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!
This year’s theme for our company appreciation party was put to a vote. After the votes were tallied the theme was shrouded in mystery until a team email was sent with the reveal in true eROI Rock star fashion. This year it was fated to be… Summer White Party! Using our new eROI Event system we created a totally themed event that the email linked to. Check out the process for creating The eROI Summer White Party.
The finished product, see how it was done below.
I met Tom Szaky, barely 25 years old at the time, and a pure, scrappy, entrepreneur’s entrepreneur, at the 2007 Inc. 500 conference in Chicago. He spoke before keynote President Clinton and was clearly the more engaging speaker of the two (a pretty tough feat considering how dynamic Clinton used to be). Tom, born in Hungary, grew up in Canada, and dropped out of Princeton to start “The Coolest Startup in America” called Terracycle where every product and its packaging is made out of garbage. His story is fascinating and the lessons business leaders and public policy-makers can learn from his success are significant. The irony for Portland, one of the greenest cities on Earth, is that most business leaders and policy folks had never heard of him and were quite doubtful that some young kid would be any good as a keynote speaker at the wildly successful Greenlight Greater Portland annual event - thankfully, Tom proved them wrong with an excellent presentation of how to win by innovating and by being greener, better, AND cheaper. I don’t have his presentation electronically, so until I get it, you’ll have to settle for the YouTube video on his Good Morning America and Oprah appearances six weeks prior.
The Portland Creative Community took some bold steps with its launch of the Portland Ad Federation Rosey Awards website themed “Nothing Says I’m Better than you Like a Rosey.” The messaging has an East Coast directness to it that takes many Portlanders by surprise in a city that fosters friendliness to strangers, foes, and friends. However, I think it’s the perfect time for Portland to step up and talk with confidence about its creative talent here. Yes, we’ve recently been discovered by the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and other publications as the destination for hipsters (employed and unemployed) to hang out. But, we aren’t getting much positive press for having the second highest unemployment in the country. Now is the right time to shout from the roof-tops that Portland creative agencies do kick-ass work! Kudos to Anthill Marketing for the concept, design, and messaging in the site and entire Roseys this year!
2009 PAF Rosey Awards site
I’m not so sure this site would work in most other industries as it is definitely edgy, controversial, and provocative, but I think it’s a shot in the arm that Portland needs. The true test is to see if agencies from other cities take notice. Then, an interesting dialog will begin.
You’ll start to see this campaign promoted more on Twitter (I love the “Rosey Smack Feed” section of the ‘Win Tix’ part of the site), Facebook, and other blogs in the upcoming months. I’ve got to sign off from this blog post to think of some good Smack Talk myself - submit your own here >>
My two fellow eROI NYC folks, Chris Masagatani and Kavita Makadia, joined me in attending the June 1 Ignite NYC event just a block from Chris’s apartment in Midtown. I had been to an Ignite event in Washington DC which was pretty good, but a little stiff and serious, so my expectations were moderate before going to the event. At this NYC event, I was blown away by how creative, funny, and polished each of the 5-minute presentations were. I highly highly recommend you watch the video below of the brilliantly funny Baratunde Shares of The Onion.
It’s that time of the quarter again for you to be involved in a really cool study to see how many of us in REALITY actually practice what we preach when it comes to testing our email campaigns. The “Email Testing Survey” should take 2-3 minutes and you’ll probably learn a bit in the process of answering some pretty insightful questions. Also, you have a good shot at winning a Flip Ultra Video Camera - take the survey here >>
Fill out survey, and you could win this
The results should be fascinating as everyone in the email marketing world always talks about testing, testing, testing, but not everyone has time, patience, $, or know-how on how to do testing right.
Once again, take the survey and you might win a fun new toy.
Guy Kawasaki bootstrapping image
Yesterday, Chanin Ballance (founder/CEO of viaLanguage), Mitch Daugherty (founder of Morange Design), and I (the eROI guy) got together to plan what we’d talk about for a webinar about Bootstrapping and our personal experiences with self-induced starvation and endurance thru the early days. It was like catching up with old friends after a couple years - the instant bond entrepreneurs share in dredging up old stories that weren’t fun at the time, but are great memories in retrospect. The OEN Webinar is set for June 17 (registration isn’t live yet, but will be shortly) and we’re going to use a different format than the usual put-your-audience-to-sleep-with-powerpoint. We are going to try to re-create the casual, round-table discussion among entrepreneurs sharing candid stories. Some of the topics will include:
– Risk vs Reward - How do you know if it makes sense to bootstrap your idea?
– Keep your Day Job - The stress of self funding with no income can sometimes lead to failure
– Cash Flow - How to get a handle on your most important business aspect
– How to market your business on a shoestring budget
– Why most business models don’t need funding as it can be a big distraction
Guy Kawasaki, in his old-school days before Alltop, delivers some awesome advice on this on his 2006 blog post titled “The Art of Bootstrapping”
I’ve attended hundreds of marketing conferences over the years, and spoken at a few, but this one was pretty unique in that the speakers and content were the best of the best from all over the country on leading topics such as email marketing, search marketing, and social media. But more importantly, Online Marketing Summit delivered in making a lot of personal connections primarily through its founder, Aaron Kahlow, who ran an online marketing agency for years and understands the subject material inherently and the crazy breed of people known as online marketers. Here are my tweets from Aaron’s opening session at the Washington DC OMS on May 14:
I highly recommend you attend another OMS - there’s also a good chance you will see eROI folks like Dylan Boyd, Alex Williams, or me speak at some of the upcoming cities - Chicago, Austin, Denver, Minneapolis, San Fran, Portland, Seattle - there are others as well - check it out here >>. I will try to dig up where my presentation from this event is posted - stay tuned.
Many companies have treated email as the “red-headed stepchild” of the online world, but as money gets tight and targeting become more important, “rock star” becomes a more appropriate term for the direct marketing technique. Natalie Zmuda’s article, How E-mail Became a Direct-Marketing Rock Star in Recession, shows that not only are businesses talking about beefing up their email, they’re actually allocating a budget for it. Because of the relatively low cost of using this form of marketing during a recession, email has been looked upon with new eyes. While other forms of marketing have flourished in the past, the interactive nature and sustainability of email has proven most effective. One of the most important aspects of a strategic email campaign is that it is trackable. In Zmuda’s article, Zappos.com mentions that segmentation will be a big part of their strategy moving forward. By looking at the data from their previous “mass mailing” technique they can start to identify what to send and to whom to send it to. A case study recently done by eROI lays out the importance of this and using the full potential of the data that is driven from email campaigns. Below is an excerpt from the Advertising Age article.
E-mail has emerged as a recession darling, as retailers look to proven programs that are cost-effective and results-oriented. That’s led to increasing investment in technologies that better target customers and serve up more enticing messages.
“The economy has energized this channel,” said Ryan Deutsch, VP-strategic services and market development at StrongMail. “It’s become the rock star of direct marketing in a lot of these retail organizations because it’s the most cost-effective and most trackable.”
Alcoa presents (sorry, that’s the beginning of a TV commercial of “The Catch” in the 1982 NFL NFC Championship flashback when Dwight Clark levitated to grab a perfect pass from Joe Montana to lift the 49ers over the Cowboys). But, I digress. My mind faded to the dramatic music to Monday Night Football, but it’s now back on the prize - bragging rights to the Third Annual PAF Battle of the Bands at Someday Lounge in Old Town / Chinatown, Portland, Oregon where the creatives show their true colors after dark. If you want to take a look at videos from prior year’s Battle of the Band, now is your time to really soak in some entertaining video for 2008. It’s going to be almost impossible for eROI to win it for yet a third year in a row, but we’re going to bring our “A” Game. Check it (this is PAF’s main event email and all the info is below):
BATTLE OF THE BANDS
DATE:
Wednesday June 17, 2009
TIME:
6:00 pm
PLACE:
Someday Lounge
224 NW 5th Avenue
Portland, OR
COST:
$300 per band
Register your Band!
Contact Mike Terry at mterry@magnetoworks.com
I know, I’m a marketer, and I like visual things, which is why I always wondered why Twitter was so spartan with its notification emails. Below are a couple screen-shots of the types of email I’ve been getting from Twitter since 10am this morning. They used to be so transactional, bussiness-like, and dreadfully boring. Now, Twitter has elevated its brand massively through a wildly effective push-medium like email. The below emails really pop of the page instead of being completely forgettable. This is all the more important considering folks like me almost never go to twitter.com - instead, I always use Tweetdeck or Twitterberry, therefore I almost never interact with the Twitter brand in an environment that Twitter controls. So, long story short, I’m in love with their decision to go with HTML email notifications. Such a tiny little thing makes a HUGE difference to many of us. Take a peek:
Here is my twitter stream from this morning’s Portland Business Journal Power Breakfast event where Ziba Founder, Sohrab Vossoughi, inspired me from a creative and entrepreneurial standpoint. Sorry for the upside down notes, but you’ve got to start at the bottom and read up:
This morning’s article on eMarketer, “Marketers Moving to Digital Media” had some really encouraging and powerful data in it. For all of us in the interactive agency and email marketing industry, this is great news that validates our gut instinct that we’ve been seeing anecdotally. The article begins:
“Looking for an upside. In the wake of the global economic downturn, marketers worldwide are shifting more of their budgets into cheaper, more-measurable categories. In most cases, that means online.
Although the name of the organization might imply a slight bias, in a survey by the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA), 81% of respondents said they plan to invest at least as much in digital marketing in 2009 as in the previous year.
More than 77% of traditional advertising agencies are increasing the amount of digital in their budgets by 1% to 29%. And over 10% are upping online budgets by 30% or more.
I love that YouTube videos are timeless and all of us can re-live ridiculous moments years later. At eROI, we have dozens and dozens of those moments captured over the past many years on the eROI YouTube channel here >>. So, why am I doing a Flashback blog post? Yesterday, I had a client meeting with my friend James Adair and the typical client meeting turned into something so much better after watching the below video on our big screen. The second video is of distinguished Portland PR specialist, JulieAnna Little Giannini. She was the winner at eROI Idol, so it was only appropriate to include her video as well.
I have been with eROI, in the interactive marketing industry, for over five years and seen the space evolve with email marketing, social networking/social media, blogging, and microblogging, i.e., Twitter. Running campaigns for clients online can be very exciting and stressful – as the Internet is always on. There is no other medium that moves as fast as the Internet and has as many ways that people can consume content. With the onslaught of social media sites and Twitter, information spreads faster than most people realize – people share feeds, sites have open APIs to pull information and post to other sites, Google constantly crawls and indexes these high traffic sites. One posting on Twitter or Facebook can result in hundreds or thousands of pages of syndication in minutes.
The real estate industry has always done a good job locally with information but it never spreads very fast (Sunday paper listings is the “information superhighway” of the real estate industry), which is one area the industry has seriously slacked. I am very lucky with my realtor as Jennifer King is a top realtor in the Portland area, with whom I have bought and sold a number of homes with. She has and is continuing to do an amazing job. Recently Jennifer switched to doing websites for properties and not leaving fliers. Jennifer is traditional in her methodology, so I knew she had all the bases covered. With the current state of the housing market, not many homes are moving very fast, so as traffic was slow for two weeks (during spring break) I reached out to a friend and colleague of mine, DJ Waldow from North Carolina. He was looking for a realtor online to help him sell his home and found his Realtor by asking some questions on Trulia Voices, a real estate Q&A social networking community. After some back and forth, it was a perfect match. He recently had a story published on him about using Twitter to promote the sale of his house. Anderson Cooper tweeted his story which promoted it only more. Soon thereafter, they had accepted an offer to purchase their home. DJ pointed me to Trulia and Rudy Bachraty, Trulia’s Social Media Guru, who helped him socialize his home on Trulia, Trulia’s corporate blog and on Twitter. So I was hoping to have a similar success by following suit.
I had a Twitter conversation with Rudy and he gave me a helping hand. Jennifer became a Trulia Pro to help promote my home up to 7x more on Trulia compared to that of a non Trulia Pro and I tweeted about my home for sale as well as posted a message on Facebook. Using URL tracking functionality by idek.net (written by Adam Covati). I was able to determine there was a major impact on the traffic and interest in my home.
Within two days of Jennifer posting my home on Trulia, my tweeting efforts and the Facebook posting the number of site visits to my property website more than tripled and we increased that again with a spike of page views on Trulia. In addition, due to the social effects of sites like Trulia and Twitter, there are nearly 250 listings on Google for my home. I have personally received a over 15 referrals from friends for people they know to look at the house.
The impacts of social media sites is wide reaching and exponentially effective. Coupled with traditional real estate marketing techniques we have increased not only site visits but also more than doubled the number of showing requests. Hopefully this dual marketing strategy will help us find a buyer for our home more effectively.
Here is a great example of making your transactional email more than just a notification. When done right, transactional email can be a great branding opportunity.
Check out this awesome shipping confirmation email from Cd Baby below (click to enlarge).
I saw this…
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