eROI Days Email Agency

MediaPost’s Email Insider recently did an article on the importance of holiday emails.  As email marketers, it is our duty to not only create quality emails but also give our clients consulting on what kind of email will help their businesses grow.  Holiday email marketing goes beyond Cyber Monday campaigns or even general “Happy Holiday” emails, it is most effective when it starts slowly into an aggressive campaign.  The article pointed out that there are even great opportunities to not only drive business to your e-com site but also to stores with offers like “ship to store” which make up-sells and complimentary sales easier.  The main point is to plan.  Don’t throw together a sloppy campaign a week before Christmas, take it seriously to get serious results.

Here are a few examples of holiday emails eROI has done in the past.

Are You Ready For The 18 Phases Of Christmas?

“If you haven’t begun planning your holiday campaigns, then you’re already behind. The first salvo of holiday email marketing has already been fired, with 8% of major online retailers having already mentioned the holidays in their email campaigns. While most of those were running “Christmas in July” campaigns, a few were just getting in early references to be top of mind later in the season. August is traditionally a non-event for holiday marketing, but September will mark the beginning of a continued effort to win holiday sales that will continue into January…”

Read the rest of the MediaPost article here »

The Software Association of Oregon (SAO) is launching a platform for peer discussion groups called the Leadership Exchange. Through an extensive survey of 300 tech professionals in the community, we heard loud and clear that people were looking for ways to grow professionally in their roles by connecting with peers.

With this in mind, I’m leading the Steering Committee for the CEO Leadership Exchange so if you are interested in joining the group which will meet once a month at different software/tech CEOs / GMs company conference rooms (or hopefully more creative places at some point) from around the Portland Metro area, please sign up online on SAO’s site or email me or DM me on Twitter (@ryanbuch). The point of these peer discussion groups is to gather in a relaxed atmosphere and share tough issues / challenges / burning questions with your peers knowing that it is fully confidential and info stays in the room only.

This model has been unbelievably successful for groups like Starve Ups (co-founded 9 years ago), EO, and SAO’s Startup Exchange has gained a lot of traction over the past year. Many of my peers through Starve Ups have become very close personal friends as well as business partners in other ventures. It took months and years to develop these close ties, but I’m optimistic that the CEO Leadership Exchange (for CEOs/GMs of Portland companies that have or expect to have $5m in annual revenue) will have that kind of valuable connecting power and peer learning over the upcoming months and years.

Read more below to find out about the other Leadership Exchange Groups that are all launching the week of Labor Day in less than 2 weeks!

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When it comes to Twitter I read more than write.  I’m sad to say I have had to say goodbye to some celebs that I have followed (Demi and Ashton) but celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe hasn’t disappointed me yet with her twitpics of worship worthy rooms full of shoes, fashion advice and generally cheery tweets.  Rachel finds time between tweets to create her own branded empire.  In addition to her stylist gig she has a reality show, partnership with Piperlime, she’s introducing a new line of products for QVC and just launched her new website – RachelZoe.com.

I’m usually curious enough to click on the links she offers and yesterday I found myself at her new site.  What I was surprised and delighted by was the ease at which she engaged the user in a multitude of interactions.  As a first time visitor to the site you are invited to “Get The Zoe Report” by simply giving your email address and zip code.  The call to action is straight forward and simple.

Next you are taken to a thank you page where they segment your gender, age and preferences with an option to add a category they haven’t listed.  I think this page starts to build the relationship with the user.  You are asked about what is important to you and given the chance to elaborate, in a way it sets the tone for the pages that follow. (more…)

On April 8th, we got the news that the legendary Hung Far Low Sign had been cleared to be brought back to its home in Chinatown.  The challenge was to find the funds to do it.  What ensued was an epic email strand of brainstorming throughout our team.  The top of all of our lists (well, besides the “Naked Limbo Contest”) was our Marketing Coordinator’s idea to have a huge block party.  I think he put it best with “yes, the answer to everything is a dance party.”

Here we are four months later in the final stages of a huge collaboration to introduce the first Old Town China Town Block Party.  I’m so psyched that all the creative, delicious and just cool business in this area have all banned together to have fun for a great cause.

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My parents taught me to stay away from the word “hate”, so I’m going to use some dramatic adjectives like supremely dislike in association with a major spammer who has rocked my (our) world in the past couple weeks. The recent situation has affected a small handful of our valued clients and for that, I’m incredibly pained by this attack from this anonymous, unseen perpetrator/spammer(s).  Here’s what I’m referring to:

Recently, a number of email marketing platforms, including emailROI, were the target of an attack by hackers/spammers. The result of this attack has shown that a small group of emailROI accounts were compromised. Within hours of learning of this, we called and emailed those client contacts and immediately notified them of what had transpired. It appeared that the hackers’ intent, in how it affected us, was to spam folks, and fortunately we caught it quickly so it only impacted a few valued clients. As a full-service email and interactive agency, we have never captured or stored credit cards through the emailROI application, and we did not and do not capture/store personal financial info either.

Once we identified what was occurring, the quickest, most efficient way to stop the attack was to reset all account passwords. This is why all of our emailROI clients were required to update their emailROI password this week upon logging in. Since then we have implemented a number of additional security measures to remedy the threat the attack created. We are taking every possible step to tighten security to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

How might this affect our emailROI clients?
The process for updating everyone’s passwords will need to be a manual one. While we are working to make this as seamless as possible, we have to address each request as it comes in to our support line. These requests are our top priority to address and we will get to each one as quickly as we possibly can.  If you are a client, thank you for your patience as we make our way through that process.  The best way that you can help in protecting your account from this point on is to change your password often, and make sure it is secure.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you as a result of this attack. As the changes we have made in the past few days are being done in a live environment, some performance issues have come up within emailROI, and we have been doing our best to work through them as quickly as possible. We feel that these temporary issues are far worth the improved security in both the short and long run.

Please comment below as we want to answer your questions and be as helpful as possible.  Our team and I will be approving comments and responding to these comments as fast as we can today and for the weeks to come.  Thank you so much for your understanding.

I know I’m so so so late to this game – I have clung on to my Blackberry forever because I feared poor AT&T coverage. I feared that my fingers were too fat to successfully type on the touchscreen from trying it on my wife’s first generation iPhone. Not sure how many more fears I had, but I finally made the switch to the unbelievably intuitive and beautiful creation known as the iPhone. Other than the obvious advantages of an incredible mobile web experience, mature iPhone app ecosystem, more intuitive texting, more readable email, I wanted to focus on the mobile video feature that makes it so easy to shoot video and upload it to YouTube.  So nice.  Here is a video that I took on day 2 of owning my new iPhone:

If you have an iPhone, please share with us a haiku about why you like it so much. Here’s mine:

iPhone, radiating
beauty, video camera
in my pocket alas

It’s that time of year again when Inc Magazine comes out with its list of the fastest growing, privately-held companies in the country.  We are stoked to make the INC 500|5000 list for a third consecutive year – I get really reflective and nostalgic of how far we’ve come as a company – very proud of our team.

This year, we achieved #1,876.  It’s hard to believe that we have grown 169.7% over the past 3 years.  Actually, it’s not that much of a stretch – we’ve worked our asses off to do great work and push the ball forward.  We were also awarded #30 in the Portland Metro Area, we share the list with others like EthicsPoint, R2C Group and even Papa Murphy’s International.

The top 10 ranged from advertising & marketing to logistics & transportation but the business who earned the crown was insurance.  Miami’s Northern Capitol Insurance topped the list with 19,812.2% growth and $95 million in revenue.  Their business model changed from one of accommodating a more narrow margin of well-off home buyers to one that was focused on managing risk for large groups of re-insurers.  The foresight to change their path greatly helped them achieve the #1 company status.  Another great example of working to the market was #3 Harley Stanfield.  They used a model of sustainable housing and flexible ownership for the unstable housing market.

This September 24-25, I’ll be in Washington D.C. at the Inc. 5000 Conference – I know some friends of mine from Brass Media and Ethics Point will be there.  How about you?  Let me know if I’ll see you there.  It’s my 3rd time going to this conference and get a ton of value from it every year.  I highly recommend it.

When I first started writing for this blog, it was called “Email Days” and featured lots of examples of everyday emails, highlighting the importance of email in our every day lives, not just touting email marketing only.  So, I thought I’d go back to my roots a little bit and tell you about an email a friend sent me last night.  He is an avid cyclist and knows I like cycling as well, despite the fact that we both mainly commute to work by bike and don’t get to do long rides very often as our weekends are consumed with raising young kids and different kinds of activities then biking.  He sent a link to the video below, which is filmed in Portland, Oregon, and really captures the humor of two different types of cyclists – hipsters vs performance.  This is one of the funnier videos I’ve seen in a while and is very close to home, literally and figuratively.  Enjoy.

Now we may not be as blessed in the rap department as Crispin but that doesn’t mean we can’t wrap with the best of them.  Andy, one of our designers, decided to go away to get married over the first weekend in August.  Poor guy had no idea that with separation anxiety in full effect the eROI team banned together to give him his biggest wedding present yet, his own desk.  The team wrapped everything – his functioning phone, his fancy tea maker, random cords on his desk and even the papers on his magnet board.

Andy’s reaction to his newly redesigned space was pretty priceless.  Click through the slide show and watch the video below keeping in mind that in the beginning he is standing right in front of his desk and somehow fails to look at it while the rest of the design team is gawking at him in disbelief and anticipation.

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The YouTube video from Crispin interns has been circulating through agency e-zines and word-of-mouth email for the past week or more.

It made me think about the wacky stuff that free labor at other large agencies come up with and here’s what I found off of a Google Search:

Crap – I searched and looked at dozens of intern videos with no sound or no humor. Maybe Crispin nailed this better than I thought. There is opportunity for other interns to take their spin on it. This also proves that online video still needs a lot of content – there is very little out there and much much smaller amount of quality.

As for interns at eROI, we love ‘em.  Not sure I want to task any of them with spending 100′s of hours putting together a rap video.  Your thoughts?

Next post…wrapping paper gone wild experiment in the office (video and pics to follow)…

Publicis just got a little bigger as it outbid the other agency conglomerates to take Razorfish off Microsoft’s hands for a mere $530 million.  I haven’t had a chance to ask any longtime Razorfish employees how they feel about being traded as frequently as a baseball card, but I can’t imagine that it fosters a lot of loyalty to the company. Microsoft bought Razorfish’s parent company, aQuantive, for $6 billion or 10x revenue just 2 years ago, and is now shedding the business units it doesn’t want (Razorfish) for 1.4x revenue, which says a lot about software company valuations vs. agency valuations.

On reflection, I couldn’t be happier with the type of independent culture Portland agencies have.  Portland’s largest agency, Wieden + Kennedy, is the world’s largest completely independent agency and was named Global Agency of the Year last year – any coincidence that they best creative work comes from an independent agency?

Check out the full article here >>