I gave this presentation at Innotech Oregon last Thursday and talked through some really useful tools that email marketers should consider using: Flowtown, Unbounce, Which Test Won, Email2Mobile, Email on Acid. Check out the presentation below to see some visual examples of what these tools can accomplish for you.
If you walk by any Icebreaker retail store it’s obvious that they have incredible assets and a lot of personality.
Our task was to put that brand creativity to work and drive up holiday sales.
Our challenge was to make the Icebreaker brand stand out against the barrage of holiday emails coming from every other retailer.
While the creative grabbed the attention of the viewer, the content kept people clicking and purchasing.
Using a total of 11 emails, the campaign helped to substantially increase the holiday sales of 2009 from the previous year.
Strategies we used in the 2009 Icebreaker holiday campaign included:
Kudos to Chad White of Responsys for distilling a lot of really great concepts about “The Inbox of the Not-So-Distant Future” in his most recent article in MediaPost’s EmailInsider. As email marketers, we ultimately need to step into the shoes of our email recipients and understand all the ways in which they will interact with our email within their inbox. The quick synopsis of Chad’s article is:
1. Social media integration – share with your network becomes a key component in every email (and email marketers can segment lists to optimize for Gmail (Google Buzz) or Facebook’s Titan)
2. Mobile – SMS and Email converging has great benefits for things like mobile couponing for retailers
3. Video Lite – animated gifs to appear as a video – see eROI’s Dylan Boyd blog post on “VIV Blows it out with Animated GIFs”
4. Email Browsing – example of Sears using Gmail’s Enhanced Email: browsing module is decided and displayed at the time of open, not the time of send, which allows the information to be as current as possible. An email sent last month pulled today’s best-sellers from Sears.com.
5. Transactions -Email certification of a known trusted sender is especially important for e-commerce clients.
6. Email Management / Sentiment – ExactTarget’s Morgan Stewart wrote in a separate EmailInsider article about a “thumbs-up” button in the inbox to re-inforce positive sentiment in email instead of sledge-hammering the negative world of reporting spam as the only option.
If you dig a little deeper, there is a whole lot more innovation coming to the Future Inbox. Social tools are available to scrape profile info (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and dozens of other social media sites) and append that to your email lists to allow better personalization and segmenting. OpenID frameworks will allow information to be passed more freely between email and any online community through a single username/password that will inherently recognize you from your inbox. The future is near and email is innovating as fast or faster than most other industries. Get ready.
Things I like: cheesing for the camera, beer, the holidays, websites that include all of these things.
Lucky for me, and you, eROI shares in my adoration for the aforementioned things.
To commemorate the holiday season we wanted to say “Cheers in the Name of Frugality” to all of our clients, supporters and friends. Joyfully, the entire company is as narcissistic as I am and thought the perfect gift to you was pictures of us (my go-to gift outside my professional life).
Highlights included: beer showers in the kiddy-pool, “organized falling”, clothing removal and, of course, pet cameos. It was loads of fun and brought all of us together even more. This one will be hard to top.
Major props to the very talented Chris Masagatani who is our NYC Director and also an amazing video creator and producer. The video says it all, but I just want to reinforce how proud I am of Chris and Kavita for being one of our true bright spots this past year. eROI New York City has also done an awesome job staying connected to HQ in P’town. Check it out – the video makes you feel like you are in NYC – raw yet refined – is that possible?
eROI New York – 2009 Review from Christopher Masagatani on Vimeo.
Everyone should feel special on their birthday. In my family that sense of happiness came with a slight sense of humiliation. Whether it was a sombrero at Who Song and Larry’s or the story of your birth being recounted to your closest friends, birthdays were a roller coaster of emotions.
Being the giver that I am, I was sure to pass on my family traditions to my eROI family. Thus began the institution of the birthday email. Even though every employee is guaranteed to get a card late, I made sure that these mild affronts showed up right on time.
Below are a few of the highlights throughout the year. I hope I don’t lose friends over this.
Our fearless leader in a stylish ‘stache. Click here for the real thing.
eROI employees live by the work hard – play hard motto and Halloween always presents a great opportunity to balance out the work. This year one of our employees took it upon herself to throw a bash and invite the gang. With Halloween a week away the invitations have been sent out and the tone has been set for this once a year event. Kelsey and her team came up with an amazing email that translated into a one of a kind event using eROI Event’s custom-theme capabilities. One of our designers, Stephen, created a zombie cool invite complete with his signature hash-tags (you would know why I say signature if you follow him on Twitter).
One of our Web Developers, Christine, busted out the production on both the email and the event. The result is a Halloween art piece brought to life.
“Woman Sues Toyota Over ‘Terrifying’ Prank” was the ABC News headline that caught the eye of one of eROI’s developers and the article quickly circulated around the office. The article stated that Amber Duick was suing Toyota for $10 million over emails that supposedly made her believe that she was being stalked. The campaign in question was for Toyota’s Matrix car. The emails, intended for “men under 35 who hate advertising,” was a series of emails “from” a fictitious English man on the run from cops claiming to need to stay at the recipients house. Saatchi & Saatchi, the agency responsible for the ads, even created a fake MySpace page for the fugitive. The campaign was well executed, funny, creative and buzz worthy and the lawsuit only adds to the hype around the emails.
It seems there are a couple things that don’t line up with the lawsuit. First of all, the lawyers who represent Toyota asserted that there was a confirmed opt-in process that Duick admitted that she committed to at the initial outset of the series of Toyota campaign emails that she received. The article didn’t mention whether or not there was an unsubscribe link and physical address in each email (CAN-Spam compliance), as Toyota and Saatchi & Saatchi may have taken the position that those elements in the email would have detracted from the authenticity of this fake campaign (not sure I’ve ever written “authenticity and fake” in the same sentence where it actually kind of made sense).
If there was an easy opt-out on each and every email, which would make you think either this is the most privacy concerned criminal ever encountered, then there isn’t even a glimmer of hope that Duick could win her case. As is, Toyota has an overwhelmingly solid legal argument based on her written consent in opt-in.
What could have been done differently?
Obviously a neurotic Los Angeles woman wasn’t their target audience, so how could she have been engaged while not being “terrified?” List segmentation could have been used to “check in” on consumers not fitting the targeted demographic. Toyota could have even segmented women from men and had an extra question or check in to make sure their campaign would be received with the appropriate response. Another idea would be to just make the product a little more blatantly obvious so you know you are interacting with a brand but you are still having fun. Finding a balance between really creative and fun with responsible marketing is key.
There is nothing like a little distance to make the heart grow fonder. The past 5 days, I’ve spent with my little family in a remote, rustic cabin in the forested Wallowa Mountains outside of Joseph, Oregon (6 hour drive from Portland). As with any vacation, it took a couple days to unwind, then it was pure bliss doing what I love doing – being outdoors nonstop, hiking, spending time with my family, and being undistracted by all the craziness in our technology-laden lives.
Upon my return to the grid (meaning my iPhone on the drive back), I realized that my longing for technology was really in communication of key information and emotional connection through my inbox (email is not, nor will it ever be dead in the foreseeable future), not through Tweetie, Tweetdeck when I returned to my laptop at home, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any website at all – it was spending 6 hours of catching up on all of the things that are hyper-relevant to me in my inbox. Interestingly enough, I could only really scan and internalize all the issues brought up through hundreds of emails on my iPhone for about an hour, and the other 5 hours of digging way deeper and responding happened through my Outlook inbox on my laptop. It’s a totally different mode of thinking on a 14″ screen than a 2″ screen.
There is a lot of chatter over the past several months among Email Marketing industry execs (over a hundred of us on a private email list) about whether or not Twitter is a complete waste of time or if it will kill Email, and it seems so obvious to me that Twitter is a useful conversation piece that has its place in the marketing mix, but is not yet the killer addictive app/platform/communication channel that email is. In each of our daily lives, the large majority of us prioritize our Inbox over everything else. It took almost a week in the woods to be able to articulate this simple gravitational pull towards email.
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…”
Chad White wrote an eye-opening story about the real ROI in email. The raw return is not being measured in the traditional sense. Having a ROI of $43.52 is killer, but the fact that the real number may be closer to $103 is astounding. Devoting more budget towards email is the smart thing to do. It should put a smile on your face to know that when you are tracking your data the numbers are higher than they first appear.
Even online, where it’s easiest for email marketers to track the path of subscribers, we’re not getting credit for much of the action that our messages drive. That’s because 33% of permission-based email recipients say they usually visit sites directly, instead of clicking on an email link, according to Epsilon. This means conversions may be undercounted by 50%.
Taking into consideration the action that email drives offline and directly to Web sites, email marketing’s ROI is probably closer to $130 — about three times the DMA’s estimate. And that’s clearly ignoring email’s ability to drive interest and actions in other channels like catalogs and social networks.
Email Marketing’s ROI Probably Closer To $130 Than $43.52
By Chad White
At eROI, we’re not always as disciplined as we should be about asking our customers what they think of us personally and the kind of work we do here. So, last week, we decided to ask a few customers (thru 1-to-1 email outreach) and here’s what we heard:
“eROI is what you look for in any business relationship: an expert partner who helps you realize your vision. The eROI team listened carefully to our needs, asked probing questions that helped us better understand the capabilities that would enable us to reach our goals, and communicated closely with us all the way to achieve success. The final product went above and beyond what we thought was possible. It was mindblowing.”
–Noah Glass, CEO, GoMobo
“Choosing eROI to help launch our magazine into the digital realm has been a great decision. The support from their web team has been incredible, making the scary transition from print to online- stress free. They provided structure, guidance and solutions to any minor hang up we experienced along the way.”
–Kaitlyn, CBS Watch Magazine (new site hasn’t been launched yet)
“Working with eROI to help with the development and launch of seven planet was key to company on many levels and will prove to be a critical positive impact on the brand. We began speaking with their team about 7 months prior to launching our virtual trading post (our ecommerce store/company site) with the intent to launch a site that was easy to navigate, that visually differentiated our brand and that helped our patrons effectively find out how the “mindful commerce” could work in their lives. In the end, they met all three of those criteria without question and in turn also were very patience with us in the process as we had scope revisions, content delays, support needs, etc. Finally, they proactively approached us after our launch with product review site upgrades, that would help improve the trading post and usability, without being asked to do so. Those upgrades are now implemented and we look forward to working with them consistently on making the seven planet site and our company newsletters as key to the brand and the vision of mindful commerce as our traditional green general stores.”
–John Friess, CEO, Seven Planet
The eROI presenters, Dylan Boyd, Alex Williams, and I, have traveled all over the country to give presentations on various topics from Building Community Online to The Value of a Welcome Email Program to New Trends in Measuring the Success of your Online Marketing & Social Media Efforts. This blog post is an overload of resource material for 3 great presentations – enjoy!
This year’s theme for our company appreciation party was put to a vote. After the votes were tallied the theme was shrouded in mystery until a team email was sent with the reveal in true eROI Rock star fashion. This year it was fated to be… Summer White Party! Using our new eROI Event system we created a totally themed event that the email linked to. Check out the process for creating The eROI Summer White Party.
The finished product, see how it was done below.
It’s that time of the quarter again for you to be involved in a really cool study to see how many of us in REALITY actually practice what we preach when it comes to testing our email campaigns. The “Email Testing Survey” should take 2-3 minutes and you’ll probably learn a bit in the process of answering some pretty insightful questions. Also, you have a good shot at winning a Flip Ultra Video Camera - take the survey here >>
Fill out survey, and you could win this
The results should be fascinating as everyone in the email marketing world always talks about testing, testing, testing, but not everyone has time, patience, $, or know-how on how to do testing right.
Once again, take the survey and you might win a fun new toy.
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