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

May 1, 2008

Designing Emails for Ecommerce

So many examples to show you, but this one really hits on the simplicity of ecommerce email marketing. What is so special about this? Well not special, but it just clearly communicates the levels of interaction and what you can get by clicking the links. Not over the top, not too much copy, and the value proposition is right there in every call to action bucket.

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Often times I see emails with so many things to do, too much copy, and not laid out in a format that is going to display right in the inbox. This layout rocks.

Now to have full disclosure this designer used to work for eROI. So he earned his chops at the school of hard knocks. And it just doesn't hurt as well that this designer is also my younger brother. Nice work Bryan, you make me proud that you stayed awake at eROI U.

Best part about this is his using Twitter as another communication vehicle in the footer. Not over the top, but right in link with his audience of young urban hipsters. Guess the tech addictive measures run in the family as well.

Still time to get your own shirt or limited run hoodie from his new line.

Comments (2) | Posted by dylan at 4:42 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.

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

April 25, 2008

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.

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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 23, 2008

eROI email Survey: The Cradle & The Grave

Over 500 marketers were surveyed about the subscribe/unsubscribe process. While these processes are improving, they have yet to reach what we would call exceptional.

You can get the whole PDF in our resources section (Quarterly Studies tab)/ but the call outs below are not in the PDF.

High Level Thoughts:
- Email marketers are not matching up other marketing efforts like they should. Email, search, DM, Print, Call Centers, and sales teams need to get on the same page.

- Email marketers are not monitoring feedback loops and complaint rates. Are they counting on the ESP to do it? Many ESPs like eROI do this, but some do not. Does yours? Or does your program if you run it in house?

- The thank you page, prime visitor real estate is being wasted. There are so many opportunities to be testing the thank you page with Progressive Profiling and offers. As well as setting expectations.

- Not surveying subscribers at opt out. Remember high school when someone wanted to break up? Didn't you ask WHY are you leaving? This still holds true. Exit surveys are key to finding out why you have churn.

- Not allowing frequency changes. Subscribers should have access to change preferences of frequency just like they can manage a profile with your programs. Do they want to hear from you monthly, weekly, daily, as things that are important to them change? Listen before you speak.

Here is a teaser. You can get the whole PDF in our resources section (Quarterly Studies tab) . If you already have been there, all you need to do it log back in. No more forms, questions, or steps. Nice touch huh. What other email marketing agencies have you seen do this? None, they all want your information EVERY time. There are better ways to do this, Take a look for yourself.

Opting-in- the cradle
When obtaining permission to send out emails, only about 30% of email marketers use a confirmed opt-in method, where a confirmation e-mail including an activation web link (or requiring a reply email) is sent to verify the subscriber. This number has grown quite a bit over the years, but is still well below where the industryshould be. confirmed opt-in helps ensure quality of the email list by requiring an action by the user to begin receiving emails. about 75% of email marketers provide only a small number of ways for subscribers to opt-in (one to three), whereas about 4% have more than 10 ways for subscribers to opt-in.

This story got picked up by ClickZ last friday which we appreciate.

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 1:00 PM | Permalink

April 9, 2008

How to Use Video in Email

In a follow up post to the last one I wanted to share with you some good examples of how not only to code emails so that they work, but also how to use video in your email marketing campaigns.

I am going to show two examples below of not only great strategy but execution. The eROI team did the first one so I am biased and the second is from one of our agency clients that "gets it".

Notice in both that they each act like a video player with the opaque play button floating over the video window. This should be the way you present it as well as set expectations of the action that will be delivered once they click. The last thing you want to do is not properly set click expectations.

We do not try in either force the video to play in the window but rather drive it to a landing page where we KNOW the video will play fast, properly and deliver the experience that they are asking for.

It is NOT rocket science, and yes video does drive a higher click through, but if you fail on the delivery then you might as well have not sent the campaign.

RidgewoodTV example:

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Citrus Agency example:

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Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 9:58 AM | Permalink