eROI Days Email Agency

It’s that time of the year again.  If you want to see what my predictions were last year, check them out here.  One of the topics that is dominating the hearts and minds of most of us over the past 3 months is the economy. I wanted to think outside of the context of a stilted economy and talk about all the things that could be possible in the online marketing world based on emerging trends and technology.  So here goes:

10. My Dad will use Twitter for first time and get hooked
— Most of us in the online marketing industry have been using Twitter for a year or more, but it hasn’t been commonly used outside the technical demographic. That will change in ’09. Twitter has reached the tipping point where this new communication channel is promoted and used throughout traditional and online media. Twitter is being promoted as another channel on NPR, NY Times, and hundreds of other media companies. Thousands of Corporations have set up corporate twitter profiles and manage them daily (automatically through RSS feeds like the eROI Twitter profile or manually through Twitter.com).

But, let’s talk about my Dad for a second. He’s turning 66 in two weeks. Like many 60-something business execs, he is pretty addicted to his Blackberry. True to the culture of his age group, I’ll often get 1000 word manifesto emails that he typed out with his thumbs over the course of an hour on his Blackberry. However, I see less and less long emails sent from his Blackberry and my Dad is adopting a quicker version of things on his Blackberry. I think some of his younger partners or employees will introduce him to TwitterBerry and he will enjoy the benefit of keeping updates on close business colleagues and friends. Then, he’ll start to use TweetDeck on his laptop and soon he’ll be hooked. Maybe, he’ll turn into a Binge Tweeter like me.

9. My Mom will get on Facebook and get addicted to chatting non-stop with family and friends
— Facebook is becoming the essential social web app for all demographics. Over the holiday break, I’ve been lounging online (something I never have time to really do in the productivity of the work week) – playing around with Facebook and it’s amazing how much social value it has as more and more friends join your network. My wife created her profile on Facebook a month ago and is already far surpassing me with her use of it – chatting with her girlfriends, uploading and sharing photos, videos, commenting on other photos. She hasn’t gotten into a lot of Facebook apps, but that will happen next week, I’m sure. Men, let’s face it. Women are far better communicators than we are. Case in point – play Taboo, Cranium, or any communication-based board game where it is women vs. men and women will win every single time. Therefore, women like my wife and my Mom thrive in the Facebook environment. In fact, I predict that my wife introduces my Mom into Facebook and then there will be no more secrets. Game over.

My business associate and friend Jerry Ketel, partner at Leopold & Ketel Partners, sent this email to several Portland agency owners to help prove to clients that marketing has been proven to grow a brand and its sales, profit, and market share during a recession (notice how I didn’t use this “r” word in the blog title – I’m not comfortable using it yet).  Here was Jerry’s email to me (I added the image after searching on Google “marketing in recession” – it’s actually quite informative):

“There have been a number of studies over the years proving that marketing during a recession is a good investment in the long run. ‘In a recession, dare to invest aggressively in marketing, innovation and customer quality’, is the clear message to be drawn from PIMS (Profit Impact of Market Strategy) research into which business strategies aid success during and after a market downturn lasting several years. Author: Keith Roberts, Journal: Strategy & Leadership, 2003. 
http://tinyurl.com/4sqx8j
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Businesses Must Support Their Local Community or they will suffer (PR backlash, customer and vendor pressure). Local is the new Organic, but for businesses, not just consumers. There is such truth to the expression – the more you give, the more you get. It applies to giving of your time and money to charity causes and even non-profit professional associations. On the surface, it appears to be a major expense and unproductive distraction to give a significant amount of executive time, employee resources, and company money to local charities like Friends of the Children, Start Making a Reader Today, Zenger Farm, or the Boys and Girls Club. The same logic applies to professional organizations like Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, Starve Ups, Portland Advertising Federation, Software Association of Oregon, American Marketing Association, and a handful of others. Examples of companies who focus on giving back to their communities (click on each company name to go directly to their community involvement webpage) include Kettle Foods, Jive Software, and eROI.

However, it is flawed logic to look at giving back to the community as an expense. Here’s why:

• Gain awareness to large groups of prospective clients. Customer acquisition costs are much lower when a business and its customer have a shared connection and shared values.
• Community involvement creates a halo effect of positive association to an altruistic organization with shared values.
• Employee involvement in non-profit organizations deepens the emotional connection and loyalty between the employee and the company.
• Employee recruiting is a whole lot easier with greater local awareness and the positive association with your business doing the right thing (especially in the younger generation of recent college grads).
• Serving on non-profit committees and Board of Directors gives you access to some of the smartest local business execs that can give valuable entrepreneurial business advice you can’t get anywhere else.
• Public relations and marketing is a lot easier locally when people are genuinely routing for you.
• Finally, doing the right thing for your community is the whole point of being in business in the first place.

If you don’t run a company built on a socially-conscious business model, the least you can do is get involved in your community and I guarantee you will have a huge return on investment for that effort.

Social networking sites will turn into collaborative software platforms (think online Calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, web conference, presentation collaboration, image manipulation between many parties, and the already-standard email, chat, IM, blog, profile pages). Social networking isn’t just for kids anymore. Over 60% of new Facebook users are over 30 years old now. These 30, 40, 50, and a few 60somethings are professionals who will leverage these online communities to help with more than just business development.

If Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social community sites add professional collaboration tools like personalized calendars, spreadsheets, whiteboards into the mix, business people and businesses as a whole will standardize their entire internal communication operations (document sharing, chat, IM, blog, email threaded discussions) on these collaboration communities for increased productivity, mobility and trackability. A leader in the new frontier of Web 2.0.0.8 Collaboration Software is Portland’s own Jive Software and their blazing hot new product called Clearspace.

Email Service Providers (ESPs) will specialize in optimizing the content rendering on mobile devices. You’ve received email newsletters on your Blackberry that have image links and website links that are 4-5 lines long per link. It’s a usability nightmare to attempt to read a long newsletter with a complex layout. The Email Experience Council ran a poll in May’07 where they found that 61% online marketers thought email should be optimized for mobile devices, yet less than 5% of ESPs offered it. ESPs will adapt and fill this customer need in ’08.

Traditional agencies will acquire online marketing software companies and interactive agencies. No, we (eROI) don’t want to be acquired for at least the next decade. Yes, this prediction is very real. Traditional agencies will be around for the long haul. They get the big picture. They get branding. They get traditional advertising mediums (TV, outdoor, print, etc.). They do not get interactive.

Interactive agencies get interactive because the entire culture is focused around it. Account folks talk about what they read in the daily newsletters of EmailInsider, eMarketer, MarketingVox, iMediaConnection, or MarketingSherpa. Interactive designers talk about how well certain designs will work with CSS standards, Flickr feeds, blog engines, and other limitations of the online medium that serve as amazing problems to overcome in elegant ways. Technical programmers figure out how to connect it all to a database and make sure it is strong enough to withstand huge traffic spikes if the online campaign becomes truly viral. Some of the most cutting-edge interactive work is done by smaller interactive shops or recently acquired interactive shops that have become an interactive division of a large traditional agency. In a marketing world of increasing complexity, the best quality is being produced by niche specialists (which even includes old examples of the first large-scale viral website Subservient Chicken made by a small interactive agency, the Barbarian Group).

Publishing content to a website, blog, and email campaign will be integrated in many ESP (Email Service Providers), RSS (Real Simple Syndication), and CMS (Content Management System) platforms. Clients want one place to login to manage the layout, text, images, and tracking of their email campaigns, web content and analytics, and blog content and analytics. Marketers will begin to demand that a blog post is published to the blog, a different website, and an article within the e-newsletter – by clicking a single button. Behold the power of the “one-to-many” relationship in this form of unified messaging.

B2B Companies will update their Whitepapers, Guides, and Case Studies in ’08. Have you ever noticed how so many B2B companies let their online Resource Centers get really outdated (and yes, that includes eROI for a few of our 45+ free guides, case studies, and email studies). 2008 is the year that this will change. Without fresh content, B2B companies’ marketing programs begin to die.

Email Brand ROI. Email Marketers will standardize a formula that most everyone can agree on for putting a hard figure on the benefit of email marketing to your brand (perhaps the Email Experience Council will drive this, or we will highlight it in the online marketing world). Email is an often under-valued medium because of its ubiquity and ease of use, but it is also the backbone of online communication.

From a branding perspective, customers and prospects often get more “brand touchpoints” through email than any other medium (examples include monthly newsletters, resource downloads, quarterly events, webinars, monthly blog posting summary emails, etc). If your brand comes across as unprofessional or irrelevant in those emails, you are not only missing a huge opportunity to convert more prospects to customers but you’ll damage the long-term trust in your brand.

Online marketing dollars will rapidly shift towards Custom Web Apps and Widgets. We really can’t take credit for this prediction – every panelists and keynote speaker (including top folks from NBC Universal, CondeNast, and Google) at the Sep’07 MediaPost’s OMMA East show was preaching the power of widgets. Why? Because users don’t want to leave the online communities where they socialize and interact in. Until recently, brands and media companies assume that online users will leave Facebook, MySpace, or other community and go to the advertiser’s site or media site to learn more.

That has changed. Now, brands need to make their marketing messages more interactive and more portable. YouTube popularized this with providing the code for any video for people to copy and paste onto their blog, website, Facebook or MySpace page. Doritos, NBC, HBO, and any other savvy advertiser or media company is starting to do this. For example, HBO put a widget of a disco ball countdown on its site FutureSexLove.com. When the show launched, the disco ball virtually exploded across the thousands of sites, blogs, and profile pages that downloaded the widget.

User-Generated content will be an ingredient in most business website launches (and nearly all consumer sites). In 2006, YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook got all of the press. Wait, they still do. But, legions of major consumer brands launched their own primary sites or campaign micro-sites with clever concepts that drove consumers to feel a sense of ownership of the future of those brands. Notable examples include HBO’s Justin Timberlake show FutureSexLove, ABC/Disney’s 13 Nights of Halloween, and Doritos user-generated Super-Bowl ads.

In 2008, B2B companies will follow suit, but it won’t be easy. User-Generated content needs to be used in a way that accomplishes specific marketing objectives, and oftentimes B2B companies meet those objectives through Resource Centers (whitepaper, case study, and guide downloads), web forms, giveaways, or surveys. None of these online marketing tactics allow for community building, commenting, rating, “digging”, or creating profiles.

Extending this to what we do as an online marketing company that works with other businesses (not consumers), we just launched our own site, eroi.com, and there simply aren’t any social networking tools built into our primary site. We have done a tremendous amount of Web 2.0 tactics outside of our main site – four distinct blogs with built-in RSS feeds, Pageflakes, delicious, and digg capabilities, our own Facebook Group page, MySpace page, YouTube Channel, and Flickr feeds, but we haven’t pulled them all together and integrated social networking tools into our primary site. As a self-fulfilling prophecy, we could look at implementing some of these tools into our site or, even better, our products. Online support can leverage the wisdom of other customers and allow searchable discussion threads for product support issues between multiple customers. B2B technology companies can learn from Salesforce, Google and Facebook and open the API to their products to allow for anyone to build modules that easily integrate into their online products.

The online green marketing theme will trend from green worshipping to green irreverence. This year’s inconvenient truth is that green has hit the marketing world like a coal-spitting freight train against a pristine mountainous backdrop. Whether it’s Subaru advertising its gas-gulping vehicles as magically green now, despite the fact that they don’t have a single hybrid model in their entire product lineup. The Green Life named Subaru as One of the 10 Worst Greenwashers in 2003. The company made the list for “reclassifying the Outback from a car to a light truck, thus skirting fuel economy standards and violating the distinction in its marketing campaign between Outbacks and SUVs.” For all the greenwashing that is happening in traditional and online marketing campaigns, there are quite a few genuine stories of companies that are green in almost every aspect of what they do and how they do it. For example, TerraCycle created a conveyor belt system to take a huge amount of food waste and have worms eat it and poop it out into containers. The company makes all of its products and its packaging out of waste. Its marketing reflects the eco-friendly values of the business. Furthermore, Kettle Foods, an Oregon company that buys locally, uses its cooking oil twice to fuel its fleet of trucks and marketing cars on biodeisel, uses solar power and wind energy, and restores wetlands at its plant, makes sure it tells its authentic story of green-rootedness through co-creating its products and brand with customers. This year, realtors are marketing themselves as LEED Certified, attorneys have a whole new practice of green, sustainable experts, and even accountants are joining the fray. This is fantastic – it’s the right thing to do and a competitive differentiator, especially if there is true sustainable expertise there. However, their marketing concepts and themes are often so serious and borderline pious to an already serious topic of choking the Earth from a huge, global, carbon emission problem. 2008 will be the year that green-friendly and green-blooded companies in every industry will have the confidence to assume that consumers are aware of the problem and focus their marketing message on humor and a bit of green irreverence.

1. Thoughtful, cause-related marketing is the biggest winner in 2007. Pay attention. If you do this right, you will put your company on the map AND make the world a better place. This may just be the best business advice you get all year. Ask your co-worker, your department, your entire company what single non-profit they want to support and throw a lot of energy behind it. Better yet, co-create a new program or new event with an existing, reputable non-profit and you’ll see that your employees, customers, and prospects, as well as your kids and your spouse will help you take this cause, and indirectly your company to the next level.

The best example of this is a brand we used to take for granted, Dove. Dove launched “The Campaign for Real Beauty” and let the fact be known that the company no longer simply sells soap. Dove is now so much more than a set of commodity products. Dove sells real beauty; natural beauty; non-superficial beauty. The Campaign for Real Beauty website features a one-minute film that shows the transformation of an average-looking woman into a strikingly gorgeous supermodel. Only by seeing this process can we truly comprehend the illusion that the media has portrayed of these fabricated dream girls. The beauty of this site is that it doesn’t end with just awareness of the problem. It launches immediately into an actionable item for eight to 12-year-old girls to sign up for Dove’s real beauty workshops. These workshops teach girls about the importance of identifying beauty within themselves in the pre-teen years before the peer pressure to be like the mythical supermodel drives them to anorexia or bulimia.

A couple of years ago, eROI began its own partnership with Portland-based non-profit, Friends of the Children, by co-creating an event called Friends Art Fair. In just 2 years, the event has raised $55k and has garnered 2.5 million media impressions thru email marketing channels, print media, and media sponsor KPTV Fox 12 News. However, we have yet to do a campaign around a cause that is relevant to the e-marketing world. Make sure you sign up for our newsletter to be the first to find out about our cause-related campaign in mid-2007.

2. Email mantra: list segmentation + relevant content = improved results. eROI published an email study earlier this year showing a direct correlation between smaller, more relevant lists and higher open and click through rates. Instead of sending all emails to a Main List of all of their contacts, marketers are starting to segment their lists into product categories, service categories, press lists, webinar lists, etc. Marketers who fail to take the extra hour or two to do this list segmentation every 3-6 months will see continued email list fatigue and a resulting drop in performance. Emailers will learn that content needs to focus less on selling a product and talking at recipients, and more on talking with recipients. Updating email content and starting a conversation will be more important than ever as people move toward seeing their inboxes as sacred places that they don’t want violated by one-way advertising messages.

3. Greater integration of Video into all websites. Yesterday, I visited the homepage of CRM juggernaut, Salesforce.com, and was immediately struck by how quickly the video flash piece engaged me. Video is not just for TV and YouTube anymore. The ShaveEverywhere site proved that the use of video within viral sites is hugely engaging and effective in converting sales. We will see more large, medium, and small businesses integrate video into their primary and campaign websites in 2007. One trend we will likely see will be an increase in the use of “Webisodes”, where 3-5 minute daily or weekly video clips will entice users to come back to sites for more all-web programming.