eROI Days Email Agency

After a late night at a Deerhoof concert, we all awoke fairly sleepy. I am surprised I have made it this far without a nap. Today was the first day of the SXSW panels. As with any conference, there are times slots and multiple panels available. Thankfully they release podcasts of each panel so that I still may get the information I missed out on.

There were five panels I attended. Each of them offered a different insight into the topic they were covering. More than anything they made me inspired, warm, and fuzzy. I think SXSW draws all of the rockstars in the industry and they do as good of job being in the audience as they do on their panels. It’s refreshing to know that they are still out there seeking knowledge from their peers.

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MarketingSherpa speaks the marketing language. MEC Labs speaks scientific analysis. MEC Labs acquired MarketingSherpa within the past 6 months and the MarketingSherpa Email Summit ’07 is the first main opportunity for 650 email marketers to experience the difference in the culture and business model of each entity.

Anne Holland and Stefan Tornquist nailed it. They almost feel as if they are born to co-present. The audience was engaged, participated and was so focused it was great. Nice work Anne and Stefan. I would love to see more of you two up infront.

I’m impressed by MarketingSherpa’s presentation – they get it. They show instead of tell. Case studies and lessons learned sink in immediately. They use pretty pictures to tell me the Before and After and why certain marketing tactics succeeded vs. failed.

MEC Labs is trying to do the same thing, but speaks and shows formulas, science, data, mathematical graphs, and PPT slides with lots of small text on it.

Major disconnect here. So much so that I’m blogging about it during MEC Labs “Multvariable experiment.” As a former financial analyst and college graduate with a science degree, I realize that I am clearly a marketer and not a scientist after this conference.

I love the conference, but I’ve got to question: Will MarketingSherpa + MEC Labs Marriage Work? If MEC Labs has MORE of an influence on the ’08 event, you’ll see more MarketingSherpa-type marketers tuning out.

I know it will work as MEC Labs is focused on the business, but they need Anne and Crew out infront of the world as their dynamic style resonates with this audience.

Transactional messaging expected and favorably perceived by recipients.

Sprint Before: all text emails with no cross-sell, or up-sell messaging

Sprint After: Started with shipping emails. Wanted to Keep personalization and some text. But, there was so much to improve (while still keeping legal and IT happy).

Content the same, but formatting much more professional and lively. Navigation in upper-right and cross-sell opportunities along right-side.
Conversion rate = 8x higher than base emails. Very relevant and timely.

Email is Time Sensitive – performs differently than print, for example: “Buy now, pay later” as offer performed better than “Only $1.99 now”

Members like mystery, but make sure it’s worth their click. Need to have a really strong offer on landing page.

Try new things. Creative e-postcard (with powerful image) performed far better than primarily text email with small visual interest.

Lessons Learned:
Stop Guessing. Let the customer decide.
Email does not always work in print.
Customers like mystery and personalization, but make sure it’s worth the click or it won’t perform very well from a conversion standpoint.

Along with 650 other email marketers in a giant room in Miami, Florida, I’m now listening to Anne Holland and Stefan Tornquist with MarketingSherpa.

• 2007 MarketingSherpa showed that email is “extremely significant” to company’s marketing programs.
• 25% of marketers surveyed have no mention of newsletter or email signup on their homepages.
• 55% of companies send a Welcome email message within 72 hours. Of those, roughly 1/3 send content beyond welcome – these automated email triggers offer a great opportunity to show examples of previous newsletters or cross-sell or up-sell offers. Strike while the iron is hot and reach out to subscribers right when they are most excited about hearing from you.
• Transactional email has become more accepted over the past 3 years. Fewer people are hugely negative or positive towards transactional email as long as there isn’t a lot of heavy, “hard sell” marketing speak in them.
• Email Deliverability: many ISPs like AOL, Earthlink, Gmail, and Yahoo are primarily Reputation-based which has become much more systematic and mathematic in all that Reputation encompasses. Reputation-based programs promote good marketing.
• Reputation Fixes:
  1) Slash your list
  2) Third Parties & CAN-SPAM (do it right)
  3) Rendering 
• MSherpa recommends that you re-engage with an unsubscriber at the point of unsubscribing. Add 2-3 quick survey questions asking why they are leaving.
• Eyetracking: need to teach new designers a data-centric way of where email recipients eyes are drawn to on the email creative. Showed a case study of a more print-driven design that performed horribly on Eye Tools heat map. The other case study showing tightened up copy and strong visual offers performed amazingly where the hottest area of the heat map was actually below the fold. Impressive.
• Viewing and Rendering: blocked images are important to take into account. Make sure that your email creative has a mix of images and copy where some copy is above the fold.

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Our Creativity Journal Contest is nearing an end on February 28th. If you are still interested in getting your creative into the mix, send it on to create AT eroi.com.

This past holiday season, we put together a creative journal and send it out to some of our select customers. These journals were a hit, finding their way into the hearts of all who received them. Thank you emails rolled into our inboxes, many asking, “Can I get one more for a co-worker?” Well due to the love of these Creativity Journals, and the fact that we have a few boxes of them left, we wanted to hold a contest with our subscribers to send us their BEST email campaign creative. Now this is open to eROI customers and subscribers alike, so no pressure as everyone has a chance to get a journal. The only requisite: the creative must ROCK.

To enter, simply send us your email creative in HTML, JPG, or PDF format by February 21st, 2007 and we will hold an internal review by our entire team to choose 10 winners. These winners will have their work featured on ReturnOnSubscriber once they are chosen and our comments will follow on this blog. Please make sure to attach your name, company, email address and 100 – 250 words describing what the campaign was for, the target audience and what time of year it was sent. Also important is the Subject Line, or lines if you did an A/B list split by Subject Line.

We look forward to your submissions and if you have any questions, reach out and touch us at “create AT eROI.com”
Submit Your Campaign By Feb 28th

In my last blog posting, I mentioned Microsoft’s deliveribility guy Brian Holdsworth but ran out of time before jotting down my notes about his talk, so here they are:

MS Outlook and Windows LiveMail (formerly Hotmail) represent 600 million people / users in the world. Microsoft expects this to climb to 1 billion in the next few years.

Big change in Outlook 2007: it automatically postmarks emails to email addresses NOT in your address book. It delays the send several minutes per email address not in your address book. This will significantly reduce the amount of spam generated by botnets and zombies that send email through unprotected PCs (which is responsible for 80% of the increase in spam in the past year).

Spammer Trends and Tactics:
Microsoft has brought 376 successful lawsuits against spammers in the past 3 years. Part of the lawsuit process requires the spammer to come into Microsoft’s office and explain why they spammed. Recently, a 17 year-old came into to talk to the Microsoft deliverability team – he started when he was 9 years old and was now sending 25 million emails per day and made $300 per day on affiliate revenue (which breaks down to roughly $1 per 100,000 emails – not great ROI, but pretty good when considering there are no costs other than his eventual fine and jail time).

Of the 4 billion emails per day that Hotmail processes, 90% is spam. Much of this is image spam, and spam generated from botnets and zombies.

Next version of Hotmail is Windows LiveMail which is very similar to Outlook.

An Unsubscribe link is built into every email in Windows LiveMail in the Return Header.

Microsoft Goals:
1. Reduce Spam in Inbox
2. Improve deliverability for legit senders:
a. volume based reputation
b. Sender ID + past reputation (Outlook postmark)
c. Unsubscribe built into Windows LiveMail

Last note is the phenomenon of communication barriers within Microsoft. The Outlook team makes major changes/shifts every 3 years, and for Outlook 2007, they are moving to a content rendering engine built in MS Word instead of the natural choice of Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s deliverability found out about this at the same time the general public saw the press release a couple weeks ago – doesn’t know why this decision was made by the Outlook team. Maybe the next ReturnPath event can address this topic in more detail…

I attended Return Path’s Seattle Workshop yesterday and learned a lot more about “Email Strategies that Increase Deliverability and Response” than I expected. They even had a guest speaker from Microsoft Hotmail (now branded Windows LiveMail) – Product Planner Brian Holdsworth who shed light on Microsoft’s deliverability strategies. Apparently, over 50% of email browser use is MS Outlook, so maybe we should listen to what he has to say.

Here are my notes from the event (Return Path speaker):
Large ISPs getting significantly more email volume each day – recently showing 7.4billion emails per day.

What is Email Reputation?
1. Complaints (Informal)
2. High Unknown Users (unclean list)
3. Spam Traps (spamcop.com and other types of spam-catching email addresses)
4. Sending Infrastructure (IP address must be clean)
5. Sending Consistency (similar daily email volume)

Where you are sending from matters a whole lot more than domain reputation and email content.

Feedback loops are important – automatically unsubscribes people who complain. Added benefit of decreasing complaint rates up to 40% at Yahoo, Hotmail, when feedback loops are implemented by senders.

Strategies to Reduce complaints:

• Welcome email upon subscription 
• Link to sample newsletter
• Use double opt-in
• Always respect unsub requests
• Make it very easy to unsubscribe
• Content relevancy is key
• Conduct complaint analysis

Just read an article on the UK cracking down with new regulations in effect this year. My overall thought is that the industry should always stay ahead of regulations with more stringent best practices, but it’s good to see that other countries are taking email compliance seriously.

The article reads:
“UK puts new email regulation in effect
In an effort to cut down on spam and to weed out spamming companies, the UK has placed new regulations on email communications. At the start of the new year, the UK Companies Act Amendments of 2006 went into effect, with requirements similar to the US CAN-SPAM act.
by Kristina Knight

As with normal business correspondence, UK companies are now required to disclose the company name, where the company is registered, the registration number (if there is one) and the registered address in transactional email communications. For other commercial messages, such as marketing materials or newsletters, a valid postal address and the company name should be included in the correspondence.”

Read the rest of the article >>

Normally, I don’t mention anything in one of our press releases, but this was a recap to 2006 and I’m feeling a bit philosophical from a business perspective. If things go well for us this year (’07), we will grow smart and build employee evangelists and customer evangelists. Halleluiah! (I’m not religious, but I couldn’t avoid it with all the evangelist talk). There’s a lot more to it then that, but let’s start the discussion there. I hope to gain a lot of insight from other creative agency owners in an Agency Owner Roundtable (among Portland agency owners) discussion that begins tonight and hopefully will continue to happen every couple months.

Our Press Release:
eROI Delivers Strong Finish to 2006 with 61% Revenue Growth; Adds Over 150 New Clients and Expands Management Team

PORTLAND, Ore. (January 22, 2007) eROI, Inc., a full-service e-marketing company, today announced that the company continued its pattern of profitability, recording its fourth consecutive profitable year as a 4-year old company. In 2006, the company grew their revenue 61%, making 2006 their strongest year. Last year, the company brought on over 150 new clients, including The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, Montinore Vineyards, Annie’s Natural Foods and Digimarc Corporation. Furthermore, eROI grew to 32 team members and expanded its management team through well-deserved promotions.

eROI’s positive growth continues partly because of its consistent high quality of service and distinctive creative approach to online marketing. Additionally, the strong momentum is fueled by an increase in the demand for email marketing, e-commerce functionality, and social media tools and platforms. New and current clients such as retailer Dunderdon, gamer Konami and foodie Kettle Foods are realizing the value of direct consumer feedback that social media tools provide. “We’ve helped implement some very successful online viral marketing campaigns for clients by using customized versions of available social media tools. Social media allows organizations to build online communities of loyal brand evangelists,” said Maureen Pimley, recently promoted Vice President of Client Services. “These tools are key to tapping into a much larger audience of interested prospective customers.”

See the Full Press Release on our site >>

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“Back away from the laptop,” the voice inside my head pleaded with my irrational ‘addicted to email’ self. It was a snowy, clear morning in Central Oregon and I had at least a 1/2 hour before my kids or the rest of my family woke up. It was prime email-checking time. But this time, I fought the urge. I was on vacation and I needed to unplug after a hectic, insanely busy December at work.

An amazing thing happened. I succeeded in NOT checking my email. Here’s how I did it:
1) I kept my laptop closed. An open laptop screen is like the gateway drug to email addiction. Keep it closed. Period.
2) I found a distraction, otherwise known as a healthy activity. A brisk walk accross the meadow with my dog, a lovable but goofy yellow lab.
3) I found another distraction – finishing up a great entrepreneurial book called “Small Giants” by Bo Burlingham.
4) Have an awesome plan for the day – went skiing at Mt. Bachelor with a friend. We happened to have a bluebird day with 11 inches of dry powder.
5) Stretch, relax, find a hot tub and submerge for an hour, then eat well with friends and family that night.
6) Check email the next morning – don’t kid yourself into thinking that you can avoid email forever – this just causes more anxiety of returning to an overwhelming and urgent stack of emails in your inbox.

Email addiction is reaching epidemic levels in America today. Learn more about this issue by Downloading the In-Depth Email Addiction Survey Results here >>

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.

We are running a survey just in time for the holiday season. We will be releasing the results next week as long. This survey is only about 10-15 questions long and will provide some very valuable insight to you and other readers.

Take 2 minutes (literally) to take our survey

7. Email marketers will demand more strategy from their marketing agencies. From the client-side email marketer’s perspective, there are only minor differences between the top email marketing software platforms. Email marketers will demand to know more advanced strategies for their email programs by asking questions like: how does this email render in the default settings of the different email environments (AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.)? What content shows up above and below the fold on the email preview? What content and call-to-action will really resonate with my target audience? How can I be a resource and still convert click throughs into qualified leads?

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