Article Overview:

National Geographic asks for your preferences, your profile, your desire for each email type, and, most importantly, your permission
Timberland’s emails stand out due to brand consistency, large calls-to-action, clarity of messaging, and easy-to-measure creative tests
Banana Republic has stepped into its own in testing, experimenting, and being different
Rethinking “best practices”

What is “right”? Is there a correct way? Do best practices always work?
The answer to these and almost every other question in email marketing is, “It depends.” I know it’s a cop-out of an answer, but in all honesty, there is no right answer. There’s no global best practice that makes your campaign stats jump, no design layout that wins every time. It takes constant trying, tweaking, analyzing, and risk-taking. Calculated and meticulous risk-taking, I might add. And yes, in the end there is no “right,” only good job, mission accomplished, and what’s next?
Yet over the years of not just observing thousands of email campaigns but also creating them, I have weeded through the good and the bad to find those brands that are marketing in ways that move audiences and drive results. This isn’t about presenting you with empirical campaign data. This is about what works for me, and why.

Here are seven brands that are doing it right.
Read the full article

We have had the pleasure of working with OK! Magazine  and a host of other magazine publishers and I wanted to share with you how some of them our email marketing automation engines to gather content, produce a newsletter and get it out to their subscriber bases in record time.

Knowing from years of writing, producing and executing on email marketing newsletters and campaigns, we developed a platform extension a few years back that helped us to focus on the content production. After all the creation of the content is often the thing that holds back a newsletter or campaign from getting out the door on time. When you can place your energy on your job in publishing of updating the content so that you are the first to publish and not worry about the curation of the content in order to produce the email you can have more time to do your job.

We went to the drawing board a few years back with first RSS and then a Wordpress plugin that allowed content producers and publishers to continue to spend their time writing and curating on their sites, blogs and web properties while our engines grabbed the content, arranged it, moved it into custom email layouts and distributed it automatically to their subscriber lists. Sounds easy right and a no brainer. But it took a little work to get it right.

Content always has formatting issues and images sometimes blow up in emails, so taking the time to make sure that these engines could grab and format HTML and text versions (and now even mobile versions) took a little testing and fine tuning. We put all the work on our shoulders so that clients that work with us need not to worry about it. These two engines can effortlessly grab content from custom feeds, regular RSS feeds, or even from posts and assets tagged in the Wordpress engine to build beautiful and timely communications.

We have our team working on some new engines that you might see in the coming months that will add even more integration with other platforms, CRM systems, social media platforms, ecommerce engines and more. So keep your eyes out if you are looking out for ways to make your job easier and the email you send out work for you and your subscribers instead of you or your team working to produce them.

How many times have you either submitted a RFP or received a RFP to answer? We all know the drill right?

Client Side:

Gather the troops, accumulate the collective needs, frame the problem, identify the questions you need answered in order to make an informed decision, narrow the list, begin the courting process.

Agency Side:

Receive the RFP (if it was sent to you somehow these people feel you are qualified either from work, past relationships, or the word of others), review it, decide if your company is suited to respond, spend 40-100 hours answering questions, prepare work samples, foolishly create new work or ideas to give away, pray you make it to the selection round, cry when you do not make the cut OR begin the courtship ritual.

These are such antiquated rules, and both sides complain equally about the process, so why have we all continued to be bound by it? Simply because it’s mandated by prior experience or by archaic corporate guidelines? Are those really good enough reasons to keep this painful process in place? In my option, absolutely not. It’s time for a change; time to take this process in a new direction.

The RFP

This past month the team at eROI was approached with a RFP opportunity for a project that we, as an agency that develops online brand/strategy/and community, were a perfect fit. To be honest, we often pass on RFPs due to the disconnect between the knowledge, the brand and the opportunity – but this one was different. The way in which the RFP was issued really grabbed our attention.

What really led us to respond in a creative, unconventional way simply started with the fact that the issuing company pushed the door wide open to for us to do so. Here are some key excerpts from the actual RFP:

The team:

Who will you will dedicate to this project? What is their process? What is their availability? Will they be available on the dates requested? What are their example projects and have they worked together before? Please introduce your suggested team.

Because this RFP relies so heavily on the chosen team, substitutions may result in forfeiting the project once won. Quite possibly there is no more important aspect to this RFP than your suggested team.

Requirements:

I’d like to be very clear on the following:

Spec work is not accepted, nor requested. We are not paying for your response and you will retain ownership of your presentation. Do not suggest names or domain names in your response, only your methodology for determining them. If you do suggest a domain name and we fall in love with it, yet don’t choose your agency, we won’t be able to pay you for the suggestion. Your comments are welcome.

Rules:

There are none. In person, digital, pdf, friendster, sky written… this is up to you.

Recommendations:

Keep it short and let us know what you need us to know.

eROI’s Approach:

The idea of having an open field on which to respond to this RFP really aligned with how we work as an organization. Having a potential customer give us the trust and freedom to respond in a way that was completely up to us, made us salivate. I’m talking froth and spit falling from our collective lips. Given that we only had 9 days from when RFP was issued to the day they wanted to make a decision, we knew that we had to move quickly in deciding how to respond. I can tell you that the idea of a traditional pitch, presenting our work across a boardroom table with PowerPoint or display boards, was eliminated immediately. We knew we had to really show what we do, why our approach is different and make a big impact all within a short period of time.

As “The Team” was a critical requirement of the RFP, selecting the perfect team for this project was the first step. Once we had the team – and I am talking a decision we made in under an hour – we went to work discussing the goals of our response and brainstorming how we could achieve them. Obviously, being a creative group, our ideas quickly went from simple to needing an army of 200, costumes (panda suit), bikes, an airplane, remote laptop access and someone’s ID badge within their company. Eventually though we brought ourselves back down to the reality of time, expenses, and simply what it is that we do best. Within a few hours we had a game plan that would address the questions presented in the RFP and showcase what we needed it to to give us a competitive edge.

So what did we decide on? Well, I’m going to keep the EXACT details undisclosed, but I will tell you this…

As I stated earlier, we certainly didn’t create a PowerPoint presentation, nor were any meeting rooms entered. We did not call outside big hitters to augment the team (as many agencies do with freelancers), and we did not get an airplane or a panda suit. We did however attack it in an unconventional way that we knew would stand out from the other agencies pitching this business. And most importantly, we used what we knew, what we had done, what we are good at, and what could do well with a limited period of time.

A few key ingredients to our response included: four very conspicuous manila envelopes, type writer font, Google-jacking, pre-paid disposable cell phones, Digg, a coffee shop, one bike messenger outfit and the following…

1) An great project team. We are fortunate to have an extremely motivated team that is passionate about what they do. They happily dedicated late nights and their weekend to this response so we could pull it all together in a sort amount of time. Clearly dividing up roles and responsibilities was a key. This was not an army of one, but a unified set of actions that only a tight team could pull off.

2) The entire eROI team. Since we approach all work we do at eROI in a team cooperative method, we rallied the entire company to help with a portion of this response. To see our entire team working in complete unison to help try and win this business by demonstrating our philosophy of collaboration, was quite awesome.

3) Mobile technology. We used SMS as a line of communication with the key stake holders at the company that had issued the RFP. We chose to do so because it was fun, different and certainly unexpected.

4) Email and the Web. It’s what we know, it’s what we are good it and besides the team, it was the most important ingredient in our response. Using email and the web, we were able to present our answers, our credentials and our work in a creative way that really showcased our personality alongside the reasons why we were the best agency for the project. We didn’t sit in front of our potential clients and present this part of our response to them. We gave them time to walk through it on their own, digest what we put before them, give feedback, ask questions and leave comments. Once they had the chance to do all of that, it was only then that we sat as a group and discussed our potential future relationship in more detail (but of course, not in a conference room!).

The Aftermath:

After our meeting, a few days went by with all of us on pins and needles wondering if we would be the agency, of the five pitching, that would win the business. The decision to take a new approach in responding to this RFP, one that really reflected who we are as a culture and company, resulted in great energy around the agency. It’s rare in our business to be given the type of open door we were given for this response, so it was exciting.

This response got everyone talking about how we should break down the conventional barriers more often, even if the door isn’t as wide open as it was this time, and here’s why: Not only is it more fun, but in a “traditional” response structure the only way to really “show” why you should be the agency of choice is to present your actual ideas for how to execute the project. Ideas that you come up with sans all the details you really need and ideas that may end up being used by the issuing company, even if you do not win the business. (Trust me here if you have never had this happen to you before, to see your approach and ideas come to life when you haven’t been to the one to work on it, kind of sucks.) By breaking outside of the “traditional” response structure we were able to truly “show” what we did well, without 1) wasting time coming up with how to execute a project before we really had all the information we needed and 2) having to give away any “pro-bono” ideas.

So what do I think you should take away from this? It is time to approach things differently, to identify new ways to do what needs to be done without giving it all away. After all, all work and time costs a business or agency money.

For a great read on the topic check out Joseph Jaffe’s article from September of 2009 in which he makes some great points that I think we should all digest.

Oh, and for those of you who are curious about the final outcome… we won the business and look forward to what is already on its way to be great working relationship.

As for the Reference to “I’m Feeling Lucky”? Well I will leave your mind to figure it out, after all we cannot give away all of the secret sauce.

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!

Now how can you resist? Join us. We swear it won’t hurt… too much.

If you want to follow the writer of this blog, aka me @dtboyd, (on Twitter since July 26, 2007) you can do that do, yet it will not be all email marketing related. That account is more  personal and digital marketing related – and private. But please request some friendship as I rarely say know, just  like to know who is following (I know my 3rd grade teacher Mrs Plath is out there still looking for retribution.) It is more like gravy, unicorns and smurf trivia actually – so if you like that (and who doesn’t) jump on in.

All the best and hope we can connect in ways that are relevant while providing you with meaningful insights – and humor.

1. Patience: Nothing that gets rushed works out well. Having the time to plan, create and fine tune always works better.

2. Failure is imminent – Learn from it. Nothing works 100% of the time perfectly. That is one of the beauties of the internet and digital marketing. As soon as something goes live we can learn from it, study it and change it. Learning from mistakes or ideas are the key way to grow and do better.

3. Who is Invested? Not everyone on a project, even a client is 100% invested or committed. It is a hard lesson to learn but even “we” can be our own worst “client” at times. People have so many distractions, commitments and other balls in the air that often it takes someone steering the ship. Heck it can even be an intern to keep the ball in play. Learn to be flexible and understand the commitments everyone involved in a project might have outside of the project. Once you can see all the other factors at play you will have a clearer understanding and be able to do your best job.

4. Push people to do the best work. Often one of the harder things to do. I have an issue with wanting things to be right 99.9% of the time. This requires times when you need to push yourself and your team harder. It is a fine line I have learned at how far some people can go, but in the end it also shows you the people you can count on to be your A team. Not everyone can be Face or Hannibal – but many can be Murdock from time to time. Work on learning who makes up your A team and take extra time/care for those that, with guidance and patience, can move from B.A. Baracus to Mr T. Grow your team, your talent, your knowledge and yourself.

5. Stick to your plans to exceed expectations but listen along the way. This is a key. We often get so caught up in the work that we can lose sight of the fine details that make a campaign work so well. This requires listening the whole way through. Now this can be relevant to your team, your susbscribers, your clients and yourself. Make sure to always solicit feedback from all involved along the way. You will be amazed at what you can learn from listening.

6. Pick the right dance partner. Not all clients/projects are a perfect fit or good fit. The honeymoon period is always such a nice time. But the key to life after the altar is remembering what brought you together. Look at why you “dated” and chose to go down this path together. If you were getting vibes early into the relationship get in tune with those thoughts. It takes two to tango and I plan to dance the night away with whomever I go to the big dance with.

7. Surround yourself passionate people. Work with people that LOVE what they do as much as you do. If you are waking up not looking forward to doing your job then it is time for a change. Align yourself with people that are passionate about what they do. Look for those that want to do great work, celebrate things that might be trivial to others but important to you – and vice-versa. Your team, whether at your work place or client/partners, needs to be as passionate and excited about the day as you are. Learn how to reward, applaud, celebrate, and motivate.

8. Tmatr is the new Tomato. As much as marketing has changed, a lot has stayed the same – people just call it something new (today by dropping a vowel in a word or making up a new word). Sure we have so many new things dropping into the mix every week in digital marketing and the web, but think about marketing as a whole. Although the vehicles might be new, the way that we should use them should not be radically different. Think about how you engage, entertain, interact, reward, celebrate and connect with your audience and customers. The basics of marketing are still the fundamentals that you should be following, storytelling and building long term emotionally connected relationships will continue to win again and again.

9. Disruption wins. Doing the same thing for comforts sake should end. Creating impactful and successful campaigns relies on new ideas and new ways of presenting them. If you have been relying solely on email, search and other mediums for a long time because they have worked, don’t stop, but add in something new. This is the year for you to try new things. Sure it might add more work and some political battles that you need to fight, but don’t let that stop you. You need to be looking for ways in which to reach new audiences that you may have never known have existed. Explore new locations, new technologies, new social media efforts, new commitment to a new thing. Breaking up your own routine can allow you to test and learn.

10. Change is Good – Enough said.

This is your year, as well as mine, to mix it up. I wish you luck.

We took it upon ourselves to remap our own communication plan around email and leveraging our systems to hopefully make a larger impact on open/reads as well as clicks and conversions. It has been a large undertaking that took some time due to the fact that as a marketing and software organization we have a lot of systems and tools we use… just like many of you and the clients we work with. So as we move into this year look for a host of new things to be entering your inbox in a new manner.

The Welcome Stream: Seems we had a good system in place, but all systems can take the knowledge of one year and be made better. We have worked on some changes to our Thank You messaging as well as our Welcome stream. Not only in the emails but in the landing page touch points. We hope from our tests that these prove to be even better performers for you. Leveraging the touch points to give more information in a clearer format will benefit these engagements as they roll out. But as always we will be fine tuning and testing throughout the year.

Customer Lifecycle: We have been working hard on our own housecleaning of sorts by tying together our emailROI platform, Salesforce, and Pardot systems. Still on the docket are some plans of our project management system to interface better across them all. Funny all the challenges one can find with so many systems, right? We will enter the new year with new a new customer welcome system for both our emailROI clients and agency clients. Using more personalization, surveys (pre and post projects), and visual communication to hopefully connect our customers more with the people that they work with all the time and might not ever have the chance to meet face to face. We are going to be making use of the past year’s survey data and reaching out more frequently for direct feedback. Data, data and more data… as that is what helps us to shape better programs and results for our clients. The key to all of this is sharing the data and results across the whole team to learn from and do better.

Also look for more customer education and communication on our software side. We are striving to move our account and support teams to present more information to you to help you to become even more empowered to execute great campaigns.

Engaging Newsletters: We often hear how many of you enjoy our monthly newsletters. I can personally tell you that they are an undertaking as everyone is uniquely designed and written by people across our team. But even with great feedback we are looking at how to change these emails this year. As an email marketing agency we don’t want to become too stuck in our rut and by presenting ourselves with the challenge of a new format and doing better we hope to deliver you a better experience and content. I kind of get tired of others email as they look and feel so similar each and every month. I always love the effort our team puts into them as a stand alone endeavor. Keeping it fresh keeps people subscribing and looking forward to the next one.

Weekly Recaps: Are you subscribed to the weekly recap of this blog and our 3 other sister blogs? This weekly email can help you stay in touch with many of the articles we write each week. Knowing that we have a weekly email also helps to keep us on our game. As many of you may not know this email is powered by our RSS to emailROI engine that just got a complete rebuild/overhaul. We are killing off the old system and will be rolling the new one out to clients that rely on this system to create their daily/weekly/monthly emails to power their email marketing. It is a great system for so many publishers (blog/magazine/website) that create content everyday. The way in which this new engine has been written gives more flexibility to layouts, images, and content than ever before. It has allowed us to do some really cool things for some of our publishers that were a challenge in the prior system. Some publishers we are working with on this platform used to (believe it or not) use the Feedburner system that you see if you Subscribe to daily newsletters like TechCrunch, but were unhappy with the lack of reporting, ways to monetize the emails, as well as had very little control over the design formatting. This system changes all of that. If you are looking for an email engine that can do this for you let us know as we are happy to share it with you.

Sometimes starting from scratch is the best plan. If you read this blog I would encourage you to sign up on the right hand side for the weekly emails. We will be sharing more information on this new system in this coming weeks.

Sales Engagement Campaigns: Yes we do use email to walk people that request information from us. We have a fairly detailed system that really does wonders across our own engagement campaigns. Since so much of what we do (and have always done) relies on inbound marketing, we really like to be cognizant of how outbound relevant marketing works. It is one thing to have the inbound side down, but if you are not working hard on our outbound you have missed the boat. Our past campaigns have helped us to qualify, engage and make informed decisions… but with a whole new flow (designed by some sharp minds in the office) I think we are going to see some fun new surprises in our sales streams. As a long time fan of the break up campaigns, we are going to push harder on changing these email up to deliver an even better experience.

Why did I want to share this with you? I mean so many of you that read this blog might have that same thought. Well in an effort to be more transparent with all of our readers, subscribers and clients I really wanted you to understand that no matter how everything looks from the outside of an email program – there should always be changes being made. If we get too comfortable with our own efforts we often miss the opportunities to do better and push the envelope. I am hoping that by sharing our plans we show you that every program must always be in a state of testing and change.

So much on the plate but heck we are only 4 days into a 365 day cycle. Thanks for your continued reading of this blog and I hope to be able to share ideas, tactics and news that help you with your own programs. Lets all get out there and drive hard in 2010 and make our email programs better for all of our subscribers.

For all the events we attended, spoke at, and participated in this year, we are thankful. We had the opportunity to meet so many friends and industry peers at SXSW, EEC, OMMA, OMS, Email Insider, Inbound Marketing Summit, Dreamforce, Portland Ad Fed, AMA PDX, OEN, OSA, AOTA, Innotech, NYC Tech Meetup, DMA NYC, DMA Annual, Internet Strategy Forum, Kickapps Seminars, Ignite NYC/PDX, and so many other events. Wow, we touched down in many cities this year from NYC to Chicago to Denver to LA to Austin to SF to Seattle to Minneapolis to Washington DC to Boston etc etc etc that it is nice to have a few weeks to sit back and reflect on all of those wonderful moments with old and new friends along the way. To those we met and enjoyed great conversations and shared knowledge with, we thank you. Meeting and talking with you makes the time at 35K feet worth it.

To all the customers and partners we have the pleasure of working with, we thank you as well. We are so fortunate to have the opportunity to work with great people who strive to produce the best customer experiences and drive the greatest results. Because of wonderful partners at companies like CBS, Zinio, Sears, Banfield, Wacom, Quest, Grand Sierra, Star Trek, Papa Murphys, Dessy, Maxium, OK Magazine, OSHU, Alima, Moonit, Icebreaker, Ivars, Modern Luxury, Fast Company, Inc Magazine, Mediapost, Travel Oregon, POVA, WCVA, Sonos, Sunstone, Bridgecity Tools, and hundreds of others, who are open to testing, trying, experimenting, exploring and trusting us, we are given the oppurtunity on a daily basis to do the things love and do best. You are the people who make it worth while each and every day and we are looking forward to doing great work for you in 2010.

To everyone on the eROI team between Portland and NYC, you are the best. You have all worked tirelessly on new ideas and pushed the envelope through nights, weekends, good times and bad in order to make great things happen. You really are an amazing group of minds in all areas. Looking ahead at 2010 I know we will push the bar even farther, drive work that is even more amazing and acheive results that are even more outstanding.

To all of the email industry minds and partners out there, I thank you too. It is amazing to work in an industry that is so open to sharing ideas, best practices, and tips in an effort to push ourselves and others to give the experience, respect and engagement that we would all desire in our own interactions with brands, businesses, and people. We are happy to think of you all as friends and partners even when we happen to cross swords on the battle field of business.

To all the media and publishers that continue to share our studies, articles, thoughts and work, thank you. We are always excited to see the work we put so much into be celebrated and shared in the community of our peers. You bring with us so many learnings from peers we truly respect and we hope that we can continue to give back by regularly sharing great thoughts of our own.

To Portland, Oregon and New York City where we make our homes, you are amazing. We could not be any more fortunate to work and live in places that encourage and celebrate creativity, uniqueness, art, work, technology and the culture and lifestyle that drives creative minds to new levels. Without the surroundings that great cities like you provide, we might not have the opportunities that we are presented with each and every day.

In the end, as hard as 2009 has been on the global business community, we are incredibly thankful for the trust, opportunities, and friendship that you all have given us at here eROI. We hope in 2010 that we can continue to pay you back with campaigns, sites and ideas that make you happy to work, partner, and take this crazy ride on the interwebs with us.

Keep your eyes on us as, after some time with our close friends and family this holiday, we will be coming out of the gates with guns blazing. There are some exciting things on the horizon for 2010 and we hope to see you around the US, on the web and, if we are lucky enough to have the oppurtunity to work with you, in project meetings. Trust me that 2010 will be an amazing ride full of twists, turns and loopy de loops that make your heart race, stomach turn, eyes shut and in the end cause the thrills to shoot out of every pour of your body.

After some thoughts about how to best say thank you to so many great clients, partners and friends we came up with a fun little montage sharing our cheers with you.

I hope you take some time to roll over and discover all of the great people that make eROI a wonderful place to work and get some insight on the folks that work so hard collectively to make great things happen.

Thank you to all and we look forward to working, talking, and being here for you in 2010.

All of our best to you and yours.

Cheers.

To support the launch of the Intuos4, Wacom Technology Corporation worked with eROI to put a new twist on the product launch with an effective integrated online campaign. This case study outlines the integrated online strategy used by Wacom, including results of the multi-pronged campaign; email, microsite, and offline channels working together to seamlessly promote the unique aspects of the new Intuos4 tablet.

Enjoy exploring the site and learn how it all came together to support the introduction and sales efforts.

“We’re absolutely happy with the number of visitors. We believe we’ve received a 70% awareness of our target audience. I mean, that’s really good. Not many companies are going to achieve that kind of awareness for a new product launch.”

~ Marketing Director, Wacom

Get the full study