eROI Days Email Agency

eROI Releases New Mobile RSS News Reader to the World.

With mobile marketing growing in use and popularity in the US, eROI decided to release, with our partner FreeRange, a new mobile RSS newsreader to anyone in the marketing world that wants it. This mobile system can be installed on any mobile device and is loaded with RSS feeds from top email marketing blogs, industry sources, trend sites, and advertising news.

In keeping with our principle of being a resource for marketers, we have also allowed you to add any RSS feeds you might follow outside of these preset feeds. If you are on the go and need access to any site with RSS, you can do it with the eROI Mobile News Reader. Get all your news and sites in one quick to load location on your Treo, Blackberry, or other mobile phone.

Get an eROI Mobile RSS Today

Publishing content to a website, blog, and email campaign will be integrated in many ESP (Email Service Providers), RSS (Real Simple Syndication), and CMS (Content Management System) platforms. Clients want one place to login to manage the layout, text, images, and tracking of their email campaigns, web content and analytics, and blog content and analytics. Marketers will begin to demand that a blog post is published to the blog, a different website, and an article within the e-newsletter – by clicking a single button. Behold the power of the “one-to-many” relationship in this form of unified messaging.

My colleague Kent Lewis and I spoke at the Annual conference for the International Association of Business Communicators.

Our topic: Building brands and community via e-marketing

Date: Monday, 25 June
Time: 10:30 – 11:45 a.m.
Track: Marketing & Brand

If you’re trying to get your head around terms like search engine marketing, blogosphere, podcasting, RSS and social media, this is the session for you. This presentation will provide an overview of effective e-marketing strategies and tactics as well as case studies and helpful resources you can use to develop and implement your own e-marketing program.

In this session, you will learn:
The definition and proper applications of e-marketing
Effective e-marketing strategies and tactics
How do develop your own e-marketing program

There were roughly 1,100 people at the overall event and 250-ish at our session. There was a lot of great dialogue between us (the speakers) and the audience on the importance of the blogosphere and social networking. Search marketing and email marketing were known entities as must-haves in any marketing mix.

The debate around whether or not a blog is worth the effort reminded me of a worldwide Intel conference for employees 10 years ago when then Intel CEO Andy Grove said that every company would be a “web company” (meaning every company would have a website) within 5 years. Guess what – he was right. I think the same thing will happen with corporate blogs in the next 5 years. It is not a question of “if” – it’s a question of when your company will support the 1 hour per week required for maintaining a good blog.

Here is our presentation if you didn’t get a chance to see it at the event: (the file is a bit big, so I need to upload it to the server when I talk to my tech guys at the office – sorry about that).

I admit it… I’m what they call a lurker. I spend countless hours reading industry blogs and articles. I have more rss feeds than I could read in a lifetime and as the Creative Director of eROI, I build websites on a daily basis that rely on user-generated content. So the question is: Why is this my first blog entry?


Apparently I’m not alone. A recent study published by Forrester Research showed that many people my age (I just turned 30) fall into the lurker category. For those that don’t know the term, a lurker is someone who reads content on the web without participating or adding content themselves. Based on this study, the majority of the creators and participants online fall within the 15-20 year old range. This isn’t a huge surprise based on the success of sites like youtube and myspace, but what does this mean for the future of the web? With this level of adoption and acceptance of social media will virtual environments like Second Life really become a part of our culture? Will adults really interact within one another as if they are in a video game. I don’t think it’s so far fetched to think so.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but it’s taken me this long to use an RSS Reader, and now I’ve fallen in love with Pageflakes. My fellow eROI blogger, Dylan Boyd – author of TheEmailWars, gives me a hard time about my slow adoption, but I never carved out the time to get an RSS Reader setup.

Here’s what I like about Pageflakes:

• Drag and drop functionality of placing your favorite feeds on your 3-column page. 
• Complete control of your page – minimizing or maximizing the different feeds so you can fit a ton of RSS Feeds on your page
• Ease of use so I can see the sheer power of subscribing to all this amazing free content through RSS

It truly is sad that I’ve been speaking about RSS at tradeshows and marketing events for the past 2 years and it is only now with a killer RSS Reader and tool like Pageflakes that I get it.

Now, I’m a convert. I will always have my RSS Reader as an open tab in Firefox or IE. I pledge allegience to great RSS Readers…

Just wanted to throw out the news that we have changed out RSS feed address. For those of you that subscribe by RSS, make note to update your feed for us to:
http://feeds.eroi.com/LoveEmailHateEmailViralEmailMarketingInbox

And for our other blog:theemailwars.com
http://feeds.eroi.com/TheEmailWars

And for the ReturnOnSubscriber.com
http://feeds.eroi.com/ReturnOnSubscriber

IF you have no clue how to use RSS, then you can subscribe on the right hand side for weekly email recaps using our new RSS to EmailROI platform. That’s right, you will be using RSS and have no clue how or why, but it powers the emailROI plaform for you automatically. It’s magic like how Santa gets his big can down that skinny little chimney.

Thanks for continuing to read the rants.

For current and future eROI clients, we have added new tools to assist with database segmentation and to automate the newsletter build via RSS. We have also implemented a new Salesforce integration tool that allows our clients to manage email campaigns from within Salesforce as well as bring campaign data back into leads and contacts.

You may also be interested in our new ecomROI guide (PDF) and eventROI features + benefits guide (PDF) to see how all of our emarketing tools work together as one.

EmailRSS (BETA): Use this tool set up emailROI list campaigns that retrieve your valid RSS feed and create your emails on the fly and at intervals you specify.

See http://tools.eroi.com to login and experience some of the new tools and client only resources.

After 12 months of surveying customers, rewriting millions of lines of code and testing a new user interface we are happy to announce our latest version of emailROI is going to be released to ALL emailROI customers currenlty using the email marketing platform.

The new system will was built as an upgrade to the already amazing functionality of the emailROI platform and will allow customers and agencies even greater control over the system. New XML API and CSS abilities will permit clients to create a system that is perfect for their needs.

Also introduced is a new RSS to Email system, as we had email to RSS in Dec 04. This new system allows you to set up automatic email campaigns using the RSS feeds you have produced from your site, blog or other source. It automatically wraps the RSS feed (and segments number of articles, day, time and frequency as you choose) into your brand template and sends it out through the emailROI platform. It was orginally built in mind for news and publishing clients, but has uses in consumer (think product feeds) as well as B to B product, events and news updates on a daily, weekly, monthly or date of the month based format.

The greatest of all new functions (IMHO) is the ability to completely rewrap the entire UI for agencies or companies to allow them to have a completely customized email marketing platform that allows them to level the playing feild against all other ESP and agency competion.

Learn More about eROI and emailROI

Where Are Your Customers This Summer?

School is out and people are on the move. Many are planning vacations and this affects both consumer and business marketing plans. A large number of clients and partners that we have spoken with have not really taken this into account for planning and adjusting their summer campaigns. You may want to be asking yourself the following: Will your audience be online at home? Or will they be on the go in the parks, at summer camps, in the woods or at beaches and fairs? How will these factors impact your email campaigns?

We suggest allowing for more time for responses to summer campaigns come in as many people will be traveling and schedules, no matter the audience, will change. Think about adding 3-5 days onto any measurement rates you have in place and allow additional time to convert recipients and respondents into sales or leads.

On the flip side, expect to see people having more time that they can allocate to sitting in front of a computer. The computer, and especially the email Inbox, have become more of a fixture in everyone’s daily life, so it will be interesting to see if a noticeable behavioral change in response rates occurs.

Either way, get out and enjoy some of these longer days and sunshine for yourself. We here at eROI certainly plan to do so.

Read Full June News

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MarketingVox reports that email list rental prices continue to drop. Surprised? I hope not. It’s pretty clear that email list rentals have become tougher and tougher to justify the ROI. Perceived spam and irrelevant content are two of the major reasons why email list rentals often don’t work. In an effort to adjust to this sad fact, B2B list costs have declined to around $0.17/email and B2C lists are down to roughly $0.10/email on average.

Leveraging your own in-house email list continues to top the list of most popular and effective online marketing tactics along with search engine optimization and marketing. Viral marketing (aka “grassroots marketing”, “word of mouth marketing”, “word of mouse marketing”) is quickly becoming the new new thing in the world of online marketing. Blogs, RSS, Podcasting, viral microsites, short video clips, and advergames are just a few of the tools and technologies that are making this such a dynamic medium and industry.