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:

• Increased frequency of sends (2-3 per week)
• A/B Testing – offers and copy
• Free shipping offers
• Product bundles
• and more…

See the emails and stats from the campaign»

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.

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.

See the email we sent out »

See the Holiday Cheer landing page »

eROI New York – 2009 Review from Christopher Masagatani on Vimeo.

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.

VP of Products, going to his version of The Dark Side.

Our controller, she is known to party with rock stars from time to time ;)

Senior Account Executive may be his day job title but at night he is at the DJ Booth spinning for Homeless Panda.

Always put together Director of Account Services, St Tropez style.

And as an update for all of you waiting with bated breath about the fate of the dishwasher.  Yesterday we officially got a new one.  It’s time to put the Mom Jeans away.

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.

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.

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.

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 »