Here are a few examples of holiday emails eROI has done in the past.

Are You Ready For The 18 Phases Of Christmas?

“If you haven’t begun planning your holiday campaigns, then you’re already behind. The first salvo of holiday email marketing has already been fired, with 8% of major online retailers having already mentioned the holidays in their email campaigns. While most of those were running “Christmas in July” campaigns, a few were just getting in early references to be top of mind later in the season. August is traditionally a non-event for holiday marketing, but September will mark the beginning of a continued effort to win holiday sales that will continue into January…”

Read the rest of the MediaPost article here »

So, while we recognize that the final four months of the year are going to fly by getting entrenched in the online marketing / interactive agency / social media world while juggling family commitments, school, soccer practices for the kids, and an occasional date night w/ your spouse, let’s try to keep a little balance in our lives.  Until then, enjoy this article:

The MediaPost article begins:

Email Open Rates: What’s the Alternative?
by Loren McDonald , Thursday, May 8, 2008

MY PREVIOUS COLUMN, “WHY THE Email Open Rate Must Die” spawned a spirited debate, mainly on these three topics (click here to read the first column and all 17 comments):

Don’t kill the open rate, but view it in the proper perspective.
PLEASE let it die!
What can we replace it with? You don’t offer any suggestions other than to say we can do better.

I stand guilty as charged of not offering an alternative to the open rate in that first column. I will remedy that in this column.

The Open Rate: Rename, Rethink, Redefine

So, what are the alternatives to the open rate?

1. As I understand it, none exist today or in the near future. Some have suggested using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to track opens, but many email clients also block CSS. The major email providers (Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail/Live Mail, Gmail) can more accurately track “open or read rates” because the email client resides on their servers and does not have to hit an external server. But, the chance of these email providers sharing open data is as likely as world peace.

2.So, let’s rename it the “Email Render Rate” or something similar that reflects what the tracking images really measure. My proposed “render rate” would more accurately reflect what occurs when images are loaded in a recipient’s email client. This includes in preview panes, software clients such as Outlook or Web-based services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

This redefinition (nothing else changes) will benefit retailers and others for whom product images are important to conversion. A render rate of 25% lets the sender know that their email rendered with images in 25% of the messages seen by recipients’ inboxes or smart phones.

Analyzing the subscriber base by render rate over time would help the marketer better optimize creative for subscribers who normally view images and for those who don’t. As smart marketers and the industry make this shift, I’m sure dozens of other creative uses of the render rate would also emerge.

3.Next, let’s de-emphasize the open rate and focus the email scorecard on output and business metrics. I’m not devaluing email process metrics. In fact, I find tremendous value in spam-complaint and unsubscribe rates, for example.

But ultimately, the only metrics your CEO and CFO care about are those that measure how the email program supports business goals such as growing revenues, increasing margins, improving customer retention and lowering communications costs.

Read the full article here >>

Download the Full PDF presentation of “Bringing Sexy Back to Email” here>>. It’s the second downloadable document on that page. Tell me what you think.

The genesis of the idea for this speech came from attending a panel on email marketing at MediaPost’s OMMA Hollywood show last month. At that panel, the nation’s top email experts, who I have a ton of respect for, all had a similar response to the question, “what’s exciting coming up in the near future for email marketing?” After a few chuckles and shrugs that it’s the same old same old in the email world, these top email software and agency experts’ answers included “email is a workhorse” and it “is the plumbing of the internet.” To paraphrase the response, email has the highest ROI of any online marketing medium, but it’s ultimately boring in its implementation.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Where is the passion? Where is the sex appeal? Email has been around for a long time, but don’t tell me it’s boring. Email is dead sexy, but first let’s explore who is sexy to you? Before you look at the images below, think about who you find sexy and why are they sexy? Great looking. Hot body. Amazing voice. Atheletic. Bad girl or Bad boy personality. Something luring you in?

Ignore these pics below, and tell me WHO IS SEXY to you?

What does this have to do with Email?

Email is Dead Sexy and here’s why:
–Email is the Killer App – only true push medium
–More brand touchpoints than any other medium
–Highest ROI – Email Works
–Core of Building Online Community
–Successful Email Trigger Campaign – Fosters 2-way dialogue

Don’t forget to download the Full PDF presentation of “Bringing Sexy Back to Email” here>>.

Do You ‘Think Different’?
By Cory Treffiletti

Back in the late ’90s, Apple launched an elegant campaign which asked the audience to “Think Different.” This omnipresent campaign was beautiful in its simplicity and represents one of my favorite ad campaigns of all time purely for the message that it sent — that ingenuity and creativity are what is rewarded in life.

Concurrently, in the late ’90s we witnessed the rapid expansion of the Internet to become an everyday tool for the average consumer; along with this growth came a requirement for companies and brands to also “Think Different.”

Brands were tasked to come up with new ways of reaching their audience in this entirely new medium. They tested new strategies and they piled dollars on top of dollars to wield the strength of the banner bandwagon as they developed additional new ways for spreading their brand-messages to the consumer. The bandwagon created a bubble and the bubble eventually burst, but those who were passionate and were personally invested in the medium continued to evolve and develop new strategies for harnessing the power of the digital populace. All the while, these people were, consciously or not, attempting to “Think Different.”

Read the full article on MediaPost and post a comment on their blog >>

In short, we haven’t protected ourselves until now. And, protection is a good thing – it prevents pregnancies, STDs, and a substantial loss of money if your ideas are taken without any compensation. You may ask, “aside from condoms, what sort of protection are you referring to?” We recently created a 2-page document that is similar to a Non-Disclosure Agreement, but is much less intimidating. We now require all prospective creative clients to sign this before our discussions and custom proposals. So far, so good. I’ll let you know when we receive our first pushback on this new process. Until then, I highly recommend other agencies to do the same.

“Hello, my name is Gord, and I’m addicted to the Internet. I didn’t realize I was addicted until I recently spent three weeks in Europe and had to go through withdrawal. But after hanging around hotel lobbies trying to get a hit from a local hot spot, I’ve had to face up to the fact that I can’t kick the habit. I need my broadband, baby!

Fear and Loathing in l’Italia

I didn’t go totally cold turkey. I had my PDA to keep up on e-mails, but it just didn’t give me the rush I was looking for. Here I was, surrounded by the culmination of centuries of artistic achievement, and all I could think about was where my Google hook-up was coming from.

I speak somewhat facetiously, but there’s a lot of truth here. Here’s an online definition of addiction:

Compulsive physiological and psychological need for a habit-forming substance.
The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or or involved in something.
It seems to me that going online qualifies on both counts. There’s no doubt that being online is habit forming. But it goes further than that. I realized in the last 20-plus days that it’s hard-wired into my physiology. Not having instant access was as foreign as not having my right hand.”

Read Gord’s blog: http://www.outofmygord.com

Just One Prediction For 2006: E-mail Will Flourish
By Mark Naples (Partner at WIT Strategy)

I should probably write that e-mail will continue to flourish. But, for whatever reason, I get the impression that most folks in our industry simply haven’t even noticed that e-mail has been the killer app this year already, and that doesn’t even include what it’s been doing during the holiday run-up.

Raise your hand if you’ve been notified a dozen times this week that your PayPal, eBay, or other online account has been compromised, or that your Nigerian Rolex has been waiting for you at Customs. Nonsense spam like that almost always originates from offshore, and is mostly blocked by ISPs. Authentication could help cut this stuff in half or better.

Microsoft, Yahoo!, America Online, the ESPC, the Direct Marketing Association, the Internet Advertising Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission have all urged the e-mail marketing industry to adopt authentication standards. The ESPC and Direct Marketing Association (DMA) actually require members to implement an authentication standard. Mr. Baer, who is also an e-mail analyst for Ferris Research, estimated that, despite such measures, 50 percent of all online advertisers have not yet begun authenticating their outbound e-mail, a statistic that he finds shocking. “Sending unauthenticated e-mail messages will lead to a severe decrease in campaign performance and deliverability rates,” he said.

Over time, I hope it does. But, for now, companies executing e-mail the right way are making the holidays hum right along, one inbox at a time. This will only get better as the industry continues to police itself. Look for e-mail–only executed the right way–to continue its tremendous growth in 2006.

WHEN OUR CURRENT E-MAIL AND Internet system was being developed during the darkest days of the Cold War, it was designed to allow communications to flow freely in case of disaster. Never has the need for open, free, and unfettered communication been made more evident than the events of the last week.

I spoke with Mitch Gelman, senior vice president and executive producer of CNN.com, who filled me on just how important e-mail has been in allowing victims, their families, and those that want to help communicate with each other.

CNN.com’s public information group set up a team of volunteers (staff and their families and friends) to answer a deluge of e-mails and phone calls from the public. They set up a special hurricanevictims@cnn.com e-mail address and personally responded to over 7,000 e-mails. Of those, approximately 4,000 needed information on how to search for or register their missing loved ones and approximately 3,000 came from those asking how they could help.

CNN.com set up a special “Safe List” on their site where people who e-mailed in could post that they were safe for their family and friends. Currently over 1,000 people are on the list.

According to Mitch, the e-mails were sorted into different groups:

1. Safe. These were e-mails from people announcing they were out of harms way. Some of the subject lines Mitch read to me were “Safe, but looking…” and “Okay in Ark.”
2. Missing: The group of heartbreaking e-mails from people looking for loved ones: “Help me find my kids,” “Can’t find Mom,” “Looking for you,” and just plain, “Help.”
3. Leads: These were e-mails from folks trying to provide information. In one e-mail a woman said that she saw a TV interview of someone named Shela who was looking for her sister. The woman said she was working as a volunteer and talked to a woman who was missing a sister named Shela and could they be the same?
4. Solutions: These included e-mails from people offering to open up their homes, and ideas on how best to help the refugees, including posting pictures at shelters of the missing and found.

From a coverage standpoint, e-mail was essential in staying in touch with correspondents in the field who often sent their stories in from their Blackberrys. In addition, CNN.com quadrupled the usual number of e-mail news alerts last week to over 2.3 million people.

CNN did special television cut-ins based on some of the e-mails that came in from viewers. In one instance, news anchor Carol Lin was able to reunite a family with their baby based on one e-mail tip.

For all our gnashing of teeth about spam and the problem of e-mail marketing, it is important to realize just why the e-mail system was created and the importance it brings to our lives. Unfettered e-mail communications is sometimes a matter of life and death and the reunion of mother and child.

Bill McCloskey is the CEO of Email Data Source Inc., developers of Email Analyst.

Email Insider for Wednesday, September 7, 2005: http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=33831