The Email Wars

I like to see how some brands are increasing ways to become the one stop location and challenge the channel partners that they work with. Now I assume that they are partnered up with a travel system, but this is a natural extension of maximizing the reach that they have to travelers. 

I know as a frequent traveler myself that I go back and forth between hotel sites, ones that I have accounts with and then to airline sites. So combining it and presenting it as a customer value is a good way to approach this. I know that some of you will continue the search back and forth between browsers and sites, but I will wager that they capture a good percentage of those traveling with them on the fact that you can use your hotel points just like miles for flight so easily. 

Good thinking. 

First of all… will it?

I had the opportunity to dine the other week with the CEO of the a company that is enabling wifi in the skies for a major carrier. It led me to wonder about how being able to work in the air online, when most of us are reading, sleeping, working on PPTs/Excel/Word, or just having some quiet time disconnected from the online world; would have an impact on our campaigns. 

He told me how no matter what device you would be able to read email, surf the web, chat, manage your Facebook page, etc. To me it is awesome, but it makes me think more and more about how geo targeting is a harder thing to consider when parts of your audience could be 30,000 feet in the air. 

I know that many people I talk with have inbox control and management issues. Would this be the ideal place to nab 5 hours of inbox work as opposed to a constant inbox triage that most of us online workers and our customers practice? 

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Just how do you drive a move to mobile email campaign? I was forwarded this example of eTrade making a move to get people to use their mobile version by giving away a free blackberry. That is one way. But what did they miss with this campaign? 

1. Where is the VIEW AS Mobile version for those getting this on a mobile device? FAIL

2. Why is the header of the email so massive? Anyone with a mobile device is not forced to scroll (or thumb) down to the content If they have HTML enabled. 

3. The email itself is over (I cut off the 2 pages of legal) 1200 pixels long. Not a very good practice in my book if you are targeting mobile OR even the typical inbox. 

So what would have worked better? 

First nailing the top three above. But on top of that thinking about the value prop of not just giving an incentive of a blackberry but a mobile device of their choice. Not everyone wants a blackberry so why pigeon hole yourself into a gift that might not appeal to your audience. I know that this is a deal with Blackberry as the content says “exclusive” but they need to be building mobile apps to be cross platform complaint. They might have missed some promotional opportunities to just touch an existing audience and move them to use their services from a value standpoint. 

What would you have done?

We came up with the idea of trying out the horizontal email technique with one of our clients, Zinio. We thought that as a company that is showing how digital magazines are different, that we wanted them to challenge how emails were read, just like how magazines are read. We have seen 4 examples of this in the past and heard great things from folks that did it for Coors, FHM, Diesel and a luggage company, so why not give it a try. 

So far it has performed well and as the list grows we will watch to see how it works out. Now this being said, we did make a standard back up email layout just in case it went the other way. Well luck was on our side. 

My thoughts are why not challenge the medium. Why not make something stand out that not only grabs the readers attention, makes them pause to look at it, and if it works see if the media picks it up. Well all three things happened. 

So what is next? We will see as the months go on. We are always up to try something different. Are you?

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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.

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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Wow. This is one for the books. I was stunned this week at a client that moved to Eloqua, which I thought was a great system, when I was told that unless I was using Internet Explorer I could not unsub from the link. This is one of the craziest things I have ever seen with my own eyes in email marketing. Why would a profile system or an unsubscribe process be built to be platform or browser specific? Love that they gave me a link to download IE? I have it already but don’t use it as my default browser.

So in a world where web forms should work in any browser why can’t Eloqua make this investment to be cross browser compatible? I open this post up to any comments and explanations from them if they want. Please enlighten me? If I was a client and this happened to my email recipient I would be ticked. It is basically not allowing me to unsubscribe from an email with a simple opt out. Right? Or am I just a bit crazy?

Well it is refreshing to get some of our newsletter design work critiqued. I spend so many posts talking about others work so love to find a post on our work. I was hoping to see that we did something wrong, but alas, they liked it…. Damn. Hard to get better when you get kudos and nothing is pointed out to grow from.

It is a collection of emails from the Search Engine Optimization industry and we did the one for SEMpdx.

Here is the overview. Love it.

3. SEMpdx

If SMX’s newsletter were as cleanly formatted as SEMpdx’s, I’d have no problem reading and absorbing the information they send me.

Clean titles, good spacing, blog post snippets that link to the complete piece–I love it!

See all of the other ones and the creative here.

Let’s set this one up as “What not to do in email marketing”.

So not sure if this was done in a find/replace method or driven from a CRM.

Lesson One: Use the right company name in your email. We are eROI not Exact Target. Those are those guys in Indy. We are the sexy ones in Portland, Oregon (HOLLA).

Two: Proof it for any typos or grammar.

Three: Cold Calling sucks, make me learn about your event and the value prop instead of making me HEAR about your event from you. You move straight into the you need to buy pitch and I still don’t know what the event is.

Don’t want to stir any Cold Call Cowboy karma, but if you don’t plan your email outreach, even on a one to one level, you might as well not email.

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So I want to start by saying that I love video and I love email. What I don’t love is when you combine them and it not only does not work, but it looks like the below image (fished out of my Junk folder)

Let’s start at the top at the jump >>

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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.

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.

Today the Email Experience Council announced the five finalists for its first annual Email Performance Award, which recognizes an organization that has created an email marketing campaign that demonstrates the full power of the channel. The winner of the Email Performance Award, which will be selected by the eec’s members, will be presented during the Email Evolution Conference, which will be held February 12-13 at the Sheraton Hotel & Marina in San Diego.

In alphabetical order, the five finalists for the Email Performance Award are: Accor, AOL, Genentech, REI and Wacom.

For more details on each of them, including copies of their nomination forms and supporting materials, visit the eec’s Email Performance Awards page. Congratulations to the finalists.

Members of the eec can vote for the winner from among the Email Performance Award finalists (see below). Just log into your eec account and follow the instructions. Voting concludes at the end of day on Monday, Jan. 28.

i wonder sometimes how much or how often the entire copy is read in an email. People skim most emails and look for things of interest, or things that look like action. Well so often the thought and time behind the copy writing skills are missed. This is why I wanted to share this one with you. We are on the board of the Portland Advertising Federation, the oldest ad club in the US (over 100 years, yeah that is a long time) and we are getting ready for the annual Rosey Awards in November where we gather, drink, award, recognized and celebrate the creative and the WORK that drives all of us to do better work.

I love the copy that has been written for the emails promoting the Roseys this year. But I wonder how many people took the time to read it. If you read you can see that there are penalties for not reading the whole email or even thinking of deleting it or adding it to your junk box.

Should we maybe learn from this and add this type of disclaimer to all of our emails? Would be fun to try.

If you are in Portland make sure to come to the event November 7th as it is one of the parties of the year. I know from last year when I was wondering the empty streets of Portland at 4:30am trying to get back to the office to crash for a bit before everyone got in. Man that was pointless. This year I am going to just write that next day off entirely.