May 12, 2008

Your Receipt is in the email

Shoppers who want to save some trees soon will find a new option for rejecting receipts at the checkout counters of major retailers.

A service that will enable consumers to receive digital receipts through big box stores, such as Best Buy and Target, is set to launch May 16.

I have always loved how Apple stores do this for me and it is about time others do as well. I don't need any more paper receipts crammed in my wallet or pocket. They get lost or thrown away. In the inbox is a great solution. Not sure the "green" factor as some studies I have been reading actually put data use in higher carbon/greenhouse gas levels than commercial airlines by 2010, but it makes sense none the less.

http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9937567-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

My question is have they thought about making this a transaction email marketing opportunity instead of JUST a receipt. If they follow best practices of a 20% use of the email for cross marketing/promotion, they might just drive online or even back to store sales with an offer....

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:01 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 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 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

April 22, 2008

Zinio and VIV Help Us Go Green

In tribute to Earth Day here are some gifts from Zinio and VIV Magazine. We all live online, why not start reading your magazines this way? If you have not seen how this works, you need to check it out. For long flights, being offline and even being able to read them in a better format it makes sense.

What is so cool is how it is tied into email as the vehicle for delivery and how the triggers work during the run time of each edition. Something worth checking out.

With over 850 Publications like BusinessWeek and others using it, it will only be a matter of time till we all consider this this standard.

VIV: VIVmag is packed with hundreds of pages of dynamic, fresh, actionable content you can interact with exactly as YOU choose. Discover what's new in awareness, beauty, fashion, fitness, health, nutrition and travel in the March/April 2008 issue of VIVmag, the first exclusively digital, interactive women's lifestyle magazine.

ViV Free Issue

Digital Classics: Zinio's new Digital Classics Library features 100 available titles on a scrollable bookshelf where users can simply click on the spine of a book to open it in their browser. In addition to reading online, consumers can search for content within the books, share titles with friends or save books to read offline later. Your special access to the digital library lets you be one of the first to choose from great classic books such as Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, Alice's Adventure in Wonderland and many more!

Digital Classics Library

Enjoy.

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