Our team at eROI came up with a really cool concept called The Need Map project to make a difference in our own backyard. I love that this is a hyper-local effort that is focused on filling gaps that exist, instead of re-inventing the wheel.
To all the folks who are driving this effort, thank you thank you. This is just the beginning of helping the community for the long term, not just a holiday effort. Looking forward to seeing this seed germinate. Please go to www.needmap.com to give us your ideas.
At pdx, waiting to catch plane to wash dc for #inc500 conf. This will my fourth straight year at this awesome conference. Great insights.
10:14 PM Sep 29th via TweetDeck
President Bill Clinton addresses @inc500 conf thru video
5:42 AM Oct 1st via TweetDeck
Going thru iPhone pics. Thought I’d share zappos CEO happy bus photo!
about 16 hours ago
What an amazing #inc5000 conference. Heading back to pdx now. Looking forward to putting some of what I learned to use!
about 21 hours ago
Below is a little video that Chase did on me as part of a series of videos of entrepreneurs at the event – cool idea to engage the audience. I thought I might win an iPad for this, but I didn’t. They made this really relevant for the Inc. 5000 crowd.
We’re definitely psyched to have made the list for our 4th consecutive year for the 2010 Inc. 5000 fastest growing, privately-held U.S. companies, sliding in at a cool #2844. Our employees have led the way with hard work, expertise, and customer-centric approach to allow us to continue to grow through 2009. I can’t tell you how appreciative I am of having the team that we have here at eROI.
Some quick facts:
3-year growth: 77%
2009 Revenue: $4.8 million
2006 Revenue: $2.7 million
Employees: 41
Founded: 2002
Industry: ■ Advertising & Marketing
Industry rank: #252
#27 in Portland, OR
If you are up and about and wandering the streets of Portland contemplating the businesses you watch come and go you may want to peek at the August 2010 Oregon Business Magazines article titled “The New Deal” written by Ben Jacklet. Yes! There are people working behind the scenes of Portland’s start up ventures and they are working hard to secure Portland’s economy in more ways than one.
These guys know small businesses drive the economy and in Portland that is just what we need now, being known as a pretty slow start up scene when compared with fast runners Seattle and San Francisco. They may not seem so glamorous to the naked eye but these small start ups need investors to get them off the ground and angel investors in Portland have not been so quick to spread their wings.
Oregon Business Magazine has just published the article to explain who is out there and what they are doing to get these small businesses and startups funded and on a steady growth pattern. The young business leaders featured here bring with them a wealth of new ideas to “ignite the startup scene”. These are the guys who are investing in Portland’s small startups not only financially but with new ideas and dynamic views on how to succeed.
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.
Last week eROI welcomed Rich Nevin, our new Product Manager, to the team. He’s a great guy to have around the office, and we’re excited to introduce him to you.
eROI: What do you do here?
Rich: I am the Product Manager for all eROI software products and services.
eROI: What did you do before?
Rich: Most recently I built a personalized children’s book company – a mash-up of a web-driven personalization interface, children’s picture books/content, and on-demand book publishing. Behind that I have a pretty varied (I like to call it “dynamic”) career, like: driving product development for a video-based e-learning company; creating a sales/marketing team for a medical device company while developing a medical device; sales engineering big streaming media deals with a little company called Enron; knowing way too much about optical microlithography and its implementation in a high-volume semiconductor manufacturing environment.
eROI: So far, what’s the coolest thing about working at eROI?
Rich: It’s an easy answer – the people. I think having smart, motivated people excited to create and deliver greatness is pretty cool.
eROI: What do you feel that you’ll bring to your team?
Rich: Having been on the customer side for these products and on the development side of other (reasonably similar) software products, I think I have a unique perspective and skill set that I hope can help make these products great.
eROI: What was your first job?
Rich: During a teachers’ strike in high school, I took a job as a bark spreader. I got in trouble for spreading the bark too quickly, which was a great lesson in “work environments to avoid.” (more…)
Our client Icebreaker’s holiday email campaign was highlighted this month on chiefmarketer.com. As Sherri Sieger explains, Icebreaker took a big risk with us by testing out a new email campaign this past holiday season. Eleven emails were sent out in the six weeks leading up to Christmas, when previously the mailing list had received just one marketing email every few months. The risk paid off big time, as holiday sales increased 32% from the previous year, 58% of which was directly attributed to our campaign.
I encourage you to check out the complete case studyto see exactly how we accomplished this. It details each of the eleven emails, as well as the overall results of the holiday campaign.
Fred Wilson, a NYC tech investor, delivered this analysis of successful web apps at the annual “Future of Web Apps” conference which was then published in this Carsonified blog post. This post really resonated with me as we are underway on a pretty ambitious web app here at eROI. Wilson’s top 10 golden rules of successful web apps were great reinforcement to make sure that nothing important is dropped off the list before launching your app. I thought I’d share my own thoughts on Wilson’s spot-on assessment.
To simplify the article into a straight list, here it is:
1. Speed
2. Instant Utility
3. Software is Media
4. Less is More
5. Make it Programmable
6. Make it Personal
7. RESTful
8. Discoverability
9. Clean
10. Playful
Here are the things I really like from what Fred Wilson had to say: Sometimes, words or expressions are so key to getting your point across. I’ve really been struggling with the over-use and broad nature of the term “intuitive” as in our interface is intuitive. Most companies tout this, but very few actually pull it off (Mint.com and iPhone interface are notable exceptions). Wilson’s expression “instant utility” means that you log in and you immediately get what to do end to end – the service is instantly useful to you. It’s critical to usability. His other 2 Golden Rules that fall in this category are “Less is More” and “Clean”. Our newest web app to launch in 6-8 weeks is following the design principles of progressive disclosure whereby the user is guided towards completing the ONE main action for that page or interface. By utilizing progressive disclosure, it reduces the confusion and clutter from a page or task – reducing the amount of time it takes for users to do their job while improving accuracy.
Additionally, I’m a big fan of Wilson’s Rule “Make it Programmable”. Web apps of old often kept silos of information in their app and the API was not really meant to push or pull a ton of info to other web apps. We are really putting a lot of energy into building web apps on an entire API platform so that the very premise of the web app is to have a community of other web apps built around it and for it.
eM+C teamed up with us to compile a new survey of 678 marketers. It revealed some compelling information on the kind of budget and time that went into online marketing in 2009 and what is budgeted for 2010.
The relatively low cost of internet marketing versus traditional avenues may have initially brought followers in a failing economy but the steady increase in budget was directly related to the ROI gained from these non-traditional channels.
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 was listening to a roundtable of 25 software sales and marketing execs talk about Mobile on our fourth floor yesterday morning, I was struck by how quickly mobile seems to be gaining steam in our collective mindshare. It’s the hot topic in media, at conferences, and several of our clients – we have been part of some successful mobile website launches in recent weeks. This blog post is more about highlighting 3 client mobile websites (hence the blog post title above) and I highly encourage you to pull these up on your mobile device which should automatically detect the mobile version of Banfield.net, touch.wacom.com, moonit.com.
For B2B companies like eROI, our mobile web analytics show that mobile web users on our site almost entirely use it for knowing how to get to our office – ContactUs page, however for the 3 mobile sites below, users are drawn into 3 or 4 distinct areas that are easy to find product information (Wacom), or quickly search a database of the closest pet hospital (Banfield), or interact with a web application through mobile version of Facebook Connect (Moonit). Please check out these 3 creative examples below:
The End Of A Chapter – My Next Move - Just like a good book, there are never really any endings, only beginnings. I wanted to take a moment to let you know that I am leaving my position at eROI as of January 31st, 2011. I will be starting a new position at a company outside of the email marketing and interactive agency business [...]
Join eROI at DMA 2010 in San Francisco – October 11th-14th - Alex Williams, Strategy for eROI, will be presenting in San Francisco at DMA2010 on email, social, mobile and ecommerce. DMA2010 is the global event covering all marketing channels — from traditional...
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