eROI Days Email Agency

We got in late last night and I went on a little stroll. Stumbling upon sixth street, I proceeded to have my mind blown. Austin is nuts. Portland has nothing on the Austin nightlife. There were hundreds of folks partying in the streets, and I must say warm weather does good things to people. After grabbing some pizza, I headed back to the Radisson, where we are holed up.

Today we started off with breakfast at a Mexican Cafe. I got some chorizo, very good stuff. We then walked up to the capital building and checked out how Texas does it. It was a trip going to the place where GW got his start. I sat on a bench right under his portrait. Jeff took pictures of kids. Leslie wanted to go on a tour and I wouldn’t do it. Probably the first of many of my shooting down the poor girl. What can I say, I am grouchy.

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MarketingSherpa speaks the marketing language. MEC Labs speaks scientific analysis. MEC Labs acquired MarketingSherpa within the past 6 months and the MarketingSherpa Email Summit ‘07 is the first main opportunity for 650 email marketers to experience the difference in the culture and business model of each entity.

Anne Holland and Stefan Tornquist nailed it. They almost feel as if they are born to co-present. The audience was engaged, participated and was so focused it was great. Nice work Anne and Stefan. I would love to see more of you two up infront.

I’m impressed by MarketingSherpa’s presentation – they get it. They show instead of tell. Case studies and lessons learned sink in immediately. They use pretty pictures to tell me the Before and After and why certain marketing tactics succeeded vs. failed.

MEC Labs is trying to do the same thing, but speaks and shows formulas, science, data, mathematical graphs, and PPT slides with lots of small text on it.

Major disconnect here. So much so that I’m blogging about it during MEC Labs “Multvariable experiment.” As a former financial analyst and college graduate with a science degree, I realize that I am clearly a marketer and not a scientist after this conference.

I love the conference, but I’ve got to question: Will MarketingSherpa + MEC Labs Marriage Work? If MEC Labs has MORE of an influence on the ‘08 event, you’ll see more MarketingSherpa-type marketers tuning out.

I know it will work as MEC Labs is focused on the business, but they need Anne and Crew out infront of the world as their dynamic style resonates with this audience.

VistaPrint is a Small Business / Home Office, office supply company. First entry to company for most of its 8 million customers is Business Cards. 17 websites in 8 different countries.

Goals: Improve Net Contribution/Impression

Secondary Goals: improve deliverability. Removed non-consumers from list.

Speaker spoke so fast, I couldn’t write most of the notes needed for this blog post.

Transactional messaging expected and favorably perceived by recipients.

Sprint Before: all text emails with no cross-sell, or up-sell messaging

Sprint After: Started with shipping emails. Wanted to Keep personalization and some text. But, there was so much to improve (while still keeping legal and IT happy).

Content the same, but formatting much more professional and lively. Navigation in upper-right and cross-sell opportunities along right-side.
Conversion rate = 8x higher than base emails. Very relevant and timely.

Email is Time Sensitive – performs differently than print, for example: “Buy now, pay later” as offer performed better than “Only $1.99 now”

Members like mystery, but make sure it’s worth their click. Need to have a really strong offer on landing page.

Try new things. Creative e-postcard (with powerful image) performed far better than primarily text email with small visual interest.

Lessons Learned:
Stop Guessing. Let the customer decide.
Email does not always work in print.
Customers like mystery and personalization, but make sure it’s worth the click or it won’t perform very well from a conversion standpoint.

Along with 650 other email marketers in a giant room in Miami, Florida, I’m now listening to Anne Holland and Stefan Tornquist with MarketingSherpa.

• 2007 MarketingSherpa showed that email is “extremely significant” to company’s marketing programs.
• 25% of marketers surveyed have no mention of newsletter or email signup on their homepages.
• 55% of companies send a Welcome email message within 72 hours. Of those, roughly 1/3 send content beyond welcome – these automated email triggers offer a great opportunity to show examples of previous newsletters or cross-sell or up-sell offers. Strike while the iron is hot and reach out to subscribers right when they are most excited about hearing from you.
• Transactional email has become more accepted over the past 3 years. Fewer people are hugely negative or positive towards transactional email as long as there isn’t a lot of heavy, “hard sell” marketing speak in them.
• Email Deliverability: many ISPs like AOL, Earthlink, Gmail, and Yahoo are primarily Reputation-based which has become much more systematic and mathematic in all that Reputation encompasses. Reputation-based programs promote good marketing.
• Reputation Fixes:
  1) Slash your list
  2) Third Parties & CAN-SPAM (do it right)
  3) Rendering 
• MSherpa recommends that you re-engage with an unsubscriber at the point of unsubscribing. Add 2-3 quick survey questions asking why they are leaving.
• Eyetracking: need to teach new designers a data-centric way of where email recipients eyes are drawn to on the email creative. Showed a case study of a more print-driven design that performed horribly on Eye Tools heat map. The other case study showing tightened up copy and strong visual offers performed amazingly where the hottest area of the heat map was actually below the fold. Impressive.
• Viewing and Rendering: blocked images are important to take into account. Make sure that your email creative has a mix of images and copy where some copy is above the fold.

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Last night, I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to Rick Webb, co-founder of The Barbarian Group, speak on driving the whole viral marketing world forward. As the creators of Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken” and Milwaukee’s Best “Beer Canon” shown below, these guys continually prove that being original is the only game to play.

Rick’s prognostications of the top 4 trends for ‘07 in the web marketing world:
1. Niche Social Networking
2. Games (adver-games)
3. Branded Utilities (widgets)
4. Entertainment (where video truly becomes interactive again rather than just YouTube)