The Email Wars

At eROI we have been fortunate to work with some of the best PR firms in the nation. We have worked to help them understand not only why to use email as a Public Relations Agency outreach tool, but also taught them how to use it to get actionable steps out of it. Now I am going to share some of these ideas with you. 

1. Develop a communications channel that you own. By using an opt in email list for publications, writers, industry analysts, bloggers and others you can establish a direct channel to get your messages out infront of them when you have news to share. 

2. Design an email template that not only matches the brand, but has actionable elements that they can use. We often construct easily editable templates that not only give a good brand experience, but also have attributes that can deliver high resolution 300 dpi or higher images and other assets. 

3. Use the data in your favor. This is the most important part of the use of email marketing with PR. Now that you have delivered the assets you can tell who has read them, what they have done with them, when they downloaded the assets, who might use them, and identify those that have not taken actions so that your PR team can follow up with personal emails or yes… a phone call. 

When PR firms use email it can grow their distribution, tracking, and follow up call efforts. Which in turn creates better actionable plans to make sure that your message and programs are getting in front of those that you want to make sure are going to use them. 

Now this does not mean that the press release it dead, as we think it only ties in better with a full email marketing strategy. If you can leverage the data or read, clicks, and downloads you are closer to having and intelligent conversation with your target audience of influencers and media contacts.

Learn how eROI works with Agency partners for email marketing >>

When I first saw this in another email service providers email newsletter last week, I did not know quite what to think of it. My first reaction was great idea for the small business that adds one or two people a day to their email lists. My second reaction was how in the heck was this a best practice or Can Spam compliant? 

Now since I don’t have all the data on this new widget yet my post here might be a little off. And that being said I welcome anyone from this company to respond and let me know how it works. 

My fear is as follows:

1. You are making it easy for people to add emails of those that have not opted in

2. You are setting an idea in your client’s minds that it is OK to just add email addresses collected from sources outside of a double opt in form THAT they did not initiate.

3. Making is easy does not make it right

Now for the other side of my thoughts. 

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

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

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

1. Set up a Twitter account for your brand

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

3. Use Twiterfeed to automate the collection of your content

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

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

I like to see how some brands are increasing ways to become the one stop location and challenge the channel partners that they work with. Now I assume that they are partnered up with a travel system, but this is a natural extension of maximizing the reach that they have to travelers. 

I know as a frequent traveler myself that I go back and forth between hotel sites, ones that I have accounts with and then to airline sites. So combining it and presenting it as a customer value is a good way to approach this. I know that some of you will continue the search back and forth between browsers and sites, but I will wager that they capture a good percentage of those traveling with them on the fact that you can use your hotel points just like miles for flight so easily. 

Good thinking. 

What do we see in email? Buy me. Sell Me. Join Me. Listen to Me. Or simply Here I Am. What value does that bring to your brand? What value does that bring to your customer? We could argue each side brings value to a certain segment of your audience. And in some cases it does. But what about using email marketing to expand your brand story? Are there things that you are not thinking about that through targeted exposure might bring a new thought or feeling, and yes a sale, to your email marketing campaigns. 

I was struck by a hotel brand that I appreciate as they continue to do good things with their email marketing strategy. I need to call them one day and find out who is the brains behind their thinking here. They are a boutique property with over 20 cities with locations. Well this past week they launched a new site and focused on the food and restaurants at their properties not only in the email but even down to the title tags in the site. Kudos for thinking about this holistically instead of in a silo we often see from brands. 

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Just how do you drive a move to mobile email campaign? I was forwarded this example of eTrade making a move to get people to use their mobile version by giving away a free blackberry. That is one way. But what did they miss with this campaign? 

1. Where is the VIEW AS Mobile version for those getting this on a mobile device? FAIL

2. Why is the header of the email so massive? Anyone with a mobile device is not forced to scroll (or thumb) down to the content If they have HTML enabled. 

3. The email itself is over (I cut off the 2 pages of legal) 1200 pixels long. Not a very good practice in my book if you are targeting mobile OR even the typical inbox. 

So what would have worked better? 

First nailing the top three above. But on top of that thinking about the value prop of not just giving an incentive of a blackberry but a mobile device of their choice. Not everyone wants a blackberry so why pigeon hole yourself into a gift that might not appeal to your audience. I know that this is a deal with Blackberry as the content says “exclusive” but they need to be building mobile apps to be cross platform complaint. They might have missed some promotional opportunities to just touch an existing audience and move them to use their services from a value standpoint. 

What would you have done?

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

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

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Funny but back in the day we named the company that is now an interactive marketing agency eROI, emailROI as this was our first product. Did you know how we came up with the name? Well it was a tag line based on the French word “le roi” meaning the KING with the whole ROI thing out there. We knew back then that email marketing is king and not going to be dethroned no matter what was next out there. 

Over and over again people have tried to attack email in hopes of shifting people to the next “trend” in communications. Let me tell you this, email is not a trend, unless you consider the chart released from Social Media company ShareThis that only shows it as the leader in communication percentages. So if being a leader is a trend… sign me up to drink the punch. 

CLICK THE IMAGE TO SEE THE FULL CHART LARGER

Read the whole study at the ShareThis Blog

We came up with the idea of trying out the horizontal email technique with one of our clients, Zinio. We thought that as a company that is showing how digital magazines are different, that we wanted them to challenge how emails were read, just like how magazines are read. We have seen 4 examples of this in the past and heard great things from folks that did it for Coors, FHM, Diesel and a luggage company, so why not give it a try. 

So far it has performed well and as the list grows we will watch to see how it works out. Now this being said, we did make a standard back up email layout just in case it went the other way. Well luck was on our side. 

My thoughts are why not challenge the medium. Why not make something stand out that not only grabs the readers attention, makes them pause to look at it, and if it works see if the media picks it up. Well all three things happened. 

So what is next? We will see as the months go on. We are always up to try something different. Are you?

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I found an interesting string about Gmail possibly getting a Trends system for analyzing your email similar to the Google Reader system. It has legs to be an interesting tool that not only users but email marketers might find a good use for. With so many email software systems I have seen falling short of being able to paint the full picture of your campaign history in order for you to easily find the trends of your campaigns (best day of the week to email, when you typically send email, when you email arrives at the inbox etc), this might be something others could use for email campaign strategy and analysis.

Imagine if you could harness the power of Gmail to start campaign frequency analysis of your campaigns, those of you competition or any other trend you are tracking. Seems from the post that it might be possible to do yourself now using the Google gmail IMAP structure. Now I am fairly smart, but I think that this might be beyond my skill set. 

Read the full post on RWW

So much was made these past two week about the strategy of Barack Obama using email and sms to alert those following the campaign and supporting the campaign to learn about the VP he selected FIRST by these two methods. So what happened late friday night when the news was released to the world? 

Well I was out that night, but learned of it first not by email or SMS from his campaign, but from Twitter, websites and friends that the announcement had been made. Heck the news channels even had it before anyone go the SMS or the email letting them know that the choice had been made. 

Others noticed this as well: 

“Word of Obama’s decision leaked out hours before his campaign was scheduled to inform supporters via text and e-mail messages, and hours after informing two other top contenders for the vice presidential nomination – Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia – that they had not been chosen.”

So the email finally arrived in the AM on Saturday after 7am. I have attached it below for two reasons. 

1. The promise made across the web was that you would know FIRST by signing up and opting in. And yet we knew from more sources besides those two 12 hours earlier.

2. The email I thought would include video a photo and some excitement from his staff since this announcement was so hyped and so media hyped for so long. What a let down to just get this HTML text email. 

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Microsoft has launched a new add on that in Outlook 2007 can add some functionality to email priority scoring while at the same time give you a little more control over your time and inbox management. Why do I find this newsworthy to share with email marketers? Well I think that this could have an impact on how people get, read and respond to email. More importantly will it change the way that office workers and users of Outlook 2007 read and act on email marketing campaigns? It is way too early to know yet, but worth keeping on the radar. 

Example: What if your marketing emails and newsletters are giving a lower priority to other emails, are shoved down in the importance scale and left unchecked? Or even worse just mass deleted? Well this bodes well for office productivity but not for your campaigns. SO in thinking about this from a high and early level we should think about the importance of the relationship, how people are interacting and responding to our emails and take the subject line to a new level of importance in our campaign planning. 

How will this impact your campaigns? Or will it? That is yet to be known or determined, but if this application has some traction we might need to think about it more in our email marketing efforts and planning.

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Here it is… another great survey on email marketing and email marketer from eROI. Now this one is juicy as well as good looking. I know I am a little biased, but I love the design work our team is doing. Also be on the look for new case studies coming out on Email Design, Campaign Sites, Publishing Client Campaigns, and new methods of email marketing that are delivering ROI in social media.

Here is what you will get in the new study:

We examine all the elements of a great email, and show where email marketers are hitting (and missing) opportunities to increase deliverability, opens, clicks and conversions. We uncover rising trends and current opportunities. How do your email marketing campaigns need to evolve to take advantage?

Download our presentation of the full results!

That’s right boys and girls… a new Email Marketing Guide in the Resources center @eROI. And not just one… but 3 new guides. And hold tight… wait for it… wait for it… wait for it… now - Look next week for the RESULTS of our latest email study there as well. 

I know you say this is TOO good to be true, like the Flowbee or the GoateeSaver, but it is not it is 4 for the price of 1 visit. I know these guys at eROI really go above and beyond to think about what is working in email marketing and how to share this knowledge with the world. One would think that they are a 3000 strong global force of Ninjas and Revolutionaries (we are but less that 60 with 2 offices) but alas we just like to make you smarter to do your job better. 

Now if we share like this with everyone can you JUST imagine what we share with our clients and customers? I would wager that some AWESOME ideas come out of here and some campaigns that rock. 

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This might be one of the funniest video parodies I have seen in a while. We users of Twitter are still in love with it EVEN with the outages, the lost friends, and all the comp that has risen up. This video using some old movie footage of all people Hitler is Hilarious and really tells the story of Twitter. Now this is either going to bring you closer to it, or drive you away. Either way… your choice, but all the leading email folks are on it and we use it to share things that you might not ever see. 

If you just take the time to watch this it is PERFECTLY executed. It tells the story of Twitter and the Tweeple perfectly. I am not going to take away too much of your time but for those of you NOT on Twitter I want you to know this might help you better understand the trials and tribulations of what we have gone through. 

Now did you know that you can follow eROI and this blog by using Twitter? www.twitter.com/eroi is all you need to know.

Now IF I say that the service levels have been better since being funded it will surely show me the FAIL WHALE in the next few hours. 

Enjoy the Friday humor of a WELL executed video.