eROI Days Email Agency

As I looked over my online marketing predictions from last year, what struck me was my tone of optimism in the face of doomsday articles swirling about for 2009.  To some degree, 2009 has much to be optimistic about for online marketers. Finally, there is a broad agreement in organizations that the web is an important business and marketing medium, and a greater percentage of marketing dollars are going online (even though overall marketing budgets are flat or slightly down compared to 2008).  On the flipside, online marketers are expected to do more with less resources than ever before.

While you may still have the title as Email Marketing Manager, you are likely expected to have some expertise and drive inbound marketing, marketing automation programs, coordinate integration with social media and potentially be the online community manager for your company, closely tie into your search engine marketing program, and all of this is on top of the strategy and implementation of your marketing plan for the year.  It’s exhausting and the pressure is on – 2010 is about action and results – and the tension between marketing and sales is going to increase with the demand for quality leads that convert into real sales.

So, let’s cut to the chase and dig into what will happen in 2010.  Here are my 11 Web + Email Marketing Predictions:

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Major props to the very talented Chris Masagatani who is our NYC Director and also an amazing video creator and producer. The video says it all, but I just want to reinforce how proud I am of Chris and Kavita for being one of our true bright spots this past year. eROI New York City has also done an awesome job staying connected to HQ in P’town. Check it out – the video makes you feel like you are in NYC – raw yet refined – is that possible?

eROI New York – 2009 Review from Christopher Masagatani on Vimeo.

Yesterday evening symbolized eROI family for me – it was a great day. It started with the eROI NYC video to the whole company. Then, a few eROI event organizers put together a great event where 8 teams of 6 employees competed in a scavenger hunt / bar crawl which involved freestyle-rapping (Kelsey was good, but couldn’t hang w/ Maureen’s Philly-style talent), getting dollar bills to stick on the ceiling at Kell’s, and the last and most important show-down was a limbo contest at Someday Lounge. At this last gig, Mai Nakamura, who is part yoga-master and secretly tours with Cirque de Soleil for being able to contort her body to fit in small boxes, backpacks, whatever. She hardly even tried and she effortlessly destroyed the competition in the limbo contest.

And today, as I was doing some Christmas shopping at the Seven Planet store in Old Town, I saw 500 Santas descend on the corner of NW 4th and Davis like a swarm of red and white locusts.  My 7 year-old daughter was with me and we had to capture this unique bar crawl on video:

Something that we recommend for our clients is the integration of Social Media into their marketing campaigns.  Social media monitoring goes hand in hand with creating a strong social media presence.  I came across an article that breaks social media monitoring down into 4 manageable parts.

“The four cornerstones of social media monitoring are (1) Competitive Analysis, (2) Product Development, (3) Reputation Management and (4) Outreach.”

To paraphrase the article:

Competitive Analysis – If your competition is engaged in social media, pay attention to what they are doing and the responses they are receiving and learn from them.

Product Development – Use social media as a way to find out what your consumers want.

Reputation Management –  Make sure the people responsible for  and reacting to posts on various sites are educated in the importance of their responses and in the brand they are trying to portray.

Outreach – Identify who the influencers are outside of your company and create relationships with them.

Read the whole article here »

It’s that time where it’s great to look back on the past year and forward on what’s in store for next year. It’s a time to reflect on the new things you’ve learned, the opportunities you’ve had, the people you’ve meet and over all the things that you are thankful for.

In the spirit, I thought it would be fun to ask the entire eROI team what they were thankful for- specifically what they were thankful for in terms of the tools and resources that have become part of their day-to-day over the past year. I received responses from members of each department and thought I would share that collaborative list with you in hopes that you may find a new tool and/or resource that will become part of your day-to-day in the year to come…

Not surprisingly, there were some common answers:

I am thankful for Google….

…for pushing open standards and making the web kick ass

… so I no longer have to know everything; I now just have to know how to find it.  Much easier!

…because it answers all the questions I’m too embarrassed to ask.

I am thankful for Twitter….

… and am really blessed at how it has opened some new communications and friendships.

… and Tweetie so I can share my life with a world that barely cares.

… it’s a strange little world of mind sharing and I love it!

… and the people that use it for contests, because through those contest, I got to meet Shaq, won an iPod Touch, gift cards to Powell’s and Vault, and free tickets to Regina Spektor!

There were some “interesting” answers:

I am thankful for Maker’s Mark.

I am thankful for Blackberry flavored Izze

I’m thankful for #c7d3dd. It’s a color and it happens to be a very pretty light blue.

And overall just some really fantastic ones…

I am thankful for Google Reader for being my digital mind meld of all things new, interesting and relevant.

I am thankful It’s Nice That – inspiration from many corners.

I am thankful  Boing Boing –so much fun on any and every topic you know and never heard of in the history of the world.

I am thankful Mashable – everyday, multiple times a day.

I am thankful for mobile sites.  They are super fun to design!

I am thankful  Fluid.app + Helvetireader

I am thankful Ubuntu for making a kick-ass operating system that I can develop in and Zend for making a sweet modular development framework #zf

I am thankful for www.booooooom.com!

I am thankful for people who put their info in their email signatures

I’m thankful for the Behance Action Method system, as well as the new 99 Percent site.  Both awesome resources for making ideas happen.

I am thankful for the screen shot button.

I am thankful for ALL of my iPhone apps and how much easier they have made my life.

I am thankful for for Skitch, Evernote, Tweetdeck, and Google Analytics – could not do my job without you.

I’m thankful for Seth Godin’s blog.  Always good insight.

I am thankful for 3 tools – Evernote, Gist, & Xobni – that have made me a much more productive person in 2009.

Thank goodness for excel.  I love excel.

I am thank full for eMUSIC. Great pay music site – 10 bucks a month I get 30 songs. Allows me to hit up new things I hear..

I am thankful for Firebug, jQuery, JavaScript, Red Bull, Foosball, Ninja Plate Lunch, and Ubuntu.

I’m thankful that the percentage of IE6 users has reached 10%, down from 20% this time last year!  Score one for web standards!

I am thankful for last.fm for keeping my ears happy, reminding me of old bands I used to love and constantly introducing me to new and awesome music.  And by new I mean new to me, not generally new to the world.

I am thankful for Portland. To many of you that do not live here it is just one of those magically wonderful places filled with passionate, caring, creative, community driven people. It is a place I am always happy to fly home to.

I am thankful for the Web Designer Wall Blog. They are on top of all the new techniques and a really great resource!

I am thankful for the tech updates on www.current.tv and love how most of the content on this site is UG and video-based.

I am thankful for Firebug’s “Inspect Element” feature.

I am thankful for the “I Am T-Pain” iPhone app, and I don’t even own an iPhone.

I’m thankful for eROI’s  QA team

“I am thankful for the Urbanspoon iPhone app. Did you know there are 15 buffet restaurants in the Portland area?”

I am thankful for Instant Messenger – I can have phone conversations, answer emails, and talk to 5 people all at once thanks to IM!

And a few final ones that I saw over and over, and couldn’t agree more with…

For companies realizing how when you work with your partners you get 200% better work out of them.

For clients that continue to trust the eROI team with strategy and execution to continues to knock it out of the park.

And

For a team that continues to amaze and inspire with creative, ideas and collaboration each and every day.

I recently got an invitation from Techspace, the office building that houses our New York City office, for a holiday party filled with networking, food, music and drinks.  To my delight, when I clicked on the RSVP link I was taken to their eROI Event page.  We did some custom themeing on their event site to match their website.  What I love about this event is that they took the bones of our design and customized it for their purpose.  The addition of the holiday image and red button give it a little more holiday cheer than their normal event site would have.

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I am doing this blog post
so Hannah’s post below
doesn’t get as much attention.

Today is a good day
New client project kickoffs and
Online software innovation goodness

Better yet, a sun break appears
and Old Town Portland
is a beacon of light again.

Making marketing decisions around the Customer Lifecycle is definitely not a new concept, but it’s certainly one that’s getting more and more attention, and for good reason. When done well it’s a proven strategy for driving sales and increasing profitability, while simultaneously reducing marketing costs – something that in today’s economy every business, no matter how big or small, is looking to do.

Here at eROI not only have we been helping our clients understand how online marketing can be utilized to improve their Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) efforts, but in planning for 2010 we are examining our own efforts in this area and are determining how we can improve upon them. I’m excited to go through this process as I know what a win-win it will be for all of our agency/client relationships. Developing a better understanding of what stage our clients (and potential clients) are at in their lifecycle with us will go beyond informing our marketing efforts and affecting our profitability, it will help us be a better partner and continuously improve upon their satisfaction.

A few months back, while planning revisions to our sales cycle, we recognized the opportunity to look beyond the initial sales stage and take a closer look at how we were participating in the entire lifecycle of our customers.  I use the word “participating” because it’s important to remember that we don’t control our client’s movement through the cycle – the client ultimately makes the decisions about when to begin a relationship, how involved in the relationship they want to be and when to end it. All we can do is influence and be responsive to those decisions. When examining the most successful agency/client relationships, the most common denominator seems to be that they are fluid. There is valued collaboration. The agency has put in the effort know and understand the clients brand, business model, needs and goals so well that they are able to present work and ideas that not only meet expectation, but go well beyond them. There is open and continual communication. There is respect for the client’s needs, and in turn for the agency’s process. There is trust. There is ongoing mindsharing and idea flow.  There is a true partnership.

Achieving this “fluidity” doesn’t come instantly, it takes a lot to build a relationship to that level and, although the effort needs to come from both sides, there are many steps that an agency can take to help bring it to that point. This is where CLM can help.

At eROI we classify clients and potential clients in to one of these 5 general categories:

1. Prospects – those people in our target market.
2. Leads – Prospects who have shown interest in us.
3. Active Customers – those who are currently using our products or agency services.
4. Inactive Customers – those who have not worked on a project with us in over a year.
5. Former Customers – those who have canceled their product contracts or have not used our agency services in over 2 years.

Each category requires a different type of communication and tone of messaging. And not just from Marketing– it’s imperative that an integrated communication approach be adopted by all who interact with the client (or potential client) – including Sales, Account Services, Support & Training, Accounting, even the Creative teams. No matter who in the agency they are interacting with, every client should feel valued (because they are!), they should feel that you, as an agency, understand them and are listening to what’s important to them.

When planning a Customer Lifecycle Program you need look at it in stages. Each stage requires it own strategy of specific actions and communication approach. There are varying titles out there for these stages but within our strategy we refer to them as:

• Acquisition – The process turning Prospects into Leads.
• Activation- The process of turning Leads in to Clients.
• Relationship Management – The process of building, maintaining and growing our relationship with Active Customers.
• Retention – The process of trying to reengage in a relationship with Inactive Clients.
• Reactivation – The process of trying to reengage in a relationship with Former Clients.

Every business has a unique target market and customer base making the specifics of what’s involved in managing each of these stages unique to that business. No matter what your business though, the underlying strategy of Customer Lifecycle Management is the same – do all you can to understand what, when, how and why a customer wants to be communicated with, keep a good account of that information and use it strategically within the various stages of the Life Cycle to help grow your relationship with them.

There are a lot of recourses available that can help you develop a CLM strategy that’s right for your business, and my team at eROI would be happy to work with you on ways in which you can incorporate online marketing into that strategy (see our VP of Strategy, Dylan Boyd’s post on the topic).

As you begin your research and planning, it can easily get overwhelming – know that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing right away, you can take a gradual approach. Start by setting some goals that will help build the foundation of your strategy. For example, here are a few top-line goals that we have set for the upcoming year:

• GOAL 1: Profile current and potential client behavior more closely.
• GOAL 2: Regularly create new value-added resources to share.
• GOAL 3: More proactively ask for client satisfaction feedback.
• GOAL 4: Work as an agency to develop a more integrated client communication approach across all departments.

Customer Lifecycle Management can be complex and requires long-term strategic planning, but it’s certainly worth the effort. Sure you will see an improvement in your bottom line, but above that you will be building the type of long-term, fluid agency/client relationships that all agencies strive for.

The calm before the storm at #inc5000. Already connected with old friends and Inc magazine staff  http://yfrog.com/0oqxmjj 5:56 PM Sep 23rd from Tweetie

One more photo from Gaylord resort in wash dc. Schwanky. http://yfrog.com/16vonyj 5:57 PM Sep 23rd from Tweetie

#inc5000 conf starting now. Largest attendance ever at 1,700 of us. Aggregate rev of $214 billion http://yfrog.com/0nxn1jj 6:14 AM Sep 24th from Tweetie

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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.

Are You Ready For The 18 Phases Of Christmas?

“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…”

Read the rest of the MediaPost article here »

The Software Association of Oregon (SAO) is launching a platform for peer discussion groups called the Leadership Exchange. Through an extensive survey of 300 tech professionals in the community, we heard loud and clear that people were looking for ways to grow professionally in their roles by connecting with peers.

With this in mind, I’m leading the Steering Committee for the CEO Leadership Exchange so if you are interested in joining the group which will meet once a month at different software/tech CEOs / GMs company conference rooms (or hopefully more creative places at some point) from around the Portland Metro area, please sign up online on SAO’s site or email me or DM me on Twitter (@ryanbuch). The point of these peer discussion groups is to gather in a relaxed atmosphere and share tough issues / challenges / burning questions with your peers knowing that it is fully confidential and info stays in the room only.

This model has been unbelievably successful for groups like Starve Ups (co-founded 9 years ago), EO, and SAO’s Startup Exchange has gained a lot of traction over the past year. Many of my peers through Starve Ups have become very close personal friends as well as business partners in other ventures. It took months and years to develop these close ties, but I’m optimistic that the CEO Leadership Exchange (for CEOs/GMs of Portland companies that have or expect to have $5m in annual revenue) will have that kind of valuable connecting power and peer learning over the upcoming months and years.

Read more below to find out about the other Leadership Exchange Groups that are all launching the week of Labor Day in less than 2 weeks!

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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.