May 12, 2008

eec Does Good

I wanted to share this great one year wrap up of the latest project the eec has been working on. This is the second year of helping a non profit get an email marketing program together. Countless volunteer hours were put in by some great people in the email marketing industry to make this not only a success, but also a system that the Women's Bean Project can continue to leverage and use to help grow their donor base support.

This is just one of the great things that the eec is doing for the not only the non profits out there, but the email industry as a whole. Way to go guys.

How E-mail Impacts Society
This week I wanted to share something inspirational happening in the e-mail industry -- and some best practices! It's a recap of the Email Experience Council's (EEC's) Eality project. The Eality project originated as a way to enable peers and competitors in the e-mail marketing industry to put business aside and work as a team to create the best e-mail efforts for a good cause.

In 2007, the EEC selected the Women's Bean Project (WBP) as its Eality focus. Stephanie Miller from Return Path volunteered countless hours to lead this initiative and its team on behalf of the EEC. I spoke with Miller to get the inside scoop on the project.

Read the whole story

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 9:00 AM | Permalink

April 28, 2008

Moving from Transaction to Interaction

As a creative interactive agency, we buy images from online sources for web design and email campaign projects. But we don't always opt in for the email newsletter from the check out. I am sure that this is also the case for you and even for your own customers. So you can message them around transactional emails, product updates of products they bought and even ones like this that ASK them if they want to get on the newsletter list. If you do it right you can have a good lift into your house list. But automatically placing them on an email newsletter list is not the right thing to do and you will end up losing them or at the worse end of the spectrum, offending them.

So here is a good example of what Corbis did to reach out to me. Does not hurt that it is pretty to boot.

View image

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 6:00 AM | Permalink

April 25, 2008

Yahoo Mail Blows Up

Over on the Yahoo Mail Blog they stated they have been doing work on Yahoo Mail classic, and of course, anytime they do work, there are bugs.

http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2008/04/24/update-to-yahoo-mail-classic-has-resumed/

The postmaster and development teams at Yahoo have been using the blog to communicate changes, and actively read comments from users. If you are experiencing problems, it is a good place to post or read comments from other users to see if they are already aware of the issues.

Comments from the WEB on this:

Someone was asking about problems with Yahoo yesterday. I use Yahoo Classic for my personal emails and I noticed yesterday and today that it's making emails that I haven't opened as read. If I mark those as unread, it then marks other unread emails as read. So perhaps there's not a deliverability issue but one with open and click rates because subscribers are not reading messages because Yahoo is telling them that they've already looked at the emails. Anyone else seeing this?
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I'm seeing similar problems in the new version of Yahoo Mail. Over the past week, in my personal account:

Previously read & deleted emails have returned to my inbox as unread
The inbox has failed to load & generated JavaScript errors
Individual messages have been failing to load, generating internal Yahoo error messages to try again

It seems as if they may be doing some behind-the-scenes work that's negatively impacting the user experience--and, in some cases, making select messages unreadable for a period of time.

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

Using RSS with Email Marketing

I wanted to share with you another client that is doing a good job of using our RSS to emailROI system to help them get timely content out in an automated manner. Sure they could use RSS, but their audience really does not grasp RSS as a whole. So the solution was to create a blog that could feed by RSS categories into an emailROI template without duplicating efforts.

View image

Why is this important? Well you have 10,000 things you are doing this week. Blogging could be one of them. Most likely adding content to your site is the primary task in most cases as static web sites do not bring your customers and prospects back to you. So instead of copying and pasting to create another email that would be using content you have already spent time placing on your site or blog, we give you our system that automatically grabs the content, builds the HTML and Text versions, and then lets you know when it is ready to go at the pre-defined time you set. Simple? You bet it is. And effective. Instead of rushing to put together a campaign, you can sit back and let the campaign build itself from your content fed by RSS.

I can tell you that it is a time saver for many organizations that are eROI clients.

And take a look at how nice it comes out. On brand, relevant, timely, and we throw in an RSS feed from that campaign to boot if you have folks that subscribe to newsletters by RSS.

Comments (1) | Posted by dylan at 4:02 AM | Permalink

April 24, 2008

Who Are The Email Bloggers?

Interesting article, but let's take a peek in the email marketing space. Just who are our bloggers? Are they in line with what is reflected in this study?

It seems to me that the email marketing blogger community is not reflective of this study. Maybe we are all just above average?

Gender seems to be evenly reflected.
I would go out on a limb and state that many are around the age found in this study as well.

I took a look at many of the ones that I read. Now this is not ALL of them as there are about 50 email blogs that I track, but these folks are the most widely read and most prolific.

Tamara Gielen
Chad White
Denise Cox
DJ Waldow
Kath Pay
Alex Williams
Loren McDonald
Anna Billstrom
Jeff Mills
Kelly Rusk
Stefan Pollard
Janine Popick
Jeanniey Mullen
Stephanie Miller
Mark Brownlow
Lisa Harmon

The Study: What's A Blogger?

Bloggers are younger and higher percentages are Hispanic & African American than the general population. A higher percentage of Democrats than of Republicans are blogging.

Now that Blogging might better be called a market segment rather than a market niche, it's useful with regard to positioning the marketing message to understand what a Blogger looks like, as distinguished from the rest of the population. According to the BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Survey, 26% of all adults say they regularly or occasionally blog.

Of those:
53.7% are male
44.7% are married
28.4% hold a professional or managerial position
10.4% are students.

Bloggers tend to be younger, averaging 37.6 years old, compared to 44.8 for adults 18+ (the "general population"). Ethnically:

69.7% of Bloggers are White/Caucasian (vs. 76.1%)
12.2% are African American/Black (vs. 11.4%)
3.7% are Asian (vs. 2.0%)
20% of Bloggers are Hispanic, compared to 14.8% of adults 18+

In addition, Bloggers report a lower income ($55,819 vs. $56,811) and are better educated (14.3 years of education vs. 14.2).

Although Bloggers are more likely to use new media, the analysis finds that more conventional forms of media trigger their Internet searches. Magazines, at 51.6%, rank highest, followed by:

48.8% reading an article
46.1% broadcast TV
44.5% cable TV
42.5% face-to-face communication
39.7% newspaper

Gary Drenik, President of BIGresearch, concludes "Bloggers are a diverse group and not who you would expect..."

Do you have some blogs I should be reading? Share them with me.

Comments (6) | Posted by dylan at 4:59 AM | Permalink