eROI Days Email Agency

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!

It’s a fact. A beautiful fact.  I’m bald (it’s okay - I love being bald). It’s so unbelievably low-maintenance and I have grown to prefer the more streamline look I have now. In fact, friends, uncles, whoever I know even sparingly, who are showing clear signs of balding, my response to them is always, “Shave that shit.”  In fact, I’m thinking of starting a website - www.shavethatshit.com (don’t buy that domain, I may use it) - and showing unoptimized, balding horse-shoe hairstyles on them.  Then again, maybe not.  I got some spam that made it into my inbox untouched, which made me think that AlviArmani (see photo below) knew I was bald, but didn’t know me well enough to know that I would prefer a razor to hair treatment for men.  I liked the Before and After picture so much, I had to share it with you.

Email is a direct marketing medium, and I appreciate this directness.  I advise clients to be direct with a clear call to action.  But everyday and sometimes 3 times a day can be too much.  Yes, I am talking about an email program that I have praised and defended - Barack Obama’s email marketing program.  McCain doesn’t know how to use email, and last week, Barack was using email far too much.

The following email was the twelth I received for the week yesterday and I just want to tell the Obama posse (Barack, Michelle, Joe, and the local Barack campaign manager) to stop asking me for money in at least one of these uber-frequent emails.  A recent email example with subject line “Deadline: Tomorrow”:

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I got an email from Thinkpad with Lenovo sub-branding. I haven’t owned a Thinkpad in 6 years (and eROI has started to standardize on Sony Vaio laptops), so I decided to unsubscribe. I was taken to a Lenovo page which was branded differently than the email (and didn’t have any Thinkpad mention on it) - see below.

Now, I’m 3 clicks into trying to unsubscribe and getting really frustrated (1. click from email; 2. click on email subscription center; 3. click from second email triple-confirming I want to unsubscribe). There were so many verification steps that I gave up from clicking a fourth time. From a major brand like Lenovo (formerly IBM Thinkpad and Desktop PCs), I’m pretty surprised.

YesMail, a reputable email marketer, got slapped with a big fine today. As email marketers, we need to learn how not to make these mistakes.

ComputerWorld reports:
“November 07, 2006 (IDG News Service) — Marketer Yesmail Inc. has agreed to pay a $50,717 civil penalty to settle Federal Trade Commission charges accusing it of sending unsolicited commercial e-mail after recipients asked it to stop.

The FTC alleged that Yesmail, doing business as @Once Corp., violated federal law by continuing to send unsolicited e-mail more than 10 business days after recipients asked that the e-mail stop.

In an ironic twist, Yesmail’s spam-filtering software filtered out some unsubscribe requests from recipients as spam, resulting in Yesmail failing to honor unsubscribe requests, the FTC said. Yesmail sent thousands of e-mail messages to recipients after they requested it stop, the FTC said when announcing the settlement yesterday.”

Read full article >>

Men’s Health magazine’s Gil Schwartz writes “The Email To Don’t List”. The advice is very candid, stream of conscious, but insightful:

1. Don’t thank me. If you’re my boss and appreciate something I’ve done, that’s cool. Otherwise, bag it. I hate being thanked, particularly with a “thx.” And don’t copy me when you thank someone else, either, unless they saved a little girl from a well or something. I’m busy dealing with the other 150 e-mails I got today.

2. Don’t involve me in a CC circle jerk. Some people think out loud on issues of moderate import for 300 e-mails. And I’m in on all of them, because some doofus copied me on e-mail number one. E-mail should be used to inform, to resolve an issue, to end a conversation, to pass along a job, or to get out of something minor, without the need for personal interaction. But don’t use a toothpick to dig a hole.

3. In fact, don’t copy me on something that’s just going to annoy me. If something is going wrong and you need to unload, be a man: Call me. Otherwise, you’re using the electronic bypass to avoid my 18-wheeler as we trundle down the information superhighway.

4. But don’t forget to copy me if I should know about it. That’s right. I’m inconsistent. Figure it out. Knowing when to get people involved and when to leave them out is a basic management skill.

5. Don’t make me think about anything for more than 15 seconds. Send me 12 long single-spaced paragraphs and I’ll send you the bill for a bump up on my bifocal prescription.

6. Don’t expect a response to every e-mail. I don’t expect you to answer me all the time, either. I put the letters NRN—no reply necessary—at the end of most of my e-mails. It cuts down on “Thx” and “Will do” and “No problem” replies from people who think I want them.

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I’m a bald guy and proud of it. I have a special kinship with other bald folks, but I’m having a tough time with another bald CEO in the email world.

Dan Fost, a journalist for the San Fransisco Chronicle, writes, “With his perfectly shaved head, Jim Fowler looks like Mr. Clean. But don’t be fooled. The CEO of San Mateo’s Jigsaw Data Corp. prefers to liken himself to another famous cue ball: Dr. Evil. In taking on the identity of Austin Powers’ archenemy, Fowler is riffing on the reputation he’s gaining online as a man willing to knock down established social mores, while showing what critics say is an utter disregard for people’s privacy.

The furor is over Jigsaw’s system of encouraging people to enter business contacts into an easily accessible Web database. Sign up at the site, www.jigsaw.com, and you can get points for entering the contents of your Rolodex. You can even sell those points for money. Since it started operations on Jan. 1, 2004, Jigsaw has amassed a database of 3 million contacts at 150,000 companies, and the company expects that to grow to 5 million by year’s end. Only 131 of its 105,000 members sell points, Fowler said. “Almost all trade data to get data.” Michael Arrington, who writes the TechCrunch blog, fingered Jigsaw as “evil,” calling it a “really, really bad idea.” Rafe Needleman, who writes for the influential tech publication Release 1.0, said that it was “clever but creepy” and that it breaks the social contract.

Annalee Newitz, vice president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, an international organization based in San Francisco, called Jigsaw a “stalkers’ paradise,” as well as a breeding ground for identity thieves and spammers. David Batstone, a professor of ethics at the University of San Francisco, said that if someone took his information off of his business card or from the signature attached to an e-mail he sent — two common methods that Fowler encourages — then he would feel “like there had been a real violation of ethical expectations that we have with each other.”

Read the full article >>

While this email is beautiful and follows best practices in call to action; it definitely falls into our “Email Mistakes” category as it was moderately irrelevant to my 30 year old friend (whose 85 year-old only living grandmother could care less about electronic equipment) who received it AND the Bose email footer says:

On design and call to action, the Bose email succeeds:

Advertising Age reports that “Promotion Firms Caught in Internet Gambling Crackdown.” The article speaks for itself, so I’ll only add the comment that the U.S. government is watching you no matter how big or small you are so don’t mess with smuggling cars to Costa Rica as part of the compensation package.

The article continues, “DME Global Marketing & Fulfillment, Direct Mail Expertise and Mobile Promotions and four of its principals — William Hernon Lenis; his son William Luis Lenis and daughter Monica Lenis; and Manny Gustavo Lenis, a nephew — were named in an indictment unsealed yesterday accusing BetOnSports and its principals of illegally engaging in internet gambling and tax evasion.

Racketeering conspiracy
The indictment, issued in St. Louis, charges the ad execs and their companies with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, saying they worked to illegally advertise and support several websites by buying ads, sending equipment and prizes for the site to Costa Rica and eventually serving as the fulfillment house for internet-gambling prizes.

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A friend of mine got an email from her graduate school, Princeton. As you can see below, it was a completely blank, test email sent to all of the graduate school alumni with the subject line to “PLEASE IGNORE” it. In an effort to avoid more brand damage, maybe one of us should teach a class on email marketing best practices…

> Begin forwarded message:

>> From: “‘Princeton Graduate School Office Assistant’” [email@Princeton.EDU]
>> Date: June 8, 2006 8:02:32 AM PDT
>> To: “‘Princeton Graduate School Office Assistant’” [email@Princeton.EDU]
>> Subject: Princeton University Graduate School E-mail test, PLEASE IGNORE

> Entire message: blank