to bring you closer to it, or drive you away. Either way… your choice, but all the leading email folks are on it and we use it to share things that you might not ever see. 

If you just take the time to watch this it is PERFECTLY executed. It tells the story of Twitter and the Tweeple perfectly. I am not going to take away too much of your time but for those of you NOT on Twitter I want you to know this might help you better understand the trials and tribulations of what we have gone through. 

Now did you know that you can follow eROI and this blog by using Twitter? www.twitter.com/eroi is all you need to know.

Now IF I say that the service levels have been better since being funded it will surely show me the FAIL WHALE in the next few hours. 

Enjoy the Friday humor of a WELL executed video.