The Email Wars

Typically I would have seen this email and glanced over it. I would have noted that it was pretty but not well designed from an optimization standpoint of inbox rendering if images were blocked. But for some reason I decided to click through. Now it has been some years since I have last bought a wet suit (moving to Oregon 18 years ago has slowed my love of surfing growing up in CA), but I thought I would check out what has changed.

So in clicking through I found a very cool landing page with a flash feature that highlights the suit and it’s features. I found myself wanting to learn more about it. So I tried to access the rest of the site. No go. I was not an option. An AJAX window came up and asked for my Cypher code. Cypher code? What was that? I thought about it for a minute and my mind flashed back to an element in the email I remembered seeing. I went back to the email and noticed that the cypher code they were referring to was in the email creative. The blow was that I was not able to copy and paste it due to the fact that it was an image. Drats. 

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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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I am sharing this campaign with you a little prematurely. Now I am not saying that this campaign has not gone out and did blow away the long running subscription control by a double digit factor, but it is getting a full campaign case study written up now. It will be out soon with all the details, but want I wanted to focus on was the slight factor that changed the response rate. 

When this creative was first passed by my desk I had to stop and think about it a little bit. How was it different from what was sent out prior? What would tell people what to do and would that effort beat that of ones prior? The whole idea of this campaign was to drive subscriptions and we did not want it to make people think of anything else besides the images and the value of having a print subscription. We loaded it up into an inbox to see how it displayed. Did it drive the eyes to the action. Did it convey value and on top of that did it make me want to get a subscription. Well it was close.

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The Challenges with email and a lack of email standards across all the inboxes is that from time to time we can experience what we term an email blow out. What is an email blow out? Well is it quite simple. When you design an email there is the opportunity for it to hit an email client or inbox and go to hell in a hand basket. What you thought you might have designed has an issue you did not design for and will cause a table, a tag or an image to throw a wrench into the works and kill your formatting. 

What went wrong here? Well I am quite sure that it was a combination of a table and data feed error. I get this campaign every week and it has not had this issue ever before. What it looks to me what occurred is that the data being pulled from the CRM, CMS, or RSS feed had a character in it that did not play well with the formatting that this automated email template was prepared to handle. 

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I saw the post this past week Tamara and need to think about it as many of the blogs that you listed are some of the same on my radar. SO I will take a look and see if they will pass the baton as you have to me. Hopefully we can find a few new email marketing blogs that we might not know about. I often use your shared aggregator page to review the news at the end of the day in the industry. 

And by the way great new profile avatar (weird when I use that phrase, feel so geeky and dirty) on your Twitter Profile. I need to hire that artist to do one for me. But it needs to still hold a baseball bat. That is how I roll. 

So here is the list….

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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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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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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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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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Even the best of us like to look for other design resources out there to inspire us and give us new ideas that we can leverage for the brands we work with. I came across this site the other night and thought it would be good to share it with everyone else.

Not too deep yet but I think that it will grow as the months continue. Also some nice ones for web design as well that you can get ideas for campaign sites and landing pages. 

See them after the jump

Another one I like is http://smith-harmon.com/blog/ and not just because they are cool people to boot.

So I am a fan of personalization of emails. I love it when it is done right and makes sense in the copy, images, subject lines or other places in the email creative. What I am not a fan of is when it is just tacked on like an after thought. Really do you think that just dynamically inserting it at the top of the LARGE image you sent to your list is really going to make that much or a difference if you did not? With this creative and the offer it might as well have been left out as it is like there should be a line at the top with a FILL IN THIS BLANK field penciled out. It feels that personal to me. 

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If you had had the pleasure in the past to peruse our portfolio of FRICKING AWESOME work, yes this is a shameless plug, our team last week made some changes. We are not showing work that is just FRICKING AWESOME, we are showing and sharing with you work that the inspiring and awesome… all at the same time. 

Hats off to the eROI creative team for continuing to rock, roll, play hard and turn out some of the best email, web and campaign work out there. 

I know I might be a little biased here, but when I see the stuff we are doing now as compared to this old stuff in the portfolio my heart skips a beat and my eyes tear up. Are you ready to come over to our side and start doing some great work, take some risks and go in a new direction? I know you are and we are here for you. 

So you built a social media community. You made it cool. You put your marketing plan together. you bought print, you put up a facebook page and you told a few friends. So now what you ask? Why are they not flocking to your new site and taking part in the conversation? Well my friend, you forgot the magic ingredient… email marketing. 

We just put up a new site recently for our client Wacom and gave it some time to live and breath on its own. It did well but we wanted to try to slide the email campaign in later instead at launch. It gives us a better look at what works and when it works. So with all the pistons firing and the blocks out from infront of the wheels, we dropped this campaign to the house list of professionals to build the RPMs. And Boom, there is goes, out of the gates and down the road. 

Email IS the critical component to social media. It is the fuel that will drive your campaign or community. Don’t forget it folks. 

It is amazing but not surprising to see the volumes of traffic and conversations you can drive with your lists. If you give the timing, voice and calls to action, they will come in droves. 

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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