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September 24, 2007

iPhone and the Impact to Email Marketing

So I caved this past week, after stating that I was going to hold out, and bought an iPhone. It wasn't for "me" but for my wife who needed a phone that brought her everything she needed on her Apple on the go. I spent some time with it last week setting it up for her and found that the email and web experience was better than I first thought it to be. The size of the screen is not as important as that of other mobile devices like Blackberries and MS Mobile based phones, do to the fact that you can use your two fingers to zoom in and out and read content easier (and in HTML) than doing it on another phone type.

I was actually able to log into emailROI (our eROI ESP platform) and review campaign statistics and send out an email campaign from the car. (She was driving, but those that know me would expect me to be launching campaigns at 75 MPH.) I am a convert to the experience and the platform. I am not rushing out to get one for myself just yet, as I still love my Crackberry, and the keyboard experience is still better from a business utility perspective for me.

This device is going to change Business to Consumer email marketing. I can drink the Kool Aid now. The ability to target with compelling creative emails and interact surpasses that of any other mobile device I have used. The only thing holding this back from the business user is the lack of corporate business plans from ATT at this point in time. When that time comes, you will see me with one, launching targeted email campaigns from all points of my weekly travels. It also has a Movable Type plugin to blog directly from it with MT4 which we use for our corp blogs.

Now that I think about it, I might go get one next week. I am a tech sucker... but it is for "business reasons and research" right? At least that is how I am mentally justifying it to myself right now.

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 11:01 AM | Permalink

September 23, 2007

How Will Inflight Email Change your Read Rates?

Remember the Boeing service that promised in-flight email and web access when you were flying? You now how much work we would all get done with 1-5 hours of uninterrupted work? I just came in on the red eye last night to OMMA in NYC and would have been able to knock out some serious work/blogging if I would have had that time.

But where this really takes me is how will it impact your email campaigns if we could really move to an always on world? Would you have people with that time to spend more time reading and maybe converting or buying? Uninterrupted time is hard to find in today's world and I think that being able to have that in flight time would change the amount of time people have to spend leisurely reading, interacting, browsing and converting in campaigns. I am looking forward to that day.

Alaska Air says plans to launch in-flight Internet - Yahoo! News

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 2:27 PM | Permalink

At OMMA East This Week In NYC

I am always excited to attend OMMA. Not just for the people I get to meet up with at this twice annual event, but for the quality of the speakers, conversations and format of the event. I will be trying to capture as much of it as I can for you and will post it during the week.

If you are in town (NYC) come over and meet some of the EEC on some of the panels. I will be on a panel with Stephanie Miller (ReturnPath), Jeanniey Mullen (Ogilvy) and Lee Sherman (AvenueA Razorfish Monday at 4:45 at the Hilton.

Topic: ROI, What makes email valuable to your business!

Email has a great ROI, yet gets less than 6% of the marketing budget. Is ROI or attribution modeling the problem? Who gets credit for the sale when a customer is exposed to display media on a third party site, does a search and then opens and clicks through from an email? Come and explore how marketers address this very controversial issue of attribution modeling and how email marketers apply this to their ROI story.

Comments (1) | Posted by dylan at 11:11 AM | Permalink

September 20, 2007

Yes Email Is Effective and Alive

This is a relevant study just released yesterday from Shop.org and Forrester on how super effective email marketing is for retaining customers and a top priority for many marketers.

Some key highlights:

E-mail marketing to house files is delivering higher response rates and lower costs per order than other channels

E-mail is delivering sales at an average cost per order of less than $7, according to two surveys conducted by Forrester Research on Shop.org's behalf to create the State of Retailing Online 2007 report. This is compared to $71.89 for banner ads, $26.75 for paid search and $17.47 for affiliate programs.

91% percent of those surveyed said they use e-mail to a house list as a marketing tactic while 88% of them said it has increased as a priority in 2007

Average click-through and order-conversion rates of e-mail are an astounding 11% and 6%

Most popular and effective e-mails are those that tout online-only promotions, with 71% of those surveyed saying they use the tactic and 66% rating it as "very effective."

One of the lowest-rated types of e-mails were those following shopping cart abandonment, with 17% saying they use it and 13% rating it very effective.

More info and full article here:
http://directmag.com/disciplines/email/email_metrics_healthy/

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 7:56 AM | Permalink

September 19, 2007

Sit On Our Marketing Therapist Couch

We are moving away from webinars as we feel that it is a medium that is just not working as a whole. In testing them this past year we saw large numbers of people attend but you can never answer all the questions. So what we are doing is opening up our lines of communication to you. Why not just call and ask us our thoughts, what works and what might work for you. We find that so much more value is in a one on one conversation that it is in a mass sermon or presentation. When was the last time you left a webinar thinking, well now I know what to do with my online marketing program. That's what we thought.

So here is what you can do, really. Pick up the phone and call. Talk to our strategists one on one. We love listening to people and hearing what challenges they have with their marketing campaigns. From the 1000's of campaigns we have created and deployed, our team of strategists can shed some light from our learnings to you. One on One.

There are Three ways to take us up on this:

1. Here is the number for you to call and get some time on the interactive marketing couch. 1-877-217-6955

2. Or if you are better inclined, drop us an email to sales AT eroi.com and we can interact using that great medium of email.

3. Post a comment on this blog. Just like HIPPA compliance, we will keep these posts private and not post them live on this blog. But we will need a way to contact you like an email address or a phone number. We are smart, just not Johnny Carson or David Blaine smart.

Comments (1) | Posted by dylan at 8:00 AM | Permalink

Let's Stop The Madness

Here we are at the start of one of the busiest seasons for email marketing. With the holiday and end-of-year rush about to hit not only marketers but consumers on October 15th, the segmentation, development, design and behavioral elves are busy in workshops across not only the US, but the entire world. So why do we keep reading that email marketing is dead or dying?

The reason is other marketing media -- direct mail, search, blog, PR, new 2.0 media, viral, broadcast and print -- are all changing. These industries are trying, in essence, to lobby against each other to place themselves at the top or portray themselves as leading, or at least not losing, prominence in the minds of their audiences. It is the fight for dollars in the advertising business.

In truth, media are shifting. Not dying. Preferences on how people are reached are changing and we all need to change with them. We still watch TV, just in a different way in some households. We still read the papers, but they are not our go-to source of immediate information. We still subscribe to magazines and listen to the radio but for reasons other than our evolving desire of connectedness and immediate gratification. In a sense not only we have shifted this measurement as an audience, but marketers like yourselves have assisted with this always on mentality.

So what do we do? Trash one medium over another? Write studies claiming that one is dying while the other we are passionate about is thriving? Seems this is what many are doing.

We are here to let you know that yes advertising and marketing are changing, but one still does not kill off the other. They are interdependent. We actually, not sure if you noticed with all the summer events and daily noise in your own inbox, have not sent this ''monthly'' newsletter since May, and here we are in September. Why? Well summer has been incredibly busy not only for us at eROI and our clients, but felt that everyone needed a little break. Is this close to what you thought it would be? Is email dead? Read some of the other articles to understand that it is only evolving right now to a medium that is working better due to marketers and companies taking it more seriously and doing it right by listening to their subscribers, customers and competition.

Long live media and strive to do better.

Stop lurking on the blogs and start interacting, leave your thoughts around this topic as a comment on this blog. If you want to share but don't want them published, let us know in your comments and we will keep them hidden. (Thought I would spell that one out for you Ken)

Comments (3) | Posted by dylan at 4:16 AM | Permalink

September 18, 2007

Humor Wins When Relevant

Not sure if any of you have seen Silver Jet Airlines. They are not your inexpensive NYC to London flight option, but they are one of the nicest ways to fly it seems to me if you have that juicy corporate travel budget. But besides this I have loved these Virgin-esque tie ins they promote that is a great brand escalation to me with a brand like the Rolling Stones. Tickets to the Stones last time I saw them were not all that low priced as well and the humor works.

The creative is a good blend of text, image and a call to action towards the top of the email and left justified, which should play well in most email preview panes.

View image

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:30 AM | Permalink

September 17, 2007

How Does This Do Without Images?

I have long been a fan of the clean design and colors used by The Body Shop. On top of that the frequency is fairly regimented and tight. They seem to have their act together. But what always surprises me is the lack of text in the email. They are always image heavy and I have turned images off to see how it renders. Not very well at all. Now do you think that they know that my email displays images by default, I doubt it as I have purposefully clicked on the have trouble seeing this view as a web page link to see if they might try sending another format. Nope.

But the big thing to me is that it loads so slow. The images take a while to fill out and sometimes I have to go back to it a few times to get it to load them. Something to think about when you are building emails. Don't sacrifice design and beauty for an email that performs.

View image

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 9:21 AM | Permalink

September 15, 2007

Vote for TheEmailWars Blog

Time is here and we need your votes. Voting ends on October 19th and we need some groundswell now. As a loyal or first time readers we need your help today in giving us some much due cred. Take a moment and give us your vote. Takes only a few minutes and yes you need to register, but in doing so you can use this site to explore and find so many other great blogs in different niches.

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 10:04 PM | Permalink

September 14, 2007

Taking Above the Fold to a New Level

I am always watching about 200 brand emails. I am looking for people that are trying new things and doing it right or wrong (in my opinion). I like to hammer home ABOVE THE FOLD over and over again so this was a breath of fresh air. Wish I knew if this had a big impact on the email click rate and the conversion rate. I get tempted to buy from brands that I see doing it right. So of course I pulled out my wallet and looked for a book I have been meaning to stop in and pick up. But alas it was back ordered. I am a little impatient like that.

View image

But back to the creative. Notice the read navigation links at the top of the email. They are all stacked neatly at the top driving me to find what I am looking for in thier LONG emails. Not that I hate the emails as they are a book store with so much to talk about each week, but they are rather overwhelming to me at times.

If you aren't trying, succeeding, failing or learning from each campaign, you are not trying to do better. I know that many of your don't want to fail, but as a great agency live by... fail harder. It is the only way to learn is to take risks and be prepared to learn.

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:37 AM | Permalink

September 12, 2007

Great Campaign Driven By Email

Not too often do I see a campaign with email as the driver really hit it on the head. I was forwarded this campaign from a friend at Adverblog today and we all loved it. It was simple, on brand, on target and done with media to WOW you. You need to check this out and try it. And the fact that the URL is www.dylanmessaging.com alone was odd enough to make me want to know if it was a dynamic campaign URL set up just for me. Of course it wasn't when I got there it did not let me down.

And how does this whole concept spread you ask??? Email or course. But yet you have read that email is dead right? Come on now. If I need to read that one more time I might explode. Email is the glue online, the driver, the easiest and most effective way that word of mouth occurs. You see something cool and instantly want to send it on to so many others.

I particularly loved that they let you participate in the campaign and then after the fact asked if you wanted to opt in. Classy touch.

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 10:22 AM | Permalink

September 11, 2007

Why E-Mail Marketing Falls Short

I read this article on ClickZ this AM and could not agree more with this statement below. Can't you see that many marketers approached and still approach email marketing like using dynamite for fishing. Sure it works sometimes, but unless you have the means to capture all the fish at the surface then much of the effort (or lack of effort) goes to waste.

"There's been a great deal of discussion lately about why, after 10 years, e-mail marketing is still struggling with the basics of deliverability and consent. The general consensus among industry heavyweights is many organizations fail to follow e-mail marketing best practices. Broadly speaking, blame for bad behavior is placed on three groups: the new and inexperienced; offline marketers who try to apply their principles to e-mail; and those knowingly playing fast and loose to make a quick buck.

Much of the trouble we see today is of our own making. We messed up, big time. The root cause can be traced to two phrases: "prior business relationship" and "one bite at the cherry."

Read on at http://www.clickz.com/3626927

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 8:17 AM | Permalink

September 8, 2007

Great Inspiration from Movie Campaigns

We have been hard at work this summer on a few new entertainment and movie campaigns. We spent alot of time wrapping our heads around just what makes a movie site worth talking about, visiting, and coming back to again. Some good ones stood out like EagleVsShark (if you like the Flight of the Conchords you willlike this). But what we found is video, interactive games, soundboards, icons, and now social media. So we put these to the test with a few new fall 08 releases and will see how they work out. Trying to find that secret formula is a little elusive, as there really isn't one. It is about learning what makes the movie worth seeing, building hype, and providing tools to let the "prosumer" (producer of content ie bloggers, facebook, etc) take over your task of getting the word out. Give them the attributes to share out there and let the long tail take your content for a spin.

But regressing on this post, here was one site that blew my mind. Now when you first see it you will feel let down, trust me here. But when you understand what happens next, WOW. This blog site, no matter when you visit has the first post time and date change to about 10 minutes before you got there. Like the content is fresh at every visit (nice trick). The other twist is Google the term "iwanttoseeaghost" and it will be the first result. Buzzworthy in itself. After you click on the first post with the Open Video button, hold on for a ride and make sure that your speakers are on... but not too loud .This will take over your mind when it starts racing through the sequence. Mind blowing, creepy and worth talking about and sharing via email for sure. That is the beauty of viral., create the content and let it drive the ride. This campaign took this movie to the #2 opening in Europe against many other higher budgeted movies.

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 10:08 PM | Permalink

September 7, 2007

Inverge: Great First Year Event in Portland

I really tell you the last time I was truly fired up about an event I went to. Sure I have been to some great events like OMMA (have not missed one), Email Insiders, Marketing Sherpa Email Summit, and a few others, but this past week in Portland the Inverge conference, only in it's first year, got me fired up. I was amazed at the level of speakers that we brought to Portland from all over the US and abroad.

+ Joshua Green, Research Manager, Convergence Culture Consortium, MIT
+ Jeff Yapp, Executive Vice President, MTV Networks
+ Chris Van Dyke, President & CEO, Nau
+ Slate Olson, Senior Brand Connections Manager, Nike
+ Renny Gleeson, Global Director of Digital Strategies, Wieden+Kennedy
+ Lori H. Schwartz, SVP & Director, Interpublic Emerging Media Lab, Interpublic Group
+ Catherine Ogilvie, EVP & General Manager of the San Francisco Office, Edelman
+ Stephanie Otto, CEO / Principal, Brainstorm Communications, Inc.
+ Dalen Harrison, CEO, Ensequence
+ Adam Richardson, Strategy Director, frog design
+ Ken Papagan, President & Chief Strategy Officer, Rentrak
+ Jason Stoddard (Managing Partner) and Ken Brady (VP, Asia), Centric, Agency of Change
+ Marcelino Alvarez, Senior Interactive Producer, Wieden+Kennedy
+ Bill Barnett, General Manager, Entertainment Media Works
+ Mark Deuze, Professor, Journalism and New Media, Leiden University (The Netherlands)

This line up was so transparent, open and ready share data that I loved. I was like a sponge soaking all of this great knowledge up. If many of you might not know as we don't talk about it too often, eROI is not just an email marketing agency, but we have become a full service interactive agency that does work across strategy, blogs., viral, online brand, video, audio pods, campaign websites ,brand sites and so much more .We have really evolved so it was a treat to get so many of our team out to listen to these speakers.

I know that all of the video is archived on AlphaGeek.TV online here.

The trick is to know how to search it. Kind of tricky but if you enter the dates Sept 6th or Sept 7th from 9am to 5:30pm you can watch some of the great speakers.

Thanks again to everyone that came for year one and year two is only going to be better .It was alot like SXSW in Austin, but on a more controlled and focused level. Make sure to keep you eyes on Inverge for next year and make plans to get to Portland to participate you lurkers....

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 7:35 AM | Permalink

September 6, 2007

Signing Up for an SMS Campaign - Why?

So I might be a hold out on this whole SMS/Text Campaign idea. I hear stories of teens that are addicted to cell phone text mesaging, and I use it here and there, but I can't figure out the draw. I have signed up for a large number of these campaigns to my cell phone to see why I might have customers that use this. Heck we added it as a feature to emailROI maybe 2 plus years ago. Still very few customers that actually use it.

From the ones I have subscribed to, I see that most of them are a "what's up/ what's going on/don't miss it" type of campaign. Still none of them have made me want to drop what I was doing and rush online, to a store, buys a new release or even use my Slingbox ( I love this thing) to connect to my Tivo at home to record a show. Why I am so slow to see the impact? Has anyone seen a great text campaign or signed up for something that truly gave the brand, subscriber or sales a lift? I am sure that there must be some great campaigns out there. Or did the fact that I now fall out of the target demographic help to explain why I am not seeing why this will grow and work?

Here is one from Urban Outfitters that I was sure got "it". This sign up form alone scared me with ugly design alone.

View image

Comments (1) | Posted by dylan at 4:24 AM | Permalink

September 5, 2007

Microsoft Needs To Work on Email Tiips

I was doing some searching around the web the past few days to see what types of tips are out on the web to help email marketers getting started with email marketing. I was a little stunned when I found Microsoft in the results with a tips page for small business about email marketing.

http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/tips/email-marketing-tips.mspx

These were the ones that caught my eye in a bad way. Why would they be telling people to send out MASS MAILINGS and my favorite (from the guys taking people to court and throwing them in jail) was the one about how "violations probably won't put you in jail".

Send out a mass mailing using List Builder with Business Contact Manager? See how to import List Builder records into Business Contact Manager, or export Business Contact Manager records into List Builder. How to stay out of trouble with the CAN-SPAM Act The CAN-SPAM Act imposes some requirements on mass emailers. Violations probably won't put you in jail. But if your recipients complain, you could be in for a hassle.

Come on guys, you really need to clean these tips up a bit. They are not very best practice to be telling people how to send out mass emails as easy as this and let them know that there really aren't any serious reprocussions. Practice what you preach and help us all put an end to mass emails and scare the beejesus out of anyone not toeing the lines of the law.

Comments (1) | Posted by dylan at 1:57 PM | Permalink

September 4, 2007

Great Confirmation Page at Signup

I took a plunge the other week and downloaded Plaxo. Not sure why, but I will place some blame on David Baker over at Avenue A/Razorfish as he sent me a Plaxo update card. I have never been a fan of this system and I cannot truthfully tell you why. Now that I have it installed on one of my computers, I don't really use it as often as I thought I might. It seems like a good tool, but I guess I need to commit to it.

What I did like was the sign up process and they great screen showing me exactly what the email was going to look like when I got it in my inbox. It was a copy of the confirmation email and I thought this was a really nice touch on closing the loop with the opt in process. Many opt ins tell you to expect or look for an email. None that I have seen before this one actually give you a visual of what you will see in the inbox. So kudos to Plaxo for this nice, high-impact touch.

It made me think about our own opt in process and some best practices. I had been talking to an agency partner the other day about best practices in email marketing when it came to surveys. The idea of sending out a pre-survey email to let them know to expect a survey was the concept to see if testing conditioning behavoir would increase the amount of survey responses. The premise of letting someone know what to expect and what was expected of them was something we thought we should try. I will let you know if it increased the survey participation after it is all done.

Comments (1) | Posted by dylan at 4:00 AM | Permalink