April 17, 2008

Lessons to Learn for One to One

Let's set this one up as "What not to do in email marketing".

So not sure if this was done in a find/replace method or driven from a CRM.

Lesson One: Use the right company name in your email. We are eROI not Exact Target. Those are those guys in Indy. We are the sexy ones in Portland, Oregon (HOLLA).

Two: Proof it for any typos or grammar.

Three: Cold Calling sucks, make me learn about your event and the value prop instead of making me HEAR about your event from you. You move straight into the you need to buy pitch and I still don't know what the event is.

Don't want to stir any Cold Call Cowboy karma, but if you don't plan your email outreach, even on a one to one level, you might as well not email.

Sorry Marc-----

------------------
From: M Rosenfeld
Date: April 14, 2008 2:32:24 PM PDT
To: Dylan Boyd
Subject: Request for call re Online Market World

Hi Dylan,

I left you a message this afternoon about to see if you had some time over the next few days to discuss the opportunities for Exact Target at Online Market World, October 1-3 in San Francisco. I know you're busy, so rather than trying to catch you on the fly, I was hoping to carve out a few minutes to take you through the details of the event, and to see if this is a good fit for you.

A limited number of speaking opportunities and high-profile sponsorships are still available, as well as prime exhibit space on the show floor. We've also added a new Community section to our website (Click here for our latest newsletter, which links to it) and can offer you a number of exposure options (podcasts, webcasts, etc.) on the site, to help you start promoting your company before the event in Oct.

Please let me know what day/times work best for you to chat. Thanks in advance for your time.

Regards,

M Rosenfeld
Sales & Business Development Mgr.
Online Market World
www.onlinemarketworld.com

Online Market World 08: October 1-3, '08 San Francisco

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:20 AM | Permalink

April 8, 2008

I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

So I want to start by saying that I love video and I love email. What I don't love is when you combine them and it not only does not work, but it looks like the below image (fished out of my Junk folder)

Let's start at the top at the jump >>

1. Headers : If you can't test you can't tell if it will get there let alone get to the inbox.
Example headers:
Received: from unknown (HELO avimail-sender2) (67.51.210.148) by mailscan0.--------s.com with SMTP; 3 Apr 2008 18:20:03 -0000
X-Spam-Flag: YES
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.2 (2007-07-23) on mailscan0.0--------.com
X-Spam-Level: ***********
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=11.0 required=5.0 tests=DOS_OE_TO_MX, FORGED_OUTLOOK_HTML,FORGED_OUTLOOK_TAGS,HTML_EMBEDS,HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02, HTML_MESSAGE,MIME_HTML_ONLY,WHOIS_PRIVPROT,XMAILER_MIMEOLE_OL_1ECD5 autolearn=no version=3.2.2
X-Spam-Report: * 0.6 HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02 BODY: HTML has a low ratio of text to image area * 0.4 HTML_EMBEDS BODY: HTML with embedded plugin object * 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message * 1.7 MIME_HTML_ONLY BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts * 2.8 WHOIS_PRIVPROT URL registered to WHOIS Privacy Protection * [URIs: avimailer1.com] * 2.8 XMAILER_MIMEOLE_OL_1ECD5 XMAILER_MIMEOLE_OL_1ECD5 * 0.0 FORGED_OUTLOOK_TAGS Outlook can't send HTML in this format * 0.0 FORGED_OUTLOOK_HTML Outlook can't send HTML message only * 2.8 DOS_OE_TO_MX Delivered direct to MX with OE headers
Message-Id:
Organization: AVI Communications
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3
X-Msmail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1081
X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1081
X-Spam-Prev-Subject: Heidi Foglesong Talks Video Email

2. Rendering: If you don't test if it will render don't send it. I mean not only video BUT this entire email is images. Really images? Come on man you are targeting ESPs, email marketers, and brand marketers. We all know best practices so if you are going to sell to us... follow them.

View image

3. Who the hell is Heidi Foglesong? And why should I care in email?
Really do you know who she is? Unless you live in AZ and watch the local news you have no clue.
I had to google her to even get an idea of why I should care, Ask yourself if your target audience would go to this length. Time's Up... Answer is NOPE.

So I turned on the images to see, but would others even take this step? Please code your emails in HTML and not ALL images and ALT tag your images.

View image

So I will go on record that I do not HATE video in email (but I do like the team at AVI) and everyone is all over it lately in all the email marketing industry articles, BUT I have yet to see a campaign that worked 100% everywhere and one that has compelled me to buy. I know others will argue this, so bring it on. Show me the data, the creative, and the results.

Sell me.

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:03 AM | Permalink

February 22, 2008

Second Award Won for eROI Campaign

Well a week went by and we are very excited to have won a second award for the PowerOfthePens.com campaign we produced last Dec for Wacom. This award was from the American Marketing Association of Oregon for the "Best Web Campaign" of 2007. This is our second AMA MAX award in 2 years (Kettle Foods last year) and the second award for this campaign in 2 weeks time. The team is really excited.

Thanks to our GREAT client Wacom for allowing us to do such great work.

Watch the Videos on the next page!

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 8:12 PM | Permalink

Spring Cleaning Comes Early

I love the sense of humor in this email from Dell this past February. The gift to those that they love was the gift of a subscription management preference center. They used the holiday as an unexpected date to release the news and give their subscribers MORE control over the types of emails they get from Dell. I appreciated not only the humor, but the fact that Dell like more and more brands are giving the control back to the subscriber.

View image

The fact is you really don't want to lose your subscribers if they are tired of getting emails on certain products or subjects that are not relevant, what you want it to keep them and allow them to tell you what they want. The preference center allows you to turn that control back to them and give them the ability to change it as they want to. In the case of Dell you might not be looking for a laptop this quarter but instead a printer, so you can let them know that. So refreshing to hear some big brands take this approach... now let's just see how they pull it off.

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:00 AM | Permalink

February 11, 2008

MediaPost Selects eROI as Email Service Provider

PORTLAND, Ore. ( February 11, 2008 ), eROI, Inc ., a leading online marketing agency, today announced that MediaPost Communications, the leading advertising and media Internet portal, has selected eROI as their first email service provider (ESP). MediaPost will use eROI's email marketing platform, emailROI, for broad use for over 30 MediaPost publications.

By using emailROI, MediaPost is able to continue creating and producing emails on their existing content management system, then send them to the emailROI platform (via the emailROI API) for distribution, tracking and reporting. emailROI allows MediaPost to better report with advanced email tracking for emails sent to their member base.

"We are proud to have MediaPost join our family of clients," said Ryan Buchanan, CEO of eROI. "We continually strive to provide the best services for clients that want to communicate with precision and agility. Our customers have chosen to work with us because we make doing this easy and as effective as possible."

Now delivering millions of emails a month to online marketers around the world, MediaPost and eROI have established this relationship to focus on getting the news, information and program notifications that hundreds of thousands of marketers rely on daily. "MediaPost ran emailROI through several tests and we feel they provide the most efficient and complete solution for our needs," said Jeff Loechner, President of MediaPost Communications. "MediaPost sends out newsletters and notifications to over 100,000 members daily. It's important that we have the ability to segment our members, then build, send and intelligently track professional email newsletters that look great across all major email clients."

During testing to troubleshoot any issues that might arise from content and email reputation, eROI worked with its partner ReturnPath to do advanced email deliverability and content rendering. MediaPost relies on eROI to make sure their emails make it to their subscriber's inbox.

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 8:00 AM | Permalink