The Email Wars

I found an email from Banana Republic very interesting this AM. I am not sure how many people might have caught it but it was a complete play on something not being right. As a matter of fact the email was “broken”. Now I did not catch it at first myself in my first skim as the size was on par with every other email they send. I thought something was out of whack but had to go back and look at it harder. Now did the typical subscriber notice that something was afoot? Did they notice and take action to find out more?

But what was it? The email itself was exactly the same size as all of their other ones. I had to actually hold them side by side to make sure as the image hat tip to the wide email format – sideways scrolling- makes you think it would continue on. I dove deeper into the image mapping and everything was going to the right places, so I wonder what percentage of the subscriber base actually found that arrow to the right and used it to go to the landing page.

Note that it is a interesting tactic to act as if something might have gone wrong, was cut off, or that more is hiding past the email itself. But I would love to know if people where actually drawn to the arrow.

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So your campaign went out, they opened, they read, and they clicked. Battle one down. Fortunately for you you did a good job of presented the right offers to the right people and voila they were in market and bought. Kudos. Goal two complete. But what happens after that? Do you simply count them as another customer or as a savvy email marketer to do you take the next steps in the lifecycle? What is that you ask, I assume that you knew right?

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.

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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

Some of you might be unfamiliar with the fact that at eROI we not only are focused on email marketing but our team works extensively in web development, strategy and idea execution across many areas.

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.

So I wanted to “share” with all of you a new study we just released covering some clients we work with and how we went through the process of creating mobile versions of their website as opposed to building an app (for that). We love apps but sometimes they do not fit the need NOR does everyone need an app. See how we approached it and delivered an experience via a mobile version of the website content that was important.

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!

As a massive fan of email subscription and preference centers when it comes to email marketing I think that I stumbled on to the Holy Grail of email opt in pages. I was both amazed at the depth of this WSJ email opt in page while at the same time floored at the complexity and breadth of what they had to present. I had no idea that they published so many different versions of daily, weekly and unique emails until I stumbled upon this one. Now after scanning and trying to decide what I really wanted to get I dove deeper into all of the levels of complexity they made public facing.

My hat is off to whomever is managing all of these and my hopes is that they are using a content management system that automates the production of all of these choices. I mean for those of you that publish just one or a few emails you can imagine how many Full Time Employees it would take to pull this off.

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