eROI Days Email Agency

I recently wrote an article for iMedia Connection titled “11 Email Design Best Practices” and thought I’d share it with you if you hadn’t already checked it out.  It starts like this:

Remember the last great offer you didn’t see? The savvy email marketer knows that you catch more conversions with honey than you do with vinegar, so make sure your email design is sweet!

If you’re starting a new email marketing program, or looking for an edge to take your email campaigns to the next level, consider these ideas for designing emails that get your compelling offer noticed. These tips and tricks will start you off right, and even help experienced email marketers amp-up existing campaigns, turning precise communication into profits and visibility.

1. Before you start
Prior to constructing your email, make sure that your message is clear and concise. Develop and refine what you want to say so that readers don’t lose interest or get confused about what your call-to-action is. What is your offer? How will reading and clicking through this email help the reader? Make sure they know what’s in it for them. Before and during the building process, continually ask yourself, “What would I think if I got this in my inbox? Would I immediately delete it? Or worse, report it as spam?” Rule No. 1 — don’t be spam.

Even the most compelling message can be rendered ineffective if it’s presented in an undesirable way to your readers. During this process you may encounter many challenges and obstacles. Your design team may want to create something striking and beautiful, but your audience may not want it. At the same time, don’t throw readers for a loop with a design that is off-brand. Your email design should be able to flow well with the look of your website as well as any pieces collateral offered. Consistency is good. Also, design the email around your readers by responding to their personality. Are they tech savvy? Parents? Students?

Check out the rest of the iMedia Connection article here >>

Today’s annual iMedia Connection article is (in years past) the most read article of the year because readers (and authors) like me love the joy of discovering unique / beautiful / hilarious / branded / insanely creative websites.  In the “10 killer websites worth watching” article, I got a chance to write about 2 of my favorite sites:

Brand Name: Wacom
Agency/Site Creator: eROI
URL: www.pencollective.com

What is unusual and effective about this website?
A lot of sites try to personalize the message, but the Pen Collective site is different — the highly personalized stories are the messages. The site offers the opportunity to meet such people as Mark, an illustrator who prefers his pen to his girlfriend, or Alex, who will show you how she uses her pen to remove the cellulite from her sister’s wedding photos. The site also allows other users to share their own story with the world and become part of the Collective.  Read the full story >>

Brand Name: Converse
Agency/Site Creator: Anomaly
URL: www.thisistheindexpage.com
 
What is unusual and effective about this website?
This site connects so completely with the nostalgic high school kid in me. It’s like a Will Ferrell movie where a 16-year-old jock or a 45-year-old creative can find their own experience and sense of humor in the content and the way it’s executed. This site differentiates itself from all others with its full-screen videos, never-ending supply of full-screen background images upon refresh, clever URLs with the implied promise of humor and entertainment in each of the individual video vignettes within the overall campaign website. Content is king and Converse nailed it with this site. The “I’m too hot for you” attitude, voice, mannerisms of the girl in OutofYourLeagueGirl.com reminds me exactly of several girls in my year at Wootton High School in Maryland.  Read the full story >>

One last thing, David Friedman of Avenue A | Razorfish introduced me to a hilarious site called www.iliketotallyloveit.com – check out the site, but first read his creative review of it.

While my 6 year-old daughter Grace didn’t write my Creative Review for SesameStreet.org, she definitely was the entire focus group for the writing assignment.  Apparently, the entire site (including strategy, focus groups, usability experts, content creation, design, development, and production) cost $14 million.  Fellow eROI blogger, Dylan Boyd, shared this fact with me and we were both stunned at the price tag.  However, the following weekend, Grace and my youngest daughter Emma proved the money for SesameStreet.org was worth it, as it was exactly what kids wanted (not for adults who think they are big kids).

Here is my Creative Review published in iMedia Connection a few days ago:

“The tough task of writing a review for the iconic brand of Sesame Street’s new website melted away when I included my six-year-old daughter Grace to put the site to the test. The site’s primary target audience is clearly focused on young kids, so watching Grace interact with the site was much more informative than my initial attempts to be a big kid on the site. Here is what I learned: Sesame Street did its homework. When it comes to good content, kids are far more patient than adults. Grace watched the first two minutes of the homepage Flash animation of Bert introducing the elements of the site. She and her three-year-old sister Emma began talking back to the screen and getting very animated about all the recognizable characters. Where do you think Grace clicked first? Games, of course. Kids love games and smartly, SesameStreet.org has “Games” as the intuitive first choice in the top navigation.”

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I thought this article from iMedia Connection – “10 Ways to ‘Green’ your Brand” was so significant that I needed to evangelize it and archive it in this blog post. Matt Heinz knows his stuff and puts the overload of green information into an easy top 10 action list.

Article excerpt:
Your green top 10 list for 2008
So you’re ready to get started. Here are 10 more things you can start doing right away, all in 2008, to create a comprehensive, compelling and results-driven green strategy for your business and brand.

Internally
1. Recycling: Surprisingly, not very many of us are doing it, and not nearly to the level that we easily could. Office recycling programs now easily tackle not just paper, but also glass, aluminum, cardboard, catalogs, magazines, etc. — all in the same bin. Think also about how your company recycles office equipment, computer supplies, etc. Much of these tools can be donated or sold to companies and third-world companies that will put them to good use, reducing the need for new equipment manufacturing, which itself creates an incredibly high carbon footprint.
2. Transportation: Encourage and subsidize more of your employees to use group and public transportation. Rethink whether or not you need that business trip, or if a phone call, WebEx or video conference could suffice.
3. Power management: Consider implementing a PC power management solution, such as those described above. This can have an immediate impact on not only carbon footprint, but also operating costs.
4. Office guidelines: Default all printers to duplex printing. Encourage employees to only print what’s necessary and to use “soft copies” for everything else. Encourage and reward activities across the company that demonstrate employees “living the green brand.” You’ll be surprised what unique and compelling green strategies individual employees come up with that can become internal and external sustainability strategies for your business and brand.
5. Supplier & partner guidelines: Encourage or require your partners and suppliers to maintain certain green-friendly operating standards. Several companies, such as Wal-Mart, are already doing this, and are thereby impacting sustainable practices well beyond their own.

Externally

6. Community engagement & activation: Encourage your customers to be green with you. If you’re enacting PC power management solutions within your business, encourage your customers to do the same. Getting them involved and participating with you in your green strategies is an excellent way to build community and create strong bonds between brand and customer.
7. Community participation: Find ways to actively participate in existing community activities, organizations and other efforts to be green and sustainable, especially efforts that align with your company and brand’s core values and brand message. This can be local or national organizations and efforts — focused on employee participation or widespread customer activation.
8. Channel choices: Consider the carbon impact of your marketing channels, and how you read, influence and empower your customers. Participating in a trade show, for example, is a carbon footprint-heavy strategy compared to an online-based, community-based activity that likely can achieve the same awareness or demand generation results. And if you’re making channel choices based on what’s most sustainable, tell your customers and prospects about it. They’ll appreciate the motivation behind your choice.
9. Competitive advantage: If being green is truly a key and possibly new part of your brand message and positioning, lean into it. Make it something that everyone across your organization — sales, marketing, customer support, etc. — is reciting as a mantra in their individual engagements with your customers and prospects. Make your green strategy a true competitive advantage.
10. Endorsements & associations: Partner with Energy Star, buy products from suppliers with strong environmental stories (such as HP for computers and printers), and work with credible speakers, writers and authorities already in the green and sustainable world to align with your brand, endorse your strategy and help tell your story.

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I get this email every day and love it. One of my favorite recent articles is of creative reviews of 14 awesome websites.

To see the full article, go to iMedia’s “In Focus: 7 Experts Review 14 Killer Websites” >>

iMedia Connection wrote a great article highlighting one of our clients, Travel Oregon, and the success they had with a newsletter campaign that focused on relevancy and timeliness to their different targeted audiences. I show pictures of all 3 authors (not just my bald noggin, as Dylan and Jason did most of the work on this one):

eROI created a newsletter for Oregon’s tourism industry that used consumer feedback to ensure its success.

The Travel Oregon consumer marketing group’s objective for 2006 is to continue keeping an Oregon vacation top-of-mind with potential visitors across the country and worldwide, thus increasing tourism throughout Oregon. Travel Oregon had never done direct consumer outreach and wanted to establish a way to communicate with consumers, but not burden them with information that they would find of no value.

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