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 >>

Fear and Loathing. That is how I typically think about Vegas from years of Consumer Electronics Show trips that were way too long and seemed to start/end each morning with me in a cab with the sun coming up. Danger Will Robinson, Danger. But here we go again. I have been asked to teach 4 work shops at the DMA Annual conference October 12th to 16th and I am going to try to lay low. 

BUT if you are going to be there I would love to know about it. Maybe we could get a cocktail hour together? A ride in a gondola? Or a we could all head out of town to the weapons range and fire any gun you can imagine. (Yes I will be doing that one day that week for photos for this blog.) 

If you want to find me at DMA, best way to do so is to request to follow me on Twitter. My page is at www.twitter.com/dtboyd. Now I don’t allow everyone to follow me, AND some people might not like everything that is posted each day. (I think I have over 3200 Tweets this far) But I can promise you it will be a fun ride. 

OR you can follow eROI at www.twitter.com/eROI, might be a safer more family friendly choice. Or maybe LinkedIn is a safer vehicle for you? Either way buckle up, sit back and get ready for a good time.

Hope to see you there. If we can get a line up of some of the top email marketers with M60’s and AK-47s (Imagine Stephanie Miller and Loren McDonald holding automatic firearms… I need that photo) we will have a blast. Or at least a cocktail.

For those of you that have a phone, don’t want to haul your laptop around, your company won’t spring for a blackberry or iPhone, or you just want 2 different devices (I fall in this last group carrying both an iPhone and Blackberry for different reasons) here is the new device for you. 

It’s called Peek, and its creators say it’s the world’s first device designed for and dedicated to mobile email. Whereas email-capable smartphones can be bulky as well as complicated, the Peek’s lightweight, slim design makes it easy to take along. Featuring a large colour display and full keypad, the device uses scroll navigation and can be used to access up to three email accounts. Peek offers nationwide coverage throughout the United States and is compatible with most major email providers. Perhaps best of all, using Peek involves no contracts, credit checks or activation fees. To get started, all users need do is enter their e-mail address and password. The device, available online and in Target stores, is priced at USD 99.95, with unlimited emails for USD 19.95 per month. Colours available include black cherry and aqua blue in addition to the more standard charcoal grey.

Might be a challenge for iPhone as well as Android IF you don’t want a mobile browsing experience. Does not really help email from a marketing perspective as you really can’t do anything but read. Looks like the whole team is from Virgin Mobile. Would be great if it only had a web browser not only for marketers but the consumer.

So naming it Peek is right on target. As you can do nothing else but peek and respond.

Learn more about Peek.

I know that most of you are one of these “Tethered Workers”. Don’t be ashamed, as I am not better than any of you. We can form a 12 step group for internet addicted people. I bet in 10 minutes we could have a support group of hundreds of millions. 

Do you think that if 50% do work email, what is the percentage of people that are checking personal email? Now once you digest this, think about how your campaigns can be targeted to these type of workers based on time of day, day of week, and by the type of behavioral interactions they have on the weekends. 

Below is a snippet from the study found here in full.

Tethered to Email

Some 22 percent of employed email users say they are expected to read and respond to work-related emails, even when they are not at work. Blackberry and PDA owners are more than twice as likely to report that their employer expects that they will stay tuned in to email outside of the office. Fully 48 percent say they are required to read and respond to email when they are away from work.

50 percent of employed email users say they check their work-related email on the weekends.

22 percent of employed email users say they check their work email accounts “often” during weekend hours, compared with 16 percent who reported the same in 2002.

46 percent of employed email users say they check email when they have to take a sick day; 25 percent say they do so “often.”

34 percent of employed email users say they will at least occasionally check their email while on vacation; 11 percent say they do so “often.”

“Email is still the primary artery of workplace communications in many professions, and it has clearly started to spill over into personal life,” said Sydney Jones, coauthor and research assistant for the Pew Internet Project. “Over time, workers have become more likely to check their email outside of normal working hours, and many are expected to do so by their employer.”

Read the full study here.

In London? Want to meet up with some email marketing leaders? DMA UK Nov 4th.

I have the pleasure of being a speaker this event I am am very excited to be speaking with such a great caliber of email marketers. I hope that if you are in London you find time to join us at the event. I am only there for 3 days total but would love to meet anyone that has time for a beer.

What I am really excited about is I will get to hear many of these great speakers from Europe that I hope to learn a lot from. There are some differences in strategies that might give me some new ideas for email marketing campaign execution.

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OK, let’s lead off that this is NOT intended to be a bashing of Silverpop. They have a great email platform and I like a lot of their team that I have met. That being said, what the hell was this “Can Spam Compliance Test” they put out? Of course I answered and clicked through to see if I had a pulse. Whew. I did. I scored 4 out of 5. Well technically it was a 5 but they had the answer to number one as “maybe”. 

Make sure to click the image below to open it up and see the questions.

I understand the main point of this is education (hear the applause) but I hope that it is not being used to score people as prospects. Well they do have Vtrenz that is ran through when I took the “test”. What kills me is that these questions are so basic that they are not really helpful, but just a lead generation exercise. I mean if someone cannot answer these questions, do you really want them as a customer? To me it is a red flag of should we be working with you?

I would love to see a better tool or test put out there. That being said I am going to work with the eROI team to build one and release it in the next few weeks. I already started this week drafting 25 questions. Need to work on them, weed them down, build some intelligence into them and then I will share it with you. 

Maybe my stab at it will be better… maybe not.

Ok, had to share this. You might laugh, you might say it is dumb, etc. Regardless I got a hoot out of it and I am a dog person not a cat person. The below post is really illustrative of two things. One we create bad terms and more bad terms every day. Two we need to focus on understanding what we hear before playing the game of telephone.

But what spawned this was someone today asking me if I had heard about “cat phishing”. I was not sure what to think. Many ideas ran through my brain of what it could be, but in the end after searching and searching it turns out that is was “copy cat phishing” they heard. Yes now that makes more sense. 

It is something that all brands have to consider as it is everywhere and could negatively impact your own brand and the consumer trust in your brand. But then again so could the avian bird flu, a wayward mack truck, or the news. So until you find the magic brand protection bullet (I think it is co-ownership with the consumer/partner) let’s just enjoy some cat phishin’.

Now the image is funny, but the problem is not. It is kind of like opting in for a camapaign with a name like Mr. Poopypants. I bet there are quite a few other ways we could make a dent here, like a public service campaign of education about email marketing from the DMA, EEC, DM News, and all the other ESPs and marketers. That would most likely help all of us if we took this to the public proactively instead of just sitting back and dealing with it. 

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.”

I am not sure how many of you have started to explore Twitter on your own to see how you might use it for your own marketing efforts. Many major brands are already using it and finding great success with it. You can even follow our blogs and eROI news using Twitter if you want. 

But I wanted to use this email as an example of how you can integrate it into your email campaigns. This is one of the first that I have seen that made it one of the top level calls to action in an email. What was interesting to me for those of you that know Twitter, is that they changed the icon of the bird. Now most would not notice this change, but from the Branding side it leaves me a little disconnected as why they would have not simply used the same icon. 

That being said here is how easy it is to use it. 

1. Set up a Twitter account for your brand

2. Set up some RSS feeds in your blogs, news and emails

3. Use Twiterfeed to automate the collection of your content

4. Let people know that it is there in your emails, at sign up and on your site.

I can tell you that as a driver of daily traffic to this blog it ranks in the Top 5 referring traffic sources. And think about how your main goal is to drive traffic and awareness. You might want to try this as millions of people are using it already. Don’t be left behind and be sacked by the FAIL WHALE.

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?

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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Sure is was a funny sophmoric joke, but people that mess with email marketers data with false names, fake names, friends names, or my favorite asdf@asdf.com (look at your keyboard) make our jobs hard. Now to get some mileage out of you and your buddies getting emails from a brand or person that are dynamically loaded with the fake name you opted in with is fine in your inner circles. But placing your “joke” out there about how you loaded false data into an opt in form is crap. 

When you do this do you realize how many hours a year the marketing and email marketing industry is spending to clean out crap like this? These data points go into our CRMs, our ecom sites, our lead capture systems and more. And to top this off data that is bogus can cause us deliverability issues as ISPs that we all try so hard to avoid. Do us a favor, if you want something, sign up for it with real info, if you want to streak the quad, do it on your own site. 

Now Ken you are a persona in our space, and sure you got a joke out of this. Hell I do some pretty odd things myself, but data integrity is everything to our industry and to me this is insulting to us and not funny. 

I think that as someone that covers the industry and espouses the things that make us strong, tear us down, threaten our industry, and lift us up… you of all people should be helping us out and not hurting us.

Here is the article from Frank the Tank Magill. Enjoy your weekend at Bed, Bath, Beyond.

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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