eROI Days Email Agency

Marketers: know this – doing things the same old traditional way that you’ve always done it is not going to work anymore.

We, as marketers, need to innovate. We need to take a risk with our methods, our message, our mediums, our transparency, and our openness to listen to customers.  We need to take a risk with new products, software development, feature roll-outs, user-interface design, cutting edge design, and pushing our brand to mean something in today’s world.

We meet with clients regularly who have almost waited until its too late to dramatically improve their results on increasing the number and quality of leads captured, nurture campaigns, resource centers, the works.

Start small – celebrate your wins even if it is something less than a website launch.  At eROI, I am really psyched about a landing page we rolled out that is compelling and has a much higher conversion rate than we’ve ever had for our own marketing purposes – tell me what you think.

http://www.eroi.com/eroi-email-marketing-study-7-elements-of-email-survey-results-report/

According to a new study published today by eMarketer, “57% of consumers had a more positive impression of companies they had purchased from when they received e-mail from them—and 40% said such e-mail made a future purchase from the company more likely.”

Read the full eMarketer article here on some surprising take-aways on the effectiveness of email marketing >>

I just got eMarketer’s daily email showing a study by Epsilon where email delivery rates are steady, open rates have dropped a little over time (which makes sense as many default email environments like Outlook 2007 and Gmail have images turned off), and click-through rates are slightly down probably due to some fatigue from email recipients where the expectations have raised for better call to action and compelling email content to lure email recipients to the landing page.  Good article below.

E-Mail Performance Steady
Consumers are still reading marketing e-mails, and still clicking on them. That steady performance is driving an equally steady rise in e-mail ad spending. Full Article

We just released a new case study and launched the below email to folks who have downloaded previous case studies, guides, and survey studies in our Resource Center. Check it out:

Email Design & Appealing Content Drives Subscriptions for The Smithsonian

Clean, targeted list? Check.

Excellent deliverability? Check.

Hot subject line? Check.

So why aren’t your email marketing campaigns performing like they should?

Our latest email marketing case study illustrates the effectiveness of appealing content and design in email marketing campaigns. Read how creative content offerings and precise brand presentation, combined with email marketing best practices, helped Smithsonian Magazine substantially increase both new & renewal subscriptions.

In case you missed them, here is one post with all 10 eROI Online Marketing Predictions for 2009:

10. My Dad will use Twitter for first time and get hooked

9. My Mom will get on Facebook and get addicted to chatting non-stop with family and friends

8. Skype and other easy video-creation apps will take off in ‘09

7. Open-source, powerful tools like WordPress and Magento will become more like social apps and promote UGC (User-Generated Content)

6. Email campaigns and customer life-cycle email triggers will integrate seamlessly into social networking sites and tools.

5. Email is a whole lot more mobile today, but the formatting is still crap. You’ll see this improve dramatically in ‘09.

4. Social TV on your computer will become more popular than Regular TV among core online users.

3. Advanced site search is becoming so natural and intuitive – marketers will prioritize this as an easy implementation with huge ROI for their site.

2. CRM and Email Automation

1. The Economy will grow in ’09! Optimism will Conquer Fear.

After the last week of blog posts looking forward into 2009, I thought it would be relevant for the first blog post of 2009 to be about the Best of ‘08. The key to email marketing is personalization and ultra-relevance. This email was to my parents, sisters, and brother-in-laws about a funny video on Saturday Night Live called “Jizz in My Pants.” My Mom’s response was so funny I had to forward it to all eROI employees. If you know my Mom, it’s even funnier.

—–Original Message—–
From: Ryan Buchanan
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 1:53 PM
To: Ryan’s family
Subject: Very funny, popular SNL video

Saturday Night Live at its finest – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pXfHLUlZf4.

This is one of the most passed around video in the past couple weeks.

Cheers,
Ryan

—————————-
The video is below:

And my Mom’s response…
(more…)

Thank you to everyone at eROI who donated to the Women’s Shelter!  I’m really appreciative that you ran with this whole donation effort on your own and got so many employees here to give so generously.  Garrett, Summer, Chuck, Meaghan and Kelsey delivered the boxes of various warm donations to the shelter on NW 5th and Burnside in Portland this morning.  They were very grateful and surprised by the amount of donations eROI had collected for them.  I am sure we have made many Women happy (and warm) this Holiday Season.

(more…)

At eROI, we launch a quarterly email marketing study on things that make you scratch your head and do a bit of a double-take. Conventional wisdom says that EMAIL IS DEAD among high schoolers and college students. So, we decided to test that hypothesis, and this report has some fascinating discoveries.

Our latest survey uncovers exactly how high school students, college students, and recent college graduates communicate online. 283 high school and college students participated in the study and 29 states were represented.

These survey results reveal eye-opening trends and preferences of this demographic in how it communicates digitally. We also get valuable insight into the effectiveness of marketing messages received through email, and discover areas of opportunity for marketers to connect with this in-demand group.

Students can be an elusive demographic for marketers. From this study, you will learn about a lot of new trends and valuable information about students. You will also learn specific data on which marketing channels will carry and present your message most effectively.

CHECK OUT OUR REPORT ON STUDENT USE OF EMAIL AND SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS >>

We want to know – how does your little brother, sister, nephew, or neice Use Email? We don’t know the answer yet, and need your help to discover how high school kids, college students, and recent college grads actually use email. That’s why we’re conducting this survey >>

All the articles we’ve read pretty much tell us that email marketing will be dead in a matter of years (because kids are only into texting and social networking communities), but we’re a little skeptical of that assessment that email is not or will not be a big part of their lives. So, we are conducting our own survey and we’re primarily using blogs, MySpace, Facebook, and a little bit of email to reach out to our .edu friends. Please help us  to fill out this awesome survey, and you might win your very own, limited-edition KillROI in the process.

We need to know what our kids (or nephews, neices, cousins, brothers, or sisters) futures will look like, so please spread the word to fill out this survey; http://eroi.onlinestudentcommunication.sgizmo.com.

Additionally, I’d love to read your thoughts on the survey in the comments below.  Thank you thank you!

Ok – so the Break Media study spins it another way, but c’mon guys, who are the 26% of you how would rather interact with a computer than your partner?  Here’s the study published by MarketingVox:

Men Prefer ‘Net to TV, but Sex Trumps Both

Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson. More than two-thirds of men age 18-34 say they cannot live without the internet vs. television, but 74% would rather have sex than surf the web, according to (pdf) a study from Break Media, conducted by Hall and Partners, MarketingCharts reports.

The study, which was designed to determine what men (age 18-34) are doing online and how they respond to internet advertising, found that this demographic – which views itself as responsible and conformist overall – spends close to 22 hours on the internet per week, goes online for entertainment, and prefers to spend time on the internet rather than TV.

To read the full MarketingVox article, click here >>

My values are still in tact, when I tell you that it’s okay to cheat this time.  We just launched our New Guide: “Pre-Launch Email Marketing Campaign Cheat Sheet”! 

As we mention in our Resources section of our site, “In today’s hectic email marketing landscape, it’s easy to overlook important aspects of your campaign. So, we are offering you this cheat sheet. Check and review each point on the sheet before your campaign is sent, and increase your campaign performance by catching something you forgot to double-check.”

If you think this is one of the cheesiest blog titles and opening two sentences, post a comment.  It’s getting late in the office, and I’m a little punchy.  But seriously, check out this Guide / Cheat Sheet – I really think you’ll find it valuable.

At eROI, we try hard to be a resource to folks in the email marketing industry, and one of the ways that we’ve done that over the past 5 years is to do a quarterly study (based on a survey or aggregate data from our email marketing platform) and present those results to everyone in the industry.  It always amazes us that there is a HUGE difference between what email marketers know to do as best practices for their campaigns versus what is actually done in the real world (where time, money, process, and other factors get in the way of best practices).

In this Q3′08 eROI study called “The Elements of Email“, there is a shocking difference of best practices vs. real world practices.  For example, only a quarter of marketers test their subject lines.  Fifty-five percent of online marketers don’t know how they authenticate emails (to ensure that more of their emails reach their email subscriber’s inbox.  Lastly, only 10 percent of us create mobile versions of our email campaigns.

People are talking about the study, so make sure you check out what they are saying.  And, if you’d like to draw your own conclusions, click here to see the full study >>

Articles on this study:
http://directmag.com/magill/0819-email-markers-slopping/ 
http://www.marketingvox.com/email-marketers-missing-opportunities-040449/
http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/email-marketers-missing-opportunities-5665/

Please comment below to let me know your take.  Also don’t forget to subscribe to this blog.  Now that I’m refreshed from vacation, I promise to post blog entries more frequently.

We have finally published the Q2 2008 The Cradle & The Grave email survey results

The full report is at this link:
http://eroi.com/online-marketing-resource-center/resource-center/?sec=3

Respondents:
· Over 500 marketers were surveyed about the subscribe/unsubscribe process. While these processes are improving, they have yet to reach what we would call exceptional.

Key observations:
· People are not matching up other marketing efforts like they should
· People are not monitoring feedback loops and complaint rates
· The thank you page, prime visitor real estate is being wasted
· Not surveying subscribers at opt out
· Not allowing frequency changes

Some Results:

I. Opt – in:
–Only 30% of the respondents say they use opt-in; still below where the industry should be

–Of those that use opt-in; only a 4% provide more than 10 ways for someone to opt-in and the majority, three-quarters, have only 1-3 ways.

–Incentives/Content for opting:
§ 88% offering newsletter subscription
§ 29% offering access to preferred content
§ 24% offering discounts/coupons
§ 22% offering some kind of contest

–One-third of marketers don’t do any segmenting at opt-in

–Landing page improvements needed

II. Opt-Out
–30% of marketers don’t pass opt-in names onto other systems

–65% won’t pass on when subscribers opt-out

–CRM Systems – lead way in third-party applications for opt-in/out

–90% of marketers don’t follow up with opt-outs – potential for reaching through other channels

–One-third of marketers don’t send a confirmation email after opt-out – which can offer the chance for the subscriber to change mind.

III. Feedback Loop:
–Nearly one-quarter of email marketers don’t know what they currently do with abuse complaints, or how they are handled. Is this lack of education by the ESP or is it lack of understanding the value of feedback loops and the purpose of them?

–Only about one-half of email marketers currently monitor feedback loops.

Because this is such a SEXY presentation, I had to do it on Keynote on a sexy Mac that I have limited access to, therefore, the “Bringing Sexy Back to Email Marketing” presentation is available via a PDF on our site, but not on the extra sexy technology that my associate Dylan Boyd pointed out on the Email Wars blog, called SlideShare. Look for this blog post to be updated with that soon.

Until then, Download the Full PDF presentation of “Bringing Sexy Back to Email” here>>

It’s the second downloadable document on that page. Tell me what you think.

In today’s New York Times Business section, there was an astute article on “The Daily Struggle to Avoid Burial by E-Mail” by Randall Stross. At eROI, we have been covered in the press on multiple occasions for Email Addiction or Email Overload, but it was the combination of today’s “burial by email” article AND a recent eMarketing speech where a friend of mine talked of maintaining 40 social media site profiles, where I felt compelled to write this blog post (slightly ironic given that a blog is a basic form of social media).

Stross mentioned in the NY Times article that both Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Mark Cuban of Mark Cuban get upwards of 2,000 emails every day and 700 messages daily in Facebook, and both of these executive process all of these emails themselves. I get about 400 emails per day and usually reply to and send 60 emails/day if I’m not booked in meetings all day.

While email is the killer app and where I spend most of my time “online,” I also occasionally blog, use LinkedIn sporadically, barely use Facebook, and Twitter when I’m distracted at a conference. Basically, this blog post is my first online admission of becoming an old man – with so many distractions, I wonder if technology company entrepreneurs and executives will evolve into communicating in truncated sentence grunts with very little deep strategic thinking, planning and writing.

I have clients asking frequently, “how will I have time to do everything I do now, AND blog AND engage in all of these conversations about my brand in every single online community?” I’ve adapted my answer to a more definitive “You can’t do it all single-handedly.” Let me get back to my 35-year old friend who has 40 profiles – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Answers, Lockergnome, digg, del.icio.us, and on and on and on. The new generation and grandpa-old 35 year olds playing the new generation’s world, attention deficit disorder is a requirement, not a condition.

So, what’s my advice in this cultural change in expectations of keeping up in the online marketing world? Experiment with all of the social networking sites and tools, and find 3 sites/tools that generate the most value to you individually and/or your company (as an entrepreneur, individual benefit/company benefit is often the same). Thankfully, there is a new protocal, OpenID, where one username/password will carry all your info with you for every online community you join, because in the future, we will all be participants in hundreds of these broad social communities or niche branded communities.

With the acceleration of online communication, it relieves anxiety just to admit that “yes, I too, feel completely overwhelmed and overloaded by using every social site and tool that comes along.” I’ve said it and those words shall set me free. Now, if I could just leave my Blackberry locked in my office desk on a weekend. Fat chance.