The Email Wars

Ok the article title was meant to entice you, but isn’t that what subject lines are all about? At the end of this month we are happy to be spending 3 days in San Diego at the Online Marketing Summit February 22-24th. While there, besides speaking on one panel called Email Leaders Forum we will also be running a one on one email audit table where you can sign up and have one of our email strategy team review your situation, campaign, subscription center, welcome stream or overall plan and get our thoughts on how you might improve it.

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.

Email Marketing – Auditing your Email Workflow

Learn how to engage your target audience through effective and branded emails. The experts at eROI will help you audit your email workflow from creative to deliverability and show how you can turn a dud into a success.

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.

Ok the article title was meant to entice you, but isn’t that what subject lines are all about? At the end of this month we are happy to be spending 3 days in San Diego at the Online Marketing Summit February 22-24th. While there, besides speaking on one panel and doing one stand alone educational session, we will also be running a one on one email audit table where you can sign up and have one of our email strategy team review your situation, campaign, subscription center, welcome stream or overall plan and get our thoughts on how you might improve it.

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.

If you missed the most thrilling show in town last week in Miami at the EEC 2010 Conference, don’t fret I made sure to video them so that you can see how it went down. Three agencies took the stage to show off their best efforts at email stardom, redesigning three emails chosen by fellow Email Evolution Conference attendees. Watch as each agency busted out their best moves and unveiled their email redesigns. Watch as the votes were tallied by a live text vote for each round’s winner. Lisa Harmon from Smith-Harmon praised and critiqued the contenders, plus she dished out her own email diva tips. When all is said and done, though, the winner is chosen.

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

Well we are t-minus 12 days till we descend upon Miami Beach for the annual Email Experience Council conference. Our team is once again in the email design competition facing off against one prior challenger (Mighty Interactive) and a new one (Ogilvy). The last time we met it was a great battle of not only design but reasons behind making design decisions. So without giving away the rounds and brands we have all been working on these past few weeks I wanted to share with you some of the original and new designs that were presented. Look for more attention this year paid to rendering, social, mobile and driving conversions with the campaigns we were tasked to overhaul.

You can view last years PPT, Video and write up here.

The First Round: esurance Campaign – Original

Mighty Interactive:

eROI Design:

Responsys:

Now everyone had a different approach this email but the key things were clearly presenting the savings, using buttons to drive the actions, and pulling in key brand elements (like Erin the heroine) into the action for quick processing and recognition of the sender.

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Our constant travel schedule is keeping our team on the road this year. We have already logged NYC, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, Denver, Scottsdale, LA, SF, Eugene, PDX and DC on our US 09 Tour. But coming up you can find us in a few more cities at different events.

June 25 (SFO), June 29 (PDX), July 1 (SEA) – yes we live by airport codes now.

Designing Your Email Program From Online Outreach to the Welcome Message

So often the basics are missed at creating an experience from the point of engagement of your email practices to the relationship building process. Come learn about how to properly set expectations, develop relationships, and onboard your new subscribers in order to maximize the efforts your online search, campaigns and programs deliver to your online marketing efforts. Learn from real world examples from leading consumer and business to business companies that are doing it right.

You can find Alex Williams in SEA and PDX and Dylan Boyd (me) in SFO. Love to see you there.

Other events we know of through the summer months will be close to home in PDX. In the fall we will be jumping back on the road so stay tuned if you want to meet up with our team.

This year was a special year for the eROI team. Instead of SIX people we sent FIFTEEN of the team representing all of the specialized groups to the SXSW Interactive event in Austin, Texas. Five Days, 15 people, 1000s of ideas, and 30 helpings of Ribs.

With this many people passionate about everything digital but with different views and agendas for SXSW, we decided that we would be able to cover more of the event, panels and sessions (as well as parties) by setting out to follow our own individual plans and paths to learning. The sum of the collective is more powerful than that of the individual right? The plan was for all of us to recap lessons and new ideas learned whether we could find usable ways to employ them in our projects or lives or not. By covering more we could ingest more. There was an implied “ROI” in the whole growth of the attendee plan and we would share our knowledge with the entire team when we returned.

But why stop just at our team, why not share it all with you? If you read our other blogs (notice them in the top header of this blog) you will find that everyone is openly recapping sessions, conversation and ideas that they brought back with them.

Here is what we learned from the event:

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I just got back from SXSW last week and took a lot away. I am planning on typing up and sharing the things with those of you that might benefit from the ideas shared there.

But in leaving Austin and looking at the world from afar it seems that everyone now believes themselves to be a social media strategist. Just take some time to look at community profiles, blogs, twitter bios, etc and you will see that every marketer that exists wants to add the title to their bio. Why? Well is it hot and everyone wants to jump on the band wagon to find the money that is quickly leaving the budgets of other mediums.

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Well it is that time of year again. No not the setting of the clocks forward. No not the return to spring. No not the time that we clean up our lists and break up with those that are not participating in our email programs…

But the time is upon us to return to South By Southwest in Austin TX. And I am giddy like a school girl the night before the first day of Jr. High. This year eROI is returning not to speak, not to exhibit but to participate in SXSWi. And we are not going into this Spring Break for geeks and marketers lightly. We are taking an army of 15 people from the company to soak up every morsel of noughuty goodness that we can bring back to share the execute some amazing campaigns for our clients.

If you have not ever been to this event it should be on your “fight with every ounce of your corporate travel budget” list to attend. The amount of openness, knowledge sharing, connecting and of course celebrating is enormous. Each time we return we seem to spend the next 11 months planning on how to get back.

So if you happen to be going, come find us. Follow us on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/eROI) to see where we are at. OR you can meet us at a client party (RSVP soon) on Saturday night where they will introduce a new killer app coming to the web this summer. Just in time for all of us to benefit from it.

RSVP at http://moonitdoesroux-invitefriends.eventbrite.com/

Not sure we will be blogging from the event, but for sure we will be tweeting away.

Just returning from the eec Annual Conference in Arizona, I had a lot on my mind. I got the chance to spend time and build relationships with peers, brands and partners in panels, workshops and interactive presentations. Together we shared data and beliefs on what works, discussed best practices in email marketing, and who should be responsible for what. 

What I learned: 

The Anatomy of an Email. In a panel that we were a part of, Lisa Harmon showed us the perfect layout of an email, with best practices applied to the wireframe (get the PPT here). It was inspiring, and at the same time made me think that I was in med school. I do want a copy of this perfect email for my wall. 

Subject Line Testing. It should be a constant thing. I know that with each email we create we are always testing variables, but I can also tell you that subject line testing is not a constant. We need to drink the Kool-Aid on this one. I heard from REI, Borders and other great brands of how they are consistently multivariate testing and finding great lift in not only the open rates (sorry Loren McDonald, I know you think the Open Rate is dead now) but in the click and conversion to sales rates. Always tying the campaign back to a sale or goal is the key. 

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Well not only was it one of the best events at the eec conference this last week but we wanted to make sure that those of you that could not be there for it could enjoy it and learn from it afterwards. So we have posted the video in a round by round format as well as have loaded the presentation up to Slideshare for you to enjoy and pass the knowledge to your teams.

It was eROI Vs. Responsys Vs. Mighty Interactive and it was close. The client projects were for eSurance, Children International and At-A-Glance. Great ideas, approaches and best practices all the way around from all 3 teams. One real interesting part of this is that none of the agencies were allowed to talk to the client in any way, shape or form before they went to design. Totally blind… only able to rely on THE Eye of the Tiger.

Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon was the Moderator/Referee of the event and TEXT to vote was used in real time round by round on the screen.

We look forward to doing this event again at another upcoming conference in Indy. Connect with you there?

Round 1- Round 3 can be found on the eROI Youtube channel if you want to watch it BLOW by BLOW and learn from the experts in email design WHY they made the decisions they did. 

For those of you that are here but in different panels or are looking to see what others are learning and hearing at the email experience conference in Arizona this week there is some immediate gratificaiton for you. Yes, no longer should you need to wait for a blog post, but instead all of those bloggers are embracing Twitter to bring you highlights in real time. 

If you are not on Twitter yet here is a really easy way to go read them. 

Well this week takes me back on the road. I seem to spend a lot of my life traveling around the US to work with our clients and attend events that bring me greater knowledge. I know sounds rough, but if you spent as much time in a hotel living out of a suitcase you might think different. Many of those who’s blogs you read enjoy this same “perk” of the job which leads me to be excited to spend a few days this week with them in Arizona at the Email Evolution Conference that the email experience council is putting on again this year. 

For those of you that are not there I know that most of us will be blogging and tweeting it like crazy (look for #eec on Twitter to keep up with the thoughts and lessons learned) so it will almost be like you are here with us. 

I will work to keep posts coming all week long as this past week kept me focused on client projects and left my mind blank at the end of many days. Sorry for the non-daily posts last week. Brain fried. 

But for those of you at the event please stop me in the hall, bar or event and say hello. Love to put a face with the name IRL.

Well here we are again about 3 weeks out from the annual email experience council conference. This time it takes us not to all meet in San Diego, but in sunny (and hopefully warm) Scottsdale, AZ.

Not only am I excited to hear Stan Rapp deliver the keynote and learn from his experience and get his take on where the world of email and interactive are heading, but some of these other email marketing sessions look great as well. 

Here are some in particular that I am looking forward to: 

From Good to Great: Campaign-Specific Testing Strategies

Keep in Touch: Email as a Lifecycle Management Tool

The Great Email Debate

Email Creative Fight Night: Agency vs. Agency vs. Agency

If you have not registered, get on it, get a flight, book your room and come not only learn, but interact with all of the great voices and thought leaders in email marketing.

Event Site >>>

Want a FREE Email Redesign?

The Email Evolution Conference is coming up quick (Feb 8-11th), and we’re so excited you’ll be there with us. As an attendee, you have the exclusive opportunity to get a free email redesign for your current email program from some of the best creative minds in the business.

How it works: As part of the Email Creative Fight Night session, we’ll be choosing three emails from those submitted by EEC09 attendees before January 13 to aswerdlow@the-dma.org. Three top agencies will then take the chosen emails and redesign them to be more impactful for the inbox. The agencies will present the redesigns at the knockout Email Creative Fight Night session during the EEC09.

Lisa Harmon (Smith-Harmon) will be moderating the conference session and the ringside judges will be: Dylan Boyd (ME) from eROI, Julian Scott from Responsys and Mike Corak from Mighty Interactive. These three firms will be the ones taking the THREE lucky emails and doing a redesign of them to present live at this event. 

This is your last chance! Submit your emails for redesign by January 13 to Ali Swerdlow at aswerdlow AT the-dma.org.

See you in Scottsdale! If you have not registered, please get going on this as it is a GREAT event of leaders in email design, thought, process, planning, strategy and execution.

I am personally so excited to see who is going to submit the ones to this event and our eROI Creative team is stoked to take best practices, our knowledge in industry verticals, and push the design to be effective, compelling, designed to render, as well as purdy.

What a great day to be in Park City with so many smart people from agencies, ESPs, brands and think tanks. Heck we were even lucky enough to have the lead email marketing strategist from the Obama campaign here to share with us how they used email to be the most important fund raising and organizational engine. Great work on Day One by Mediapost and the volunteer chairs that helped put on Email Insiders this year.

Overall the panels and speakers were great. They covered a lot of topics and took time to make sure to allow the audience to ask all the questions they wanted.

Looking forward to Day Two.

My Notes:

The Obama team uses the 3 M’s: Messaging, Mobilization and Money

Messaging: Strict Messaging Discipline – We followed everything that was said in the press, long term and short term messaging themes. Using email as the vehicle to drive home the points made that day, week or based on an event connected people more to the campaign than any other method.

Early on we learned that email could not only be a useful tool but a powerful vehicle to drive action. 

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