We are only two days away from the Old Town Block Party and the entire neighborhood is buzzing with anticipation. As I mentioned in my last Block Party post, this was born out of a brainstorming session at eROI and now has grown into an event with over 20 booths, a record release party, Seven Planet store opening and a rummage sale just to name a few happenings. The eROI lounge will be by the exit on 5th, between Couch and Davis. Come down and say hi to us and all the other Old Town businesses. I can’t think of a better way to spend a Portland Saturday then with food, drinks, shopping and a lot of music. Let’s celebrate our community and help re-erect the Hung Far Low Sign!
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.
MediaPost’s Email Insider recently did an article on the importance of holiday emails. As email marketers, it is our duty to not only create quality emails but also give our clients consulting on what kind of email will help their businesses grow. Holiday email marketing goes beyond Cyber Monday campaigns or even general “Happy Holiday” emails, it is most effective when it starts slowly into an aggressive campaign. The article pointed out that there are even great opportunities to not only drive business to your e-com site but also to stores with offers like “ship to store” which make up-sells and complimentary sales easier. The main point is to plan. Don’t throw together a sloppy campaign a week before Christmas, take it seriously to get serious results.
Here are a few examples of holiday emails eROI has done in the past.
“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…”
On April 8th, we got the news that the legendary Hung Far Low Sign had been cleared to be brought back to its home in Chinatown. The challenge was to find the funds to do it. What ensued was an epic email strand of brainstorming throughout our team. The top of all of our lists (well, besides the “Naked Limbo Contest”) was our Marketing Coordinator’s idea to have a huge block party. I think he put it best with “yes, the answer to everything is a dance party.”
Here we are four months later in the final stages of a huge collaboration to introduce the first Old Town China Town Block Party. I’m so psyched that all the creative, delicious and just cool business in this area have all banned together to have fun for a great cause.
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.
When I first started writing for this blog, it was called “Email Days” and featured lots of examples of everyday emails, highlighting the importance of email in our every day lives, not just touting email marketing only. So, I thought I’d go back to my roots a little bit and tell you about an email a friend sent me last night. He is an avid cyclist and knows I like cycling as well, despite the fact that we both mainly commute to work by bike and don’t get to do long rides very often as our weekends are consumed with raising young kids and different kinds of activities then biking. He sent a link to the video below, which is filmed in Portland, Oregon, and really captures the humor of two different types of cyclists – hipsters vs performance. This is one of the funnier videos I’ve seen in a while and is very close to home, literally and figuratively. Enjoy.
Now we may not be as blessed in the rap department as Crispin but that doesn’t mean we can’t wrap with the best of them. Andy, one of our designers, decided to go away to get married over the first weekend in August. Poor guy had no idea that with separation anxiety in full effect the eROI team banned together to give him his biggest wedding present yet, his own desk. The team wrapped everything – his functioning phone, his fancy tea maker, random cords on his desk and even the papers on his magnet board.
Andy’s reaction to his newly redesigned space was pretty priceless. Click through the slide show and watch the video below keeping in mind that in the beginning he is standing right in front of his desk and somehow fails to look at it while the rest of the design team is gawking at him in disbelief and anticipation.
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)…
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 -
There’s nothing like a few, good quality testimonials to re-charge your optimism and give the extra motivation to kick it into high gear for the day. Here are a few that have me psyched about a full-throttle week coming up:
“I have worked at three agencies that have completed successful interactive engagements with eROI: McMillan, Copeland Communications and iSoftStone. In all three instances, eROI provided great ideas, good counsel, and most importantly a solid understanding of the agency’s very unique needs, based on the marketing campaigns being created for our clients. They were able to help strategically and tactically (implementation) and were proactive in thinking ahead to possible road-blocks for ideas that we wanted to bring to life, and more importantly looking at solutions to problems before we knew they existed. They cleared understand the unique needs of agencies and that will continue to serve them today and in the future. If you have any specific questions in regard to the engagements and why eROI are able to provide strong value in agency/client engagements, please feel free to contact me.“
- David Sly, iSoftStone
“eROI’s work on Arboria.com has been integral in turning our brand into a crowd pleaser. We have transformed from a primarily dealer-centric existence, to a touchy-feely existence that consumers want to buy direct.”
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…)
Dylan may participate in the Email Wars but I have been on the front line of the Dishes Wars for quite some time now. There was a heavy blow to my defense recently. The dishwasher, along with some of my resolve, broke last week. For a little while my post-it stating, “If you leave dishes in the sink a monster will eat you!” kept the kitchen clear but in time everyone realized I was, in fact, bluffing and no monster would prey on them. As a final desperate plea, while I waited for the repair man, I sent out an email to the team begging for mercy from the suds.
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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