The Email Wars

At eROI we have been fortunate to work with some of the best PR firms in the nation. We have worked to help them understand not only why to use email as a Public Relations Agency outreach tool, but also taught them how to use it to get actionable steps out of it. Now I am going to share some of these ideas with you. 

1. Develop a communications channel that you own. By using an opt in email list for publications, writers, industry analysts, bloggers and others you can establish a direct channel to get your messages out infront of them when you have news to share. 

2. Design an email template that not only matches the brand, but has actionable elements that they can use. We often construct easily editable templates that not only give a good brand experience, but also have attributes that can deliver high resolution 300 dpi or higher images and other assets. 

3. Use the data in your favor. This is the most important part of the use of email marketing with PR. Now that you have delivered the assets you can tell who has read them, what they have done with them, when they downloaded the assets, who might use them, and identify those that have not taken actions so that your PR team can follow up with personal emails or yes… a phone call. 

When PR firms use email it can grow their distribution, tracking, and follow up call efforts. Which in turn creates better actionable plans to make sure that your message and programs are getting in front of those that you want to make sure are going to use them. 

Now this does not mean that the press release it dead, as we think it only ties in better with a full email marketing strategy. If you can leverage the data or read, clicks, and downloads you are closer to having and intelligent conversation with your target audience of influencers and media contacts.

Learn how eROI works with Agency partners for email marketing >>

Well not really going green, but starting a new weekly email newsletter focusing on “green” marketing and ad campaigns. It is a continuous segmentation and introduction of more email newsletters. I am not sure now how many they have but to me it is news that they could be adding into one of their existing newsletters as content instead of making an entire new newsletter. 

I share this for a few reasons. 

1. Do they have enough weekly content to justify another newsletter? From the looks of this email in this post the answer is NO. Why well look how empty the newsletter is. It looks horrible. Not really “green” to add more media vehicles to cover small news. 

2. I assume that they are just using this as many publishers do to add more ad sales inventory and drive more clicks into their site where more ads can be served and drive more page views. Fine as that is the goal, but it is not a good use of time and space for them or the subscriber. 

3. Look at the ads. Do they support the content? Are they relevant? Nope on both counts. They are just focused towards advertisers and marketers but not focused on the matching the content or possibly the subscriber base. 

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I was driving home last night and thinking about a project I am working on for a client right now. They are having us work on their welcome messaging strategy and it had my brain churning. I am not sure why it was so important for me to think about, but I distilled it down to four things that I think are important when you are setting up a relationship via the opt in with email marketing. 

Identification, Trust, Understanding and Conversion. 

Identification:

You could make this simple: Who is sending this email and what will I know about them. Or you can think it out farther. We all know that you have a short time to capture the attention of the email reciepent. So what are the things you need to focus on? The from line, is it you or your brand. The subject line, what is the action you are intending them to take. If you can make this a Welcome/Thanks/You need to X subject line then you are ahead of the game.

This also lines up with the creative. Will they see your brand instantly? Will the creative match up with the look of the site that they were just on and carry over the voice of where they just came from online? You can focus on thinking about the split second reaction of the WHO to nail this. 

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I am not sure what to think about this idea. I have had messages from other email marketing experts that have started to use this service already. I can understand WHY people might want to use this system, but as an email marketer my thoughts are still out to vote. 

I have set up an account for myself but do not have enough data or experience to tell you WHY to use it. Here is the coverage on it below from last week. 

What still strikes me as odd is that it was created by one of the earlier founders of an Email Service Provider.

“OtherInbox is a service that helps with one of the growing problems of using Web services: e-mail overload. More specifically, services that take your information and sell it to third parties–thus filling up your in-box with decentralized junk.

OtherInbox works by giving you a special address you can use when you sign up for things and it helps you filter them in a central location with tags and layout akin to Apple’s Mail application. Each “subscription” reads like its own in-box.

The service may be most useful for figuring out what services are selling out your e-mail address to other parties, but it’s also good for handling bacn–the messages you may want from a service, but not necessarily filling up your in-box. What makes it special is that users can effectively kill off that special address making the messages bounce back to the people who would be spamming you.”

Now me, I am up to $135 that I OWE the Obama campaign since the night of the DNC election speech. Ryan, he has HOPE that the Obama team will starting using email more intellegently instead of email intellegence.

Feeling like the news paper boy is chasing me down the block 1-2 times a day looking for $5.00. Time to throttle it back guys and stop being panhandlers.

This election is providing us with so much real time data on the good and bad things we need to consider about our email marketing programs. 

The question it continues to leave in my mind is this: IF elected, will Obama continue to use email as a communication vehicle to the citizens of the United States? I would really hope that he would as it would be a great thing for all of us to have a direct communication method to the leader of our country as well as make a statement about the power and acceptance of email.

When I first saw this in another email service providers email newsletter last week, I did not know quite what to think of it. My first reaction was great idea for the small business that adds one or two people a day to their email lists. My second reaction was how in the heck was this a best practice or Can Spam compliant? 

Now since I don’t have all the data on this new widget yet my post here might be a little off. And that being said I welcome anyone from this company to respond and let me know how it works. 

My fear is as follows:

1. You are making it easy for people to add emails of those that have not opted in

2. You are setting an idea in your client’s minds that it is OK to just add email addresses collected from sources outside of a double opt in form THAT they did not initiate.

3. Making is easy does not make it right

Now for the other side of my thoughts. 

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Fingerprint just finished writing their first email client market share report. It’s the biggest study of email client usage ever conducted, using a sample of almost three million email recipients.

It’s exciting for them because it’s the first time they’ve released any of the data that’s been collected through Fingerprint. It shows the top 10 email clients in use for both consumer and business mailing lists.

I have been working on deploying it for our own newsletters (have you subscribed yet?), and will share OUR results soon.

Business Email Client Use from Study: 

Read the full report

Consumer Email Client Use from Study:

If you have not heard about the new project that the Email Experience Council is working on for this year’s non profit project, you should get up to speed. Jeanniey Mullen has just posted the next update on the project on the ClickZ site. You can read about last year’s project here as well.

I can tell you that we have an all star email marketing crew on this from many ESPs, brands, PR firms, and agencies. There have been many calls and many meetings leading up to this effort that will soon start paying off for the Agassi Foundation. 

We would love you to watch how it grows to see if you have some ideas on how to help us spread the word on this project. It is going from a regional to a national effort. Any help that you or our company would like to provide would be appreciated. 

Read the article here >>>

On the approach to another trip to the eROI NYC office to work with Chris Masagatani (MD at the office) on some new client work and meetings, I was inspired with his PITCH video on his new blog CrossPixelNation. He makes it look easy getting ready and going to a pitch. We all know that there are hours of calls, strategy, design, decks made, handouts, and all the other assest that go into a well executed pitch. Or maybe the eROI Crew takes a different approach in the email and interactive agency world. We do not go after the business of everyone, but the best ones.

We want to people that:

1. We like

2. Will drink or have drank the kool aid of best practices

3. Get It

4. Are open to trying to new things

5. Will not limit thought to just email

There is another rule that until now has been unwritten. It is at the end of a long day our clients are  ones you would want to hang out with, share a drink and have a conversation off the topic of work. They are not clients in the end, but partners.

Relationship, trust, friendship, and great work… they all start with the pitch or first date. So NYC we are not just bringing Maverick but we have a crew of wingmen for our first date. When are you free to go out NYC?

Today the team sent me an intervention email. It is not that they don’t like me, it was that they are “concerned” about my love and embracing of ALL things digital. I IM, I email, I Tweet, I Facebook, I Skype, I blog, I comment, I Flickr, I YouTube, I Vimeo, I post in forums, and most importantly I forget to notice that it is still sunny out in Portland, Oregon. I guess that they have a point now that I have taken the first step in admitting I have a problem. 

So I am happy that they took the time to intervene. At least they used email as the vehicle, as last time the all company “meeting” in my office was a bit over the top. Guess they forgot about the baseball bat and the fire escape so close to my desk…

But on the other side of the coin, this is one of the simplest and best sites using email as the “viral” vehicle that I have seen in a while. MeetUp used a great idea about all of us and our dependence on online communication, “friends” (watch the video and see if you catch the 433,000 BFFs copy there, classic), and the fact that we need to use these mediums to gt back out and physically interact with those in the real world. After all it is where LIFE happens, not the inbox or the web. Sorry to burst your bubbles.

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So many people want to write about the death of one medium for the rise of another. TV is dead, email is dead, twitter is dead, RSS is growing, print is dead… blah blah blah. What is not dead is media as a whole. Media and media use is growing and growing in every way. We may not watch as much TV, but we watch it smarter using things like TIVO, SlingBox, DVRs, Mobile, etc. So why don’t we see more shows and brands using email to drive and grow smart viewership? 

I would think that even in this example they might think about not just saying TUNE IN TONIGHT, but use some alternate calls to action. Don’t miss it, set your TIVO. Going to be busy? You can watch it online later, but you can’t miss it regardless. 

The problem that many people in the entertainment industry are missing is that time and place are not the same thing anymore. We consume media how and when we want it, on the place and device of our choice. So why not start thinking about that type of inclusive and smart messaging in their email campaigns? 

Now not that I am jumping on to check out the next Diddy Band, but the use of video in this email makes or GIVES me some instant access to the event that might make me either want to watch it OR even better tell someone about it. I would have actually placed more emphasis on the video being higher up in the email and even making the TIME and DATE a larger font that stands out in the email. Heck we all know by know that MTV will rerun any show 500 times and we can catch it between other shows, if anyone even watches MTV anymore.

Email can be a powerful medium IF you stop to think about the audience and TRY to use alternate approaches to your messaging. But you already know this… don’t you?

Bloggers Chouice Awards 2008

If you can give me a little love I would appreciate you giving us a vote for this blog. It does take the quick creation of an account, but you will love the access to finding so many other blogs that you might love. Al and Laura, don’t worry about it as I know you hate to give anyone your info in exchange for knowledge and sharing. Damn the community and the “forced” opt in.

http://bloggerschoiceawards.com/blogs/show/28135

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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What do we see in email? Buy me. Sell Me. Join Me. Listen to Me. Or simply Here I Am. What value does that bring to your brand? What value does that bring to your customer? We could argue each side brings value to a certain segment of your audience. And in some cases it does. But what about using email marketing to expand your brand story? Are there things that you are not thinking about that through targeted exposure might bring a new thought or feeling, and yes a sale, to your email marketing campaigns. 

I was struck by a hotel brand that I appreciate as they continue to do good things with their email marketing strategy. I need to call them one day and find out who is the brains behind their thinking here. They are a boutique property with over 20 cities with locations. Well this past week they launched a new site and focused on the food and restaurants at their properties not only in the email but even down to the title tags in the site. Kudos for thinking about this holistically instead of in a silo we often see from brands. 

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I at one time subscribed to this email, but it just was not relevant all the time. And what was an initial turn off to me as a web marketer is that it was by invitation only for a newsletter. It is not that cool to demand a velvet rope. Here is the EXACT copy on their site “UrbanDaddy is an exclusive, daily email magazine devoted to keeping you in the know.”

What I found to be interesting is that Ad Age is covering email marketing. I guess in light of the purchase of Ideal Bite and Daily Candy it makes sense. But here is one we love that I think you should keep your eyes on, the BeThree Daily email.

Here is an audio podcast from Ad Age about the daily email and it’s success.

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