eROI Days Email Agency

Our team at eROI came up with a really cool concept called The Need Map project to make a difference in our own backyard. I love that this is a hyper-local effort that is focused on filling gaps that exist, instead of re-inventing the wheel.

To all the folks who are driving this effort, thank you thank you. This is just the beginning of helping the community for the long term, not just a holiday effort. Looking forward to seeing this seed germinate. Please go to www.needmap.com to give us your ideas.

At pdx, waiting to catch plane to wash dc for #inc500 conf. This will my fourth straight year at this awesome conference. Great insights.
10:14 PM Sep 29th via TweetDeck

President Bill Clinton addresses @inc500 conf thru video
5:42 AM Oct 1st via TweetDeck

Gary Hirshberg CEO – Stonyfield Yogurt

Should be good! RT @inc5000: Today’s 1st session is starting! Gary Hirshberg, the CE-YO from Stoneyfield at #inc500conferenece!

Stonyfield Yogurt is up to $360 million in sales now. Gary going to go over his philosophy on triple bottom line.
5:47 AM Oct 1st

Churchill quote “success is the ability to move from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”
5:49 AM Oct 1st

If the rest of the world adopted USA energy and total consumption, we’d need 5 Earths to be able to handle it.
5:52 AM Oct 1st

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If you are up and about and wandering the streets of Portland contemplating the businesses you watch come and go you may want to peek at the August 2010 Oregon Business Magazines article titled “The New Deal” written by Ben Jacklet. Yes! There are people working behind the scenes of Portland’s start up ventures and they are working hard to secure Portland’s economy in more ways than one.

These guys know small businesses drive the economy and in Portland that is just what we need now, being known as a pretty slow start up scene when compared with fast runners Seattle and San Francisco. They may not seem so glamorous to the naked eye but these small start ups need investors to get them off the ground and angel investors in Portland have not been so quick to spread their wings.

Oregon Business Magazine has just published the article to explain who is out there and what they are doing to get these small businesses and startups funded and on a steady growth pattern. The young business leaders featured here bring with them a wealth of new ideas to “ignite the startup scene”. These are the guys who are investing in Portland’s small startups not only financially but with new ideas and dynamic views on how to succeed.

Find out who they are and what they have been doing.

It is hard these days not to notice the amount of people on the streets, in their cars, riding buses and even enjoying a meal while navigating through a mobile device.  What does this mean for marketing? The amount of time consumers are spending on mobile devices is increasing day by day. What have marketers done to tap into the new, dynamic phase of mobile marketing and how does social media fit in?

eROI decided to find out by conducting a study of over 500 marketers to see what their current attitudes were towards mobile marketing and social media trends.

Get a brief on our study from ClickZ

Our study was geared towards learning:

• The interest in mobile marketing to marketers, if any.
• The importance of mobile marketing and social media to the marketer.
• How the marketer is integrating the media and how much research is being done to optimize it.

The study was successful and informative if not a bit surprising. If 91% of the US population uses a mobile device, what are the marketers really doing to access those consumers? Get the full study here…

I gave this presentation at Innotech Oregon last Thursday and talked through some really useful tools that email marketers should consider using: Flowtown, Unbounce, Which Test Won, Email2Mobile, Email on Acid. Check out the presentation below to see some visual examples of what these tools can accomplish for you.

Last week eROI welcomed Rich Nevin, our new Product Manager, to the team. He’s a great guy to have around the office, and we’re excited to introduce him to you.

eROI: What do you do here?
Rich: I am the Product Manager for all eROI software products and services.

eROI: What did you do before?
Rich: Most recently I built a personalized children’s book company – a mash-up of a web-driven personalization interface, children’s picture books/content, and on-demand book publishing. Behind that I have a pretty varied (I like to call it “dynamic”) career, like: driving product development for a video-based e-learning company; creating a sales/marketing team for a medical device company while developing a medical device; sales engineering big streaming media deals with a little company called Enron; knowing way too much about optical microlithography and its implementation in a high-volume semiconductor manufacturing environment.

eROI: So far, what’s the coolest thing about working at eROI?
Rich: It’s an easy answer – the people. I think having smart, motivated people excited to create and deliver greatness is pretty cool.

eROI: What do you feel that you’ll bring to your team?
Rich: Having been on the customer side for these products and on the development side of other (reasonably similar) software products, I think I have a unique perspective and skill set that I hope can help make these products great.

eROI: What was your first job?
Rich: During a teachers’ strike in high school, I took a job as a bark spreader. I got in trouble for spreading the bark too quickly, which was a great lesson in “work environments to avoid.”
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Our client Icebreaker’s holiday email campaign was highlighted this month on chiefmarketer.com. As Sherri Sieger explains, Icebreaker took a big risk with us by testing out a new email campaign this past holiday season. Eleven emails were sent out in the six weeks leading up to Christmas, when previously the mailing list had received just one marketing email every few months. The risk paid off big time, as holiday sales increased 32% from the previous year, 58% of which was directly attributed to our campaign.

I encourage you to check out the complete case study to see exactly how we accomplished this. It details each of the eleven emails, as well as the overall results of the holiday campaign.

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 »

eROI’s newest case study, Wacom: Progression of an Online Community, has just been released.

This study takes you through the development of an online community of designers from testing to launch.

Below are the three main goals of an online community, we take you through how we met each of these goals with the Wacom Community.

1. Starting a relationship with your customers that can’t be duplicated by the competition, encouraging loyalty and providing value.

2. Maximizing customer interaction time with your brand, as well as building mindshare and influence.

3. Gathering an advanced level of CRM data informed by user interactions, preferences, interests, etc.

Read the whole case study »

Everyone should feel special on their birthday.  In my family that sense of happiness came with a slight sense of humiliation.  Whether it was a sombrero at Who Song and Larry’s or the story of your birth being recounted to your closest friends, birthdays were a roller coaster of emotions.

Being the giver that I am, I was sure to pass on my family traditions to my eROI family.  Thus began the institution of the birthday email.  Even though every employee is guaranteed to get a card late, I made sure that these mild affronts showed up right on time.

Below are a few of the highlights throughout the year.  I hope I don’t lose friends over this.

Our fearless leader in a stylish ‘stache.  Click here for the real thing.

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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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Something that we preach at eROI is to TEST TEST TEST.  We believe that testing should be an integral part of every email marketing campaign.  Our latest free guide gives you instructions on how to test, what to test and how to measure success.  We have given advice on what metrics you should be wary of and which ones are more solid, for example, your read rate may be leading you on.  Basically, what we are trying to get across is that testing helps to take out the guess work.  This is a great resource for anyone getting ready for, or in the process of, an email marketing campaign.

“Even with all the numbers and ideas that fly around during the process, testing can be fun! Not just because it eliminates guesswork and settles arguments, but because of the surprises waiting around every corner. This bevy of information and direction is what proves the value of testing again and again.”

DOWNLOAD THE FREE GUIDE »

We are only two days away from the Old Town Block Party and the entire neighborhood is buzzing with anticipation.  As I mentioned in my last Block Party post, this was born out of a brainstorming session at eROI and now has grown into an event with over 20 booths, a record release party, Seven Planet store opening and a rummage sale just to name a few happenings.  The eROI lounge will be by the exit on 5th, between Couch and Davis.  Come down and say hi to us and all the other Old Town businesses.  I can’t think of a better way to spend a Portland Saturday then with food, drinks, shopping and a lot of music.  Let’s celebrate our community and help re-erect the Hung Far Low Sign!

Check out the Old Town Block Party»

Donate to help re-erect Hung Far Low»

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.