eROI Days Email Agency

In 10 days, one of the biggest technology conferences in Portland (2,000+ attendees) will kick off for the 7th consecutive year, Innotech Oregon.  After talking to Innotech founder and President, Sean Lowery, I was intrigued to hear how this event has actually gained some traction among tech workers (tech execs, entrepreneurs, IT, and marketers) in a down economy.  At eROI, we’ve been involved in this event since it started as roughly 55% of our customers are based in the Greater Portland area and there is a tremendous online marketing educational value and networking aspect to the conference.  Here’s what the Software Association of Oregon had to say about the Innotech eMarketing Summit:

When: May 5-6, 2010
Where: Oregon Convention Center
Cost: $129 member / $149 non member
Register Today >>
SAO MEMBERS: Use this discount code: EMS20AT

The two-day eMarketing Summit brings together marketers, business owners and internet professionals from throughout the Northwest. This summit focuses on the strategies and concepts of eMarketing while demonstrating the latest tools and techniques used by the Northwest’s top companies. Join us May 6th for a Keynote Luncheon hosted by AMA – Oregon featuring Christy Day, Online Spokesperson & Emerging Media Specialist, Southwest Airlines. Don’t miss the 2010 SoMe Awards/Innotech After Party at the Mac from 7-9.

Additionally, in today’s Portland Business Journal article on the momentum behind Oregon’s technology community, journalist Erik Siemers writes, “As the word continues to spread [about Oregon's technology success stories], that desert between Silicon Valley and Seattle is going to look a lot more like fertile ground with success stories popping off like fireworks. ‘Portland is going to start hearing these pops going off over time,’ Nees said.”

As an involved leader in the Software Association of Oregon, I couldn’t be happier about seeing the palpable momentum recognized by others. Experience the technology movement at Innotech next week!

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.

The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps from Carsonified on Vimeo.

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.

Again, if you haven’t seen Fred Wilson’s full blog post, please check it out >>

If you walk by any Icebreaker retail store it’s obvious that they have incredible assets and a lot of personality.

Our task was to put that brand creativity to work and drive up holiday sales.

Our challenge was to make the Icebreaker brand stand out against the barrage of holiday emails coming from every other retailer.

While the creative grabbed the attention of the viewer, the content kept people clicking and purchasing.

Using a total of 11 emails, the campaign helped to substantially increase the holiday sales of 2009 from the previous year.

Strategies we used in the 2009 Icebreaker holiday campaign included:

• Increased frequency of sends (2-3 per week)
• A/B Testing – offers and copy
• Free shipping offers
• Product bundles
• and more…

See the emails and stats from the campaign»

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.

Get the whole study »

Kudos to Chad White of Responsys for distilling a lot of really great concepts about “The Inbox of the Not-So-Distant Future” in his most recent article in MediaPost’s EmailInsider. As email marketers, we ultimately need to step into the shoes of our email recipients and understand all the ways in which they will interact with our email within their inbox. The quick synopsis of Chad’s article is:

1. Social media integration – share with your network becomes a key component in every email (and email marketers can segment lists to optimize for Gmail (Google Buzz) or Facebook’s Titan)

2. Mobile – SMS and Email converging has great benefits for things like mobile couponing for retailers

3. Video Lite – animated gifs to appear as a video – see eROI’s Dylan Boyd blog post on “VIV Blows it out with Animated GIFs”

4. Email Browsing – example of Sears using Gmail’s Enhanced Email: browsing module is decided and displayed at the time of open, not the time of send, which allows the information to be as current as possible. An email sent last month pulled today’s best-sellers from Sears.com.

5. Transactions -Email certification of a known trusted sender is especially important for e-commerce clients.

6. Email Management / Sentiment – ExactTarget’s Morgan Stewart wrote in a separate EmailInsider article about a “thumbs-up” button in the inbox to re-inforce positive sentiment in email instead of sledge-hammering the negative world of reporting spam as the only option.

If you dig a little deeper, there is a whole lot more innovation coming to the Future Inbox.  Social tools are available to scrape profile info (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and dozens of other social media sites) and append that to your email lists to allow better personalization and segmenting.  OpenID frameworks will allow information to be passed more freely between email and any online community through a single username/password that will inherently recognize you from your inbox.  The future is near and email is innovating as fast or faster than most other industries.  Get ready.