Last night, I gave a speech at the Annual Member Dinner of the Software Association of Oregon (SAO) and I must say how good it feels to be part of an organization that has such positive momentum – the feeling in the air was palpable and is really encouraging given the challenging economy. Portland has always prided itself on a collaborative business community, but often at a surface level. At this event, there were software companies from across the state, top government leaders, and some clear innovators in clean technology. The keynote speaker was Google’s Green Energy Czar, Bill Weihl, and the crowd of 300 people was overflowing. Here was my SAO Board address to the audience (in semi-shortened format):
“For some of you, this might be the first SAO event you’ve been to in a while. For many of the rest of you who have been to a recent event, you have likely felt the buzz – that positive momentum – that SAO is fueling in the software community in Oregon. There are some awesome new opportunities for you to get involved:
With SAO’s goal of drawing more CTOs and CIOs from tech and non-tech organizations into the mix, we are especially pleased to be attracting great speakers like tonight’s Bill Weihl, Czar of Google.
We’ve also rolled out a Leadership Exchange program where leaders and managers across each department of your software organization are gaining insights and perspective that are simply not possible within the walls of your own company. I know it’s had a game-changing effect on my company saving me from some pretty huge mistakes that our execs or I would have made or we would have missed some major opportunities that I would have never known about had it not been for these monthly roundtable discussions and follow-on discussions.
Police Chief Sizer has already touched on the value of SAO and the tech community reaching out to the public sector through our Fireside chats. Other gatherings have included also included Portland’s Mayor.
Finally, the social gatherings and networking opportunities have gained critical mass. The last SAO Blazer game I attended was double the size from a year ago.
One thing that hasn’t been talked about tonight, but it’s been bugging me for the past 6 months. In conversations with some software folks about how to grow the software community in Oregon, I often hear complaints that Portland and Oregon as a whole does NOT have 2 things: CAPITAL and TALENT. It’s been the same complaint for the past 20 years and I’m getting tired of it. I think we do have the talent – a lot of it is right here in this room. IT’S UP TO US to grow our own companies here, start new ones, and invest and mentor promising Oregon start ups. No one is going to save us. WE ARE THE ANSWER. SAO is part of that answer. If we’re making the same excuses and complaints 20 years from now, we’ve failed. Together, we can create a stronger, growing tech community in Oregon. I firmly believe this!
I really encourage you to get involved – it will likely be the most valuable and even selfish thing you do this year – to help your career and your company. Thank you.”
Here was my presentation from the Lake Oswego Chamber of Commerce FORGE Marketing Annual Summit – great event!
As usual, I learned a ton from the other speakers:
Kimberly Barta, VP of Marketing, Dr. Martens Shoes
Dayn Wilberding, Dir of Technology, Grady Britton
Kent Lewis, President, Anvil Media
Enjoy this eROI presentation!
I also included a few of my tweets below as well:
@kentjlewis nice. “remember your marketing budget is unlimited” 11:41 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie
Top paid placement is based on Quality Score, not just on highest price. 11:32 AM Jan 28th from Tweetie
As I looked over my online marketing predictions from last year, what struck me was my tone of optimism in the face of doomsday articles swirling about for 2009. To some degree, 2009 has much to be optimistic about for online marketers. Finally, there is a broad agreement in organizations that the web is an important business and marketing medium, and a greater percentage of marketing dollars are going online (even though overall marketing budgets are flat or slightly down compared to 2008). On the flipside, online marketers are expected to do more with less resources than ever before.
While you may still have the title as Email Marketing Manager, you are likely expected to have some expertise and drive inbound marketing, marketing automation programs, coordinate integration with social media and potentially be the online community manager for your company, closely tie into your search engine marketing program, and all of this is on top of the strategy and implementation of your marketing plan for the year. It’s exhausting and the pressure is on – 2010 is about action and results – and the tension between marketing and sales is going to increase with the demand for quality leads that convert into real sales.
So, let’s cut to the chase and dig into what will happen in 2010. Here are my 11 Web + Email Marketing Predictions:
In an effort to be semi-thoughtful in this blog post, I’m not going to simply copy my Jim Collins notes that I had to write fast and furiously and therefore missed them in my Inc. 500 twitter stream. I’m going to reflect on some of the stand-out items from his speech and after reading in 2 days his book, “How the Mighty Fall, And Why Some Companies Never Give In.”
Being at the right place at the right time is IRRELEVANT. Jim’s urging to the entrepreneurial crowd got his message across loud and clear – that the tough economic storm can NOT be an excuse for everything that ails you. We, as entrepreneurs, have control of our own destinies and our own company’s destiny. It’s up to us to dig deep and build great, enduring companies over the next 15+ years.
I learned a lot from reading his book, but one story that cemented in my brain was what Collins called the Jim Stockdale Paradox. Admiral Stockdale was a Vietnam prisoner of war. When Collins asked him about how he made it through years of isolation and torture, Stockdale responded that he had unwavering faith that he’d get out but was still keenly aware of the brutal journey and circumstances in front of him. Collins then asked who didn’t make it. Stockdale responded “the optimists.” Stockdale proceeded to explain that the optimists died of a broken heart because they always put a time-table on when they’d be released – by Christmas, by Easter, by end of July and so on. The lesson is to believe in your path for the long haul and don’t let short-term setbacks deter you from your cause.
Last thing that really stuck with me was the leadership success factor of humility and making your mission all about the company in every way, not about yourself. Many of the most successful leaders like Anne Mulcahy of Xerox repeatedly turned down interviews and coverage of most of the top publications as she focused internally to clean up a nearly disastrous cash situation at Xerox and attributed the success to everyone else but herself. Collins showed example after example of leaders of great companies who did this AND similar great companies with new leaders who didn’t instill that “it’s all about the company cause” mentality and those companies started their decline and ultimately fell from greatness.
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.
To the blog that brought you the Crispin video on interns (probably after you had seen it a couple times – sorry I was a little late to the game on that one), NOW I show you a local agency – little shop called Wieden+Kennedy and a different kind of culture / humor w/ their 12 program of interns.
If you have little kids around your computer, like I do right now, you might want to watch the frequent, casual F bombs used in the video, albeit educational.
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.
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?
Over the past few months, a lot of what our team has been speaking, writing, and studying about relates to the philosophy that it’s okayto fail, as long as you are able to learn from it and, in the end, come out achieving success.
After reading our latest study “Use of Testing in Email Marketing” – which concludes by saying “if you’re not failing, you’re not learning” – I began thinking about how, as an entrepreneur and business owner, it was extremely important for me to embrace this philosophy early on and realize that it expands to every aspect of business. I’ll be the first to say it, failing isn’t fun! Doing so however, can be enlightening and isn’t something you should fear. If you fear failure, you will likely refrain from taking risks and experimenting with new ideas that can ultimately move you ahead. I have gone through the “fail, learn and improve” process numerous times and each time I’ve learned more about it. One such lesson is that sometimes “the fail” isn’t always obvious. The below video is comedy and not relevant to my particular FAIL, but it’s a Fail Video worth watching.
There are times when the big FAIL sign isn’t held up to alert you, “the fail” is often something you have to keep an eye out for. This eye-opening lesson came upon me in early 2007 when eROI was going through a big transition period accompanied by lot of growing pains. Going though this period certainly made me stronger as a leader, us stronger as a company and created a culture where my employees have a stronger voice and a bigger influence in the ongoing success of eROI -it however was an emotional and professional journey to get to this point and one that I actually documented in a 5 part blog post back in the summer of 2007. If you are so inclined, the entire series can be found in the eROI Days archive for you reading pleasure but to sum it up:
The Fail
I had assumed that I was connected to the thoughts of each employee and each department because I had a hands-on management approach and frequently interacted socially with my employees. I assumed that the agency was well aligned internally and that that everyone was happy, felt valued and felt they had a voice, both on a project level and within the agency as a whole.
A couple of days ago, we launched our brand new homepage and we are all psyched with the way it turned out. As usual for creative agencies, we are our own toughest client, trying to please lots of detail-oriented, savvy decision-makers from every department and aspect of the company. However, we truly followed our own highly-collaborative process, and while it may have taken longer than we wanted to fit this project into all of our client work as well, we were extremely happy with the end result. The user-centered design includes an element of flash which was integrated seamlessly and our production team made everything work like a charm.
One of the most noticeable new features was the integration of tabs on the page. There are 10 tabs in all that help the user easily navigate what we offer along with content from each of our five blogs. At eROI, we drink our own Koolaid when it comes to online marketing. We have a clear call-out to sign up for our newsletter in the bottom section of our page, we invite people to become a fan of eROI on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or see our profile on Linkedin and even our most recent tweets are displayed to the right of the page.
Please give us feedback in the form of a haiku – tell us if you love our new homepage or you hate it or something in between, but please please do NOT be boring. thx.
In our last study, Use of Analytics in Email Marketing Campaigns, we showed email marketers how important metrics are in making decisions and proving campaign ROI. One major opportunity to improve metrics and strengthen brand positioning with potential customers is to optimize email campaigns through consistent, careful testing. So, in our newest study, we show how 623 email marketers are currently using, or not using, testing to improve their email marketing efforts. One of the key takeaways of this study is that 4 out of 10 marketers are not testing campaigns – but why aren’t they? And for those that are testing, what elements are being tested and what can we learn from them?
Some stats from this study at a glance:
• 37% aren’t testing
• Of marketers that don’t test their email campaigns, 33% say it’s because they do not know how
• 27% say they don’t have time
• 13% say their platform doesn’t have testing capabilities
• For those that are testing, they are testing a wide variety of elements including design, frequency, calls to action and day/time sent. Our survey shows this breakdown for email content testing: 85.2% test subject lines, 54.8% test calls to action, 50.9% test designs, 49.1% test copy, 41.7% test offers, 36% test timing of campaigns.
• The survey showed that 36% of marketers are testing timing, which includes day of week, time of day, and frequency. Although history shows that results on the most successful time and day are constantly changing, here’s the latest trends:
• Time of Day – 37.86% of marketers testing timing are testing time of day. Of those, 49.4% currently find sending mid-day (10am-2pm) to be best, while start of the business day (6AM – 10AM) showed to be second best at 31.5%
• Tuesday ranks as the most successful day, followed closely by Wednesday.
Let us know what kind of insights you get from the new eROI Study Report -
Dawn Foster just sent out an awesome Flickr slideshow done by Aaron Hockley. I’ll figure out the iframe work-around to get the embedded slideshow working correctly when I get into the office tomorrow. As I was sitting next to fellow current, current, and former eROI teammates Dylan, Summer, and Garrett, I couldn’t help but commenting on all of the things that Portland creativity, informality, and general vibe offer that you simply can’t find anywhere else. For example: I would never see a toddler or infant at a late-night business event on the East Coast where “ear muffs” are needed in many of the presentations. I doubt other cities have women crescendo into near-real orgasms over vegetables during a presentation. So, to start off my twitter stream from the big Ignite6 night, I’ll pick the one that sums it all up – “What’s great about portland? So communal – techies bring kids to the event, casual, real, accepting, creative, inspiring.” Here’s the rest of my tweets:
# James keller on being a hooker in rugby. Great lessons, entertaining #ignite6
Eva – brilliant thinking
Authority – like librarians – its about what’s real
Anything happens at #ignite6 – veggies an aphrodisiac
Ice cold swim after sauna – shrinkage can be an issue #ignite6
Sauna cleanses you inside and out #ignite6
After intermission – sauna etiquette pres, #ignite6
# Kgw – lesson 1 – be careful who you call a hipster. Epic fail. At #ignite4 (more…)
This past Monday the entire Account Department attended Portland Advertising Federation’s AE Bootcamp. Some of the best of the best of Portland’s advertising executive world (Peter Levitan, Phil Reilly, Jerry Ketel, Rebecca Armstrong, and Paige McCarthy) were brought together to share their wisdom, experience, and expectations on what is required to reach “Total AEness.” I thoroughly enjoyed each presentation and it was refreshing to have a PAF event topic that spoke directly to the accounts side of the agency.
In particular, I found Phil Reilly’s talk to be very interesting. He started off by posing the question, “how many of you have a difficult time dealing with your creatives?” There were many hands raised throughout the room but I was not surprised to see a that none of the ten eROI account executives had a hand in the air. I am proud to say this is something that we do not struggle with as an agency. This led me to ask the question “why?” (more…)
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
Black and White OR White and Black - The other week Anna Yeaman at StyleCampaign put forth an idea and backed it up with a test on the concept of the uses of black and white as a background in an email and how it performs. Her test has been on my mind making me take a closer look at not only our [...]
Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in March and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.
Here it is, your March Email Marketing Calendar.
