eROI Days Email Agency

1. Thoughtful, cause-related marketing is the biggest winner in 2007. Pay attention. If you do this right, you will put your company on the map AND make the world a better place. This may just be the best business advice you get all year. Ask your co-worker, your department, your entire company what single non-profit they want to support and throw a lot of energy behind it. Better yet, co-create a new program or new event with an existing, reputable non-profit and you’ll see that your employees, customers, and prospects, as well as your kids and your spouse will help you take this cause, and indirectly your company to the next level.

The best example of this is a brand we used to take for granted, Dove. Dove launched “The Campaign for Real Beauty” and let the fact be known that the company no longer simply sells soap. Dove is now so much more than a set of commodity products. Dove sells real beauty; natural beauty; non-superficial beauty. The Campaign for Real Beauty website features a one-minute film that shows the transformation of an average-looking woman into a strikingly gorgeous supermodel. Only by seeing this process can we truly comprehend the illusion that the media has portrayed of these fabricated dream girls. The beauty of this site is that it doesn’t end with just awareness of the problem. It launches immediately into an actionable item for eight to 12-year-old girls to sign up for Dove’s real beauty workshops. These workshops teach girls about the importance of identifying beauty within themselves in the pre-teen years before the peer pressure to be like the mythical supermodel drives them to anorexia or bulimia.

A couple of years ago, eROI began its own partnership with Portland-based non-profit, Friends of the Children, by co-creating an event called Friends Art Fair. In just 2 years, the event has raised $55k and has garnered 2.5 million media impressions thru email marketing channels, print media, and media sponsor KPTV Fox 12 News. However, we have yet to do a campaign around a cause that is relevant to the e-marketing world. Make sure you sign up for our newsletter to be the first to find out about our cause-related campaign in mid-2007.