So here is goes… here are the tools that I use all week long that you might find are beneficial to not only your email marketing but your digital marketing as a whole.

Images and Design Tools:
Skitch – As a mac user I am always looking for tools that make the capture of images I need for presentation decks, blog posts and sharing. Skitch is one of my favorite tools out there. I can quickly grab the capture I need, annotate it if need be, resize it and drag it to my desktop. The other benefit it that it carries a history file with it so that you don’t need to keep those shots anywhere else and you can go back again and again.

Hotgloo – what used to be a comp tool is not in a paid model. Do I fault them, nope, as everyone should make a buck. This is a great quick sketch tool that I use to wireframe ideas with clients on the fly and illustrate functions. Often this tool helps me pass back the visual outcome of a meeting when the team is not with me. The new release even adds ecom and iphone design systems.

OmniGraffle – This is serious business but not a tool that is too overly complicated for most to use. The real value with OmniGraffle is that there are a handful of designers that develop great tempting tools for it. iPhone, iPod, App, emails etc all have great tools for creating wireframes and flushing out user experience.

Evernote – Now imagine clipping anything you wanted on the web, saving a page, image, button style, campaign design etc and having it live with you anywhere you go. Are you there with me? Well if not you need to investigate Evernote. This tool is worth a paid subscription to simply for the fact that allows you to make your ideas and research library portable. You can now (mobile phone in hand) have your research with you in any situation. Ok, now that we covered that let’s take it to the next level. Handwriting recognition and search. Yep you heard me here, so what does that me for you. Well here is a situation we find ourselves in all the time… the white board session. So for the last two hours you have been locked down in a con room, dry erase fumes waffling through the air, everyone a little cranky and tired. You have solved the approach, worked out the kinks and now have an idea. Wait was no one writing this work down and taking notes this whole time? What happens next? Someone writes “SAVE” on the board. Like that is the best way to handle it. It might live there for the next 20 days if no one dares to ask. So instead (as half way through this section you jumped over and set up the demo account right) you grab the digital camera on your iPhone or Blackberry and you snap off a shot and load it into the Evernote mobile version. Not only is it going to sync with your desktop but it is also going to be able to be keyword searchable as it can recognize the words in the photos. Wild.

Google Browser Size – Ever wonder what how your designs might be viewed by those clicking from your campaigns? Is your button in the right place? Your image sizes right? Your headline copy and calls to action going to be viewable when they first hit your landing page? Well wonder no more. Google has released a tool that takes all the data they have on screen resolutions and made it free for you to use. I use this all the time to make sure that the designs we are producing have the best chance of success. Often something people don’t consider when making beautiful things.

Social
Tweetdeck – The mainstay for me when using Twitter. The abilities it has added so fast are great. Dot releases every few weeks keeps the tool on the top of my screen. Not only do they provide Twitter content in an AIR desktop app but they also integrate LinkedIn and Facebook for me. Keeps me from wondering during the day and keeping to my goal of “Do Your Work. Don’t Be Stupid.” (if you see my desktop on my mac you will see that it actually says that. Now on top of those features it helps to remember everyone’s Twitter handle, can ad searches on the fly or even create multiple columns based on terms or groups you follow. Really a great tool.

Tweetie – Now Tweetdeck does make an mobile app that syncs over, but my problems with many of the new Twitter mobile apps is that they have a limited about of history you can go back to. It might seem like I am always on Twitter and watching, but honestly I get slammed and go dark many hours of the day. Using Tweetie (I use both V1 and V2) you can roll back time and catch up in 20 minutes with a full day of tweets. Most likely the only reason I keep using it is for the roll back functionality. I know Twitter is about now, but how can we know the future if we don’t look at our past.

Twitazlyer – I am a noob (newbie) to this app but after a personal tour from Erik Peterson there I can find some real value in it. Not only does it help to benchmark some key points of measurement on your engagement and generosity using Twitter for yourself, your company or your clients, but it also helps you chart a plan to keep you growing in your goals of interaction on Twitter. There are so many features built into it that I heavily recommend setting aside some time to really explore it and get to know it. One cool feature is the ability to add multiple accounts. So even if you are not an active participant in that account, you can monitor the use by your clients or team and help them to grow.

Radian6 - Oh how to I love thee? Let me count the ways. One you are very easy to get up and rolling. Two – I am always amazed after spending some time using it what new trends I find about our clients and products. Three – it allows me to build a case not only for an email campaign, but for the copy writing style, voice and approach to a new campaign idea for a client. Four – response and responsibility. The fact they they have a system where, if you have multiple people at your company engaged with answering questions/comments on social media sites, blogs and other sites, you can see if anyone has answered or responded to it yet. Why is this so damn sexy? Because nothing ruins a good time like too people rushing in and telling a different story or giving conflicting answers.

Geo- Location Tools:
Foursquare – Hello Addiction. Yes sure if you are foolish enough to live your life in complete public visibility (my own personal bias) and you tell people when you are, aren’t, are in transit, are drinking, etc that they can break into your house and steal your stuff. (PleaseRobMe.com) But for those of you that own 2 Rottweilers and a pit bull like I do know, it is so much fun. Now what makes it fun, well you can network and see not only who in your circle of friends is where and drop in to join them along the way BUT you can also get Crunked, Jetsetter, Night Owl, School Night, Overshare and other badges along with “Mayorship” along the way. Now none of these things listed prior truly matter but they have built this app that really is fun to use and can be a great tool. Now as a tool who can benefit from it? Well if every small business owner is not paying attention to it then they are missing the boat. The ability to make offers, advertise specials or crowds ounce customer recs and feedback is huge. This application really can allow you to know and recognize your customers that are always in and promoting your business. On top of this the social data being learned right not about human behavior from this app, travel patterns, new experiences and more bundled with geo location data is going to really help us as mobile marketing moves into it’s awkward teen years we are experiencing now. Others to look at are Gowalla and Yelp in this area. Not the biggest fans of each but others are.

Email Tools:
PivotalVeracity - How does your email look in a live inbox environment before you send it? How does it render on a mobile client? What if images are off? How are your alt tags set up to help you past this hurdle? PV can help you answer these questions and more. Really why would you risk the loss of revenue when you can be aware of what you don’t know prior to a send. Sure there are some emulators, you can send it to a few machines and seed addresses yourself, but do those solutions show you and tell you what to correct? Nope. Nor do any of them have a system like IQ that tells you what locations (i.e. devices) your subscribers are reading them from. Now you know that Jim Smith reads his emails on an iPhone in the AM, then Outlook at work. Genius right? With data like this not only can you better optimize the code of your emails but you can also look to better target content and offers based on this information. Oh the possibilities are endless. Another tool to look at that I have also used for years is ReturnPath.

Premailer – What a radical tool. by using this tool you can actually optimize your HTML emails to include inline CSS. Know for many of you that are not utlizing this now you should be. By simply changing your code with this tool you can prevent some of those nasty rendering issues that might be plaguing your email campaigns. For best email delivery results your CSS should be inline in your code. Why not try it out and see how it might make a difference for you.

Beautiful Email Newsletters – Hello Inspiration. BEN is the curator of good looking emails. Now I have a bad  habit (as do many others of your in this digital/email industry) of signing up for everything under the sun and filtering them to folder called XMAS, because it is like that to me, to review and look at for ideas, failures, and competitive analysis. BEN on the other hand finds 90% more emails that are organized and tagged for me to peruse as I search for inspiration, trends and more. What I would love to see is a way to comment and add more user ideas and feedback as I think it could become a very valuable site for designers and email marketers to share thoughts around the creative curated there.

Inbox Award – Now although they do some similar things as Ben, it is more recognition of good work then anything else. As they have been growing the content I find that there are quite a few people globally doing some good things. Worth a look every few weeks.

Flowtown – If Social and email had a baby it would be named Flowtown. Why am I so hot on this right now. Well to tell you the truth is not about the social integration ideas in email. It is about one the data that you can grab to help you better segment and build your programs without profile updates, progressive profiling, or contesting. What if you knew the age range, sex, DOB, geo location, had a photo and could no top of that know up to 50 different social, news and content sites where your subscribers exist. I think you would be salivating for this data. Now besides all of the amazing data and segmentation you could be rocking in minutes from your subscriber base, you could also be running it in real time firing off targeted Thank You and Welcome messages that would deliver the content based on the rules you could construct without asking. So hot, I need to step outside of a minute here, Whew. Well let’s not stop there, what about if you could then, due to your prowess and super powers you wear under your social/email guru hat only use the social targeting that is relevant to your subscriber. Really not everyone is on Facebook, Linked In and Twitter… so why use all three buttons and why not target sharing of content based on what you now know they use. I am really excited not only about the ideas that they have me thinking about but also the ways that I see this growing with other data that we are all making public in the coming two years. Hold me back.

Google Wonder Wheel – Now for some reason many people have never seen this in action. But it has remained a hidden treasure we use constantly when thinking about copy, subject lines, and ideas to run with. What is it? Well it is a new way of looking at the data that Google has amassed on how people use keywords to connect with ideas. So next time you run a Google search, notice the little text link at the top that states “Show Options”. Now in this example I used the key word “shoes”. Take a look at what happens. What this does it build search into a mind map that allows you to search through based on the key word you start with and get to terms that are used by real people and related. What a great way to work on your copy and subject lines to relate better to real people and not simply advance your message. Try it out and see what inspiration it might bring you. Be careful as you can tumble down the rabbit hole here in so much information.

Analytics and Testing:

Swix – The new kid on the circuit I have been playing around for it for a few weeks. Now it is not an analytics replacement tool. So sorry if that is what you thought, but it is an aggregator or measurement data from all over the web where you have content living. From Google Analytics, to Feedburner, to Twitter, to MySpace, to Flickr, to YouTube, Vimeo so on an so forth they have you covered. Now being able to see all your data and analytic in one dashboard is cool, but what takes this open beta to a new level is the fact that you can assign actual costs to each metric, tag events into it and then see a dashboard report that helps you to put some costs behind your actions, time, and spends. Keep your eyes on this as I think it has the wheels to be a great tool. Personal note is would love to see it open up for you to bring other data from your ESP into it as well.

Optimizely – This is a new tools that I have been experimenting with. It was introduced to me at a conference as the tool that the Obama campaign used to optimize landing pages, content buttons and copy in order to drive higher conversions. This is a email marketing testing tool dream. Here is what is awesome… it is really easy and it gives you all the tools to build all of your tests and quickly find out what is working with your site, landing pages and the emails that are driving the results. I was amazed when I saw them present and share this tool as the changes in donations driven using this tool was impressive. A simple 4 part subject line, hero shot and button copy change actually made a difference of $57,000,000 in campaign donations on one test alone. That in itself should be motivation enough for you to give it a spin.

A few other sites that I review daily are as follows:

Smashing Magazine

TechCrunch

ReadWriteWeb

Mobile Awesomeness

So there are 23 new tools that you might have not known about before. I encourage you to find some time to check some of them out and see if they can help you with your digital marketing, email creative, delivery, rendering and overall knowledge. Now is this time for some new in your life and I hope that I brought you a few hidden gems.

If you have some to share I would love to hear about them. Add yours to this post.

Well I assume that most don’t ask or have not thought about it. Would we willing give birth date information if asked? A majority of people would not and might even shy away from it if there is not an explanation of why you are asking. But what if you show and tell them why you want to ask it? I would think that if it was clearly presented from a personal win/benefit perspective that you would find more people opting in to this type of information.

But what else could you do to gather this information? Well leading from my post yesterday on Open ID the solution might be right within your grasp. Facebook Connect can help you gather this data into your opt in or profile management system in a really easy way. One of the data points that they share is date of birth. Now, there is a caveat here about it. Some people either don’t post it in their profile OR they use a default setting as they are concerned about posting it. Even some will just give you the month and day and that can be used in a simple birthday email campaign. You don’t really need a year now do you to make this work?

We actually have successfully used this Facebook Connect system on a site we built for a customer this past year at Moonit.com. Now we did find some challenges on people not completing it in Facebook 100% of the time, but if you present those data points in the return form once you have used Facebook Connect or another Open ID system you can leave that field blank, present them context around why they should add it, and then move to completion. Trust me as it works.

Let’s look at a few out there and talk about them a bit.

The first to look at it this one from Borders. They do a good job of not only providing a valuable discount amount of 25% but they also did a great job of making it easy to use online OR at a retail location with the bar code. I also really like the personalization in the subject line and in the body of the email. Nice touch. They also left the discount window open for 15 days. Now that should be enough time but I would leave it open for 30 days as people get busy and you could be leaving a sale on the table. I also really dislike it when emails are presented with so many legal rules around the use of a code. Does it really need to be presented in the email? Couldn’t you link to the redemption regulations on a landing page? It would be so better served there than in the email itself right? Just my personal thought as I often see so many companies add so much legal to an email. Not the place in my personal opinion as it takes away from the email itself and adds more copy that competes with the email itself.

The next one is from PiperLime. Now personally these guys own me. Yep I am a guy that likes shoes and they have my number. What I enjoyed about this email was the simplicity of it. It was clear and easy to take action on. The way that they moved the content to simply be about the birthday and left the legal mumbo jumbo out of it is key to me. The Borders one had about 40% of the content on the legal side and to me throwing up a bunch of copy that is generally about what you can’t do with this gift is not needed. Focus on the event and make it easy.

But the last one that I recently got from Alaska Airlines really stood out this year. One I did not expect to get a discount code from Alaska to book my next flight and two they sent it a month before my birthday. What a great idea to get out infront of the event and really stand out. Also it provides incentive to book now and not wait till later. Trust me as a frequent traveler with them that I put it to use fast on a little trip on my birthday this year to Sonoma for some wine “tasting” and relaxation that is much needed. I think the idea that they put into action is a great one as others are sending on the day this tactic really stood out to me. It was timely and relevant while at the same time provided immediate value.

So take some time to think about how you could use this event to your advantage. Even in a B to B world there are applications that you can use the birthday event to stand out. I mean I cannot think of one b to b company that has used it and that in itself provides a good opportunity to stand out. Maybe you should be the one to try it out this year?

So as I head down the path in the coming weeks of tacking on another year to my life I am looking forward to seeing who got in the game for this year and what my hit my inbox soon.

What is it?

OpenID is a safe, faster, and easier way to log in to web sites. End of story? Not really. We are seeing how users are just finding out what it is, and on that same note with the types of ways it can be used they might not really know that they are even using an OpenID. Why? Well it is guised in a login from another system and not your own.

Here is how Wikipedia defines it:

OpenID is an open, decentralized standard for authenticating users which can be used for access control, allowing users tolog on to different services with the same digital identity where these services trust the authentication body. OpenID replaces the common log on process that uses a login-name and a password, by allowing a user to log in once and gain access to the resources of multiple software systems.^[1] The term OpenID can also refer to an ID used in the standard.

What does that mean?

It means that no more different usernames and passwords need to be remembered across every website, blog, social media site, community site etc. What? Yes OpenID in it’s true form enables you to pass/share the content, profile, user info you want with each site you visit. So you can use Google, Facebook, and many others in order to complete a form, join a site, make a purchase and even more. The thing to understand is that you no longer need to always require someone to use your site login abilities and you can leverage those of other larger providers.

Here is an example I wanted to share to give you an idea of how it works. Odds have it you have used it and were not even aware that it was an OpenID, but simply thought you were logging in with Facebook into another site. The benefit here is that there was very little you needed to complete using actual data entry of your information and on top of this it brings in your data that you have allowed to be shared from your Facebook profile (in this example). Now the hidden benefit to marketers is that you now have opened up the ability to push data and experiences from this site into the users Facebook news stream. Here with lala you can share out what songs you are currently listening to. Now isn’t that so much better than telling people what you just had for lunch?

You might also see things with Foursquare in places like Facebook and Twitter using this same technology. The real win here is that it is easy to implement for any company. When it comes to emails you have seen everyone talking about the SWYN – Share With Your Network – ability. We have not seen too many people using it right. Most typically use to in email to gain “followers”, “fans” and “friends” instead of making it a useful tool to your users or subscribers. Think about them… not you.

How is this going to happen and when?

It is already under way. AOL, Google (see Fingerprint news), Verisign, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, The White House, PayPal and a host of others implemented it a long time back and are just getting more public with it. You might be already using it via OAuth with Twitter or using Facebook Connect and not even know it. That is kind of the great part about it. People are using other systems where they have trusted relationships and have control over how and what they share with your site.

What is it changing?

Well for one it takes the control out for completing forms from the fingers and places it into versions of profiles you might create to share with certain sites. Some very cool things are the multiple profiles that OpenID stores for the user placing the options of true validity of the data that they share to hopefully create a better data structure for you. I might be getting overly technical here, so in layman’s terms it should create a more real profile of your audience removing some of the false, hurried data inputs we see so often over the last few years. Less of “adsf@asdf.com” and bad name and demographic data that so users just don’t want to share or complete for you in order to download, register or get access to your guides, shopping, lead forms, contests, etc.

The Leader is…

We have seen in about 1 years time the use of Facebook connect going from 8,000 sites in use to over 80,000 sites using Facebook Connect in order to login to a site. Now we are not just talking about Facebook itself here, but CNN, WSJ, Huffington Post and slews of other sites. Here is a list of some sites, blogs and other ecom sites you might know of so that you can see examples of how it is being used. The ability that it is creating is going to be very big and I expect to see many of your own sites enabled this year.

The Opportunity

What this has shown us so far is the ability to get social graph data, profile data (36 attributes including email address), as well as the ability to increase engagement and provide more site and marketing personalization. So with using this you can drive content that is better targeted and present information, offers that really connect with the TRUE persona that has logged in. You can learn more about Facebook Connect here and what they state the benefits are to you and your customers and visitors.

There are also some more great examples here as well as some of my favorite uses in video and location use under the Personalized Experience category on this page.

Now to open your mind up a little more about this idea it also empowers you to push content back into the users stream to take content you have in your own site and allow them to place it out in front of others in their News Feed. Very powerful ways that you can grow your programs and efforts with very little time to implement.

There are some other great ones out there that we are watching like RPX. RPX is using Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Windows Live and more with simply using one code base so that you do not need to pick only one. Allowing your users/visitors to use what they want as their primary way to connect with you really gives you a greater ability to not only provide the right way for them but also gives you the greater ability to build your database with real factual data.

What do I need to know?

Well here is the trick. Just because someone logs into your site, form etc using OpenID it does not mean that you are going to automatically get that data. That data is just used during that exact session. So what can you do? Well you can create ways to use it to build a profile, register for your site, or enable a check out process on your side so that you can actually capture that profile information.

So simply enabling an OpenID in your site, forms and other places will not guarantee that you will capture the leads, but it will make it much easier for the end user to give you the correct data.

My Thoughts.

I think that we are on the cusp this year of learning from a marketing side how to best implement this new technology. But it is not going to be easy, or maybe it will. It will be really up to you to decide how the experience will be best served and how you can take the user from visitor to active registrant of your site.

Take some time to explore some of these sites in the examples above to see how it works and find ways that you might be able to provide it to your customers as well as in your own efforts. We have some of our own tests and plans underway.

Well you are only 1/4 of the way there in the right steps. I use Sorel as a good example (even there are some great things they can still add to the process that I will explain) of the steps that come next.

Immediately you should be sending out a Thanks for Your order/Order confirmation. Now as a best practice you really need to give people an immediate email showing them what they just did. Now in this example you can see things that I like, they present a clearly written thanks, they present your information and the order number back to you for easy reference, and (not shown) they display photos of the items you purchased. This last one I am always appreciative of as it give me a fast way to visually scan the order to make sure that I did not add anything wrong as well as shows me that their ecom system got my order right. Win right? Yes it is. But at this same point in time they have me as a captive customer and as this was my first order in the system they could have done one of the following.

1. Present me something to use to place another order with them. A unique discount code that I can use for another purchase with a time offer associated with it making me think about using it faster.

2. A way to give someone else I might know that could also be in market either a “friend” code to use, making me take the step to increase their customer base (say 10%) that I can pass on right then. I am a satisfied shopper right now and it is an ideal time to use me as a referral source.

3. Present to me other relative items (say to the right hand side of this email) that might be ones that are complimentary to these items OR things that others that have bought these items might use. A great way that you can do this even if you do not have a system in place is to look at a great and cost effective system called 4-tell to automatically feed this type of data into the email. It does not even need to be nestled into your ecom platform. I have seen in action lately and am impressed with it so far. Take a look.

So now there is going to be some time that goes by from the order confirmation to the actual shipping of this product. We all expect some downtime around now. Depending on how long it takes to pick and ship these products there may or may not be a marketing email touch here during this time.

But then comes the shipping confirmation. This is when we all get excited right? The main point of this confirmation is to project a date of arrival and to present the customer a tracking code that is easy to see in order to know when that door bell will ring. A little Pavlovian but we all salivate for them. Actually from past studies I have read this order shipped email often gets more opens than any other as we tend to keep it and use it until the order arrives. So what can you do here? Well it is another great place to position a cross or up sell around like items, future deals, or even promote something that does not exist in the main marketing messages for your site. Also here is a little trick If you can make sure to not the exact location of the offer image paths you can actually change those every few days to always have a current offer presented. Simply by replacing those images you can continue to present new offers while they wait for that order to be tracked and arrive.

So you are 3/4 to the goal now right? So what is next you might wonder? Isn’t our job done? Well the hard part is, but this is where you really have an opportunity to reach back out and find out the level of customer satisfaction with the experience or with the product. Why? Well knowing what is working and what is not is key to growing a strong ecommerce program and your relationship. A simple survey is one way to get them engaged. How did it go? Where things easy to find? Did you have any issues that came up that we could address better? Would you recommend us to someone else (Net promoter scoring)? But even better is to engage with feedback on the happiness with the product itself. We all know that people look for the recommendation of others and even seek them out when making a purchase. So would you rather have them search those out all over the web OR take advantage of placing this content back into your site and having the authority rest right next to the products? I would choose the latter based on a few reasons. Now the less I have to leave your site to make a decision and the more time I can stay with you then the higher the chance that I am going to make the purchase. Now if you decide to house these reviews you need to allow both good and bad to live here side by side. You need to throw on your tough skin and be ready for a fair amount of tough love. Hiding negative comments are a sure way to lose the trust of those that come to you.

In a recent test we did with an online retailer we tried showing professional reviews from a outdoor gear magazine in one email, while in the other we presented customer scoring and reviews. Which do you think did better? It was an interesting testament to the changes in online trust going on. The email with the customer scores and reviews outsold those of the old line journalistic source. Now this was only one test and should be repeated to make a true call on, but we found it to be a real driver to sales. Are you including testimonials or reviews in your ecom emails? Maybe you should test this.

The other reason I love reviews in the ecom site is that it creates more content. Content is king and from a search perspective I would love to have more juju on my side from a review and content perspective than on an aggregator site. Note that you will want to wait a few weeks to 30 days to follow up on this so that they have had adequate time to use the product and write an intelligent review.

In the end you need to understand that the campaign is not over when you drop your first touch email. It should be continued through the lifecycle allowing to you leverage this relationship to drive more sales, provide goodwill, and keep your engagement levels high. This way they next time they are in market they will consider you before your competition.

I know sounds too good to be true right? Well we are trying to put our team out there to help you. We look at and work on 1000’s of campaigns across every market niche out there each year, and with 7 plus years of doing this at eROI alone we wanted to allow people to get some tangible actions that they can take that are relevant to their job roles and email marketing plans and not just sit in another session.

So we hope to see many of you there and make sure to sign up when you arrive to guarantee your spot at our table with us. Make sure if you do that you bring the things you want us to review. As player/coaches ourselves and eternal students of digital/email marketing we are really excited to be in a place to help you out in person.

We hope to see you there. And if you can’t make it for some reason you can always drop us an email or call as we are happy to take a look under the hood for you to make some calls on what might add some horsepower and drive some more RPM into your campaigns.

Round One: USAA Teen Checking Campaign

Round Two: National Geographic Kids Magazine

Lots of best practices and ideas were brought to the table and the votes were cast. Who won? Guess you will have to watch and see.

Which agency will be the next Email Idol?

Moderator: Lisa Harmon, Director, Creative Services, Smith-Harmon, a Responsys Company
Panelists: Sam White, Creative Director, eROI
Jim Spence, Designer, Smith-Harmon, a Responsys Company
Mike Corak, Director of Interactive Services, Mighty Interactive

I wanted to share this latest case study from eROI as I personally worked on all of these projects. It has been a 2 year journey from when we started testing what community could mean to where we ended up for Wacom. Along the way we learned so much and continue to learn more each day still. Community can mean so many things. It is not simply building a stand alone community site. In the case of Wacom it was a journey of storytelling, sharing, listening and testing. In the end we did end up with a strong and still growing active community site that is built into the Wacom main North American site, but also ended up being a solid and continued use of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Hopefully you can gleam some of our learnings from this study and see how you might be able to approach your outreach and conversation efforts.

In the end it all comes down to commitment and non stop engagement by not only the members of the Wacom team but also from those participating in the communities as well.

eROI Case Study: Wacom Community: Mastering the 5 C’s

What goes into building the most engaging and successful online communities? Follow along as we take you through the journey and progression of the communities built by eROI for Wacom Technology Corp. Learn all about how to harness the power of your audience to create a successful online community.

What’s Inside:

The three main goals for almost any brand community

Discovering what your customers really want

Trying new things and learning from what works

Building exponentially with social media-to-community connections

5 C’s – Commitment, Conversation, Conversion, Community & Collaboration

Get the full case study today.

I would also cite this article as reasons for our approach to this change in content consumption from Read Write Web.

eROI Whitepaper: Leveraging the Mobile Web

Are you ready to build a mobile web presence?

Get a look inside the mobile website projects of 3 unique brands, and see how digital strategy and technology come together to achieve results.

Wacom Technology Corp. uses their mobile website as a key part of an integrated marketing campaign for Bamboo Touch.

Banfield Pet Hospital has a mobile version of their main corporate site, complete with mobile-specific content.

Moonit.com uses the mobile web as the most cost-effective way to make their compatibility tool available on the go.

See how they did it!

We are not only seeing it with content publishers but more and more we are seeing it across marketing and brand sites. And all use cases I have seen are pointing to it working and not being hated as much as the browser take over ads that make you wait 5 seconds till an ad runs or allowing you to click past it. And why is this? Well this one I found from a recent link (as no matter what you think I am not a reader of AskMen.com) was a good example of why they are working.

1. They allow you to still see the content you are there for. Sure it hurts the ability to interact or read it, but it does not create a bad user experience IMHO that makes you have ill will toward the site.

2. They opt in takes place quickly and then fades away to let you continue your visit.

3. They just look so much prettier than another window spawning outside of your browser or opening a new tab.

I would think that we will see more of these start to appear as this year goes on. As long as they are done in a creative way and are easy to move past I would not expect that we see much hostility towards the use. I have also lately seen them not open on a first page but X pages into a visit. We have used them in a magazine site to appear after 3 pages viewed with good success. One thing that we did test was based on the user analytics after a few months of testing. We found the average visit page view patterns and fine tuned them to 3 pages as we noticed a drop off in visits after 3 pages. By adding this we did not interfere with the intention of the visit and did not interfere with the content. The list growth has been directly tied to this tactic as we can tell the difference in subscribers coming from the normal newsletter sign up forms/boxes vs those that opt in via the light box. A little creative form tagging can do this for you as well.

Take some risks with this and see what you find. Try it on a few unique pages where you see drop offs or exits in the visit patterns. Or try it based on average page views and work backwards from there with an “X” variable. It all takes testing but without trying you will never know.

Long live the light box – or at least until we find a new way to advance the experience in a non obtrusive manner.

The top things to look are email rendering, email readability, action paths, ability to complete goals, and need for a mobile version of your website, blog, ecommerce site, or simply a paired down mobile version of the content you are presenting.

The good news is most all companies are in the same boat this point in time so you have time to explore, plan and react.

With eMarketer reporting that over 42% of US consumers are stating that they had a smart phone as of Dec 2009 we need to take this seriously. This same study also reports that nearly 13% of respondents are planning on purchasing one in the next 90 days. Tick Tock. I have also seen some recent studies citing that around 17% of smart phone users are already making purchases. Just imagine if we had mobile friendly emails, campaigns, websites and ecommerce. What a difference that would make in these numbers. So what is it going to take 60%? 70%? Most likely it is just going to take time for companies to start making strides to deliver in this fast growing environment.

There are not many tools out there to report on mobile client engagement (Pivotal Veracity has MailboxIQ that does it) yet but I expect to either see more tools hit the market this year OR marketers getting smarter about testing emails to look at Web Analytics reports from their email campaigns. Either way it is time that you start to pay attention to these metrics in your own reporting and find ways to track and build on these stats. With a recent campaign we ran we had the fortune of already having some of this data which allowed us to build emails, mobile versions of emails, microsites targeted to work on mobile devices and ways to drive engagement via that channel.

So what do you need to know.

1. Odds have it that your emails don’t either don’t work right OR they are hard to read/act. In looking at some samples of some recent campaigns I receive on my iPhone prior to viewing them at the desktop I found that some companies are not really paying attention to the mobile rendering

experience. Now I am not saying that they do not render, but they either are hard to read OR they do not lead to mobile friendly sites. That kills the campaign right there. Take some time to experience your own campaigns on a mobile device if you have not already and try to get to the goals of your own marketing.

One company we have recently found is doing some great things with their emails. The way that they are coding them creates a fluid layout that no matter what size device or where you read it stretches and changes the fonts, images, etc to the right size. I am looking at how they did this so well as I think that is it something we can all learn from. Now I do not think that this approach can work for all emails. Why? Well from this one and others I have tested it looks to only work right with simple HTML copy based emails. Emails that are image heavy might present some challenges.

The image to the left here is an example of how it reworks itself to format exactly on the iPhone. While it sure does get long, it is really easy to read and renders so nice. But take that same email and look at it in a desktop email client (the one here is Apple Mail). It reworks itself to stretch to the environment and can be manipulated no matter what size you change your preview window or the full message to be. Pretty neat I think. It is an idea worth look at more and seeing how you can build your templates or HTML to work for your needs. Extra points to them that is was a list hygiene campaign working on getting their customer database in order.

2. You don’t have the rendering information you need. So you want to make some changes but yet you really don’t have a lot of information to help you craft these campaigns. Well you are in luck. I took some time to test not only preview size but also looked at functionality size when it comes to rendering and ability to scroll not only up and down but left to right. No with most smart phones like gPhone or iPhone we did not see challenges in the left to right scroll as they use a browser type environment, but with other phones we see some limitations.

Here are some shots of the Pixel test we run in some of the clients.

iPhone: Ability in Horizontal to render over 960Pixels (sorry for the sideways shot as this was in horizontal layout mode.)

iPhone: Vertical Layout over 600 pixels.

gPhone: 600 pixels in vertical layout but ability to scroll horizontal to an unlimited length. We actually only tested to 2800 pixels but it looks like it can go indefinitely.

So what does this mean? It means we all need to test. We know that presently there are some abilities to try new things but until we test we will not know for sure. And the wild card is that when new software updates or new phone models emerge we will need to test again.

3. It is not just about the email. Well you knew that right? The email is just the overall experience gateway to what we are tasked as marketers to provide. We need to be looking at the next steps in the mobile web site or simplify it with mobile campaign pages. We have been rolling out new mobile versions of sites lately when we build them for clients, but here is something you may benefit from… we develop a large percentage of websites with custom WordPress CMS platforms. Why would this help? Well if you are doing the same you can leverage many of the development communities plugins to create built in mobile versions of your sites or campaigns. I know that this will not work for everyone and in that case you need to look at creating mobile versions of your site. It is rather hard and can be expensive to do this for large sites, so start small and focus on the experience and goals.

Some recent examples to share would be.

Moonit: Mobile version of core website with Facebook Connect Mobile

Banfield Mobile version of website for core needs.

In the end there are a lot of things to look at and evaluate not only from an external use standpoint but also from an internal ability view. No matter the outcome 2010 is the time that you start to move these projects into your company goals so that you can step up and have an experience no matter the device that drives to engagement and conversion.

Look for some more test and ideas soon or share with me some examples you have come across.

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