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If Email Marketers Knew I was Sick

February 28, 2007

For the past week, I've been hacking up a lung and sweating through my sheets from a nasty fever / flu / cold that has rocked my world for a week.

When you are sick, you want to commiserate with other sick people who have your same symptoms and you want a quick fix - pills or the most powerful cough syrup on the planet.

I did a search on "nasty cough" and got to some online communities that allowed me connect to other sick people with my issues. However, I didn't get a single relevant email from any of the medicine brands where I visited those sites and signed up for those newsletters. Maybe I should have just updated my profile on WebMD - I have always been impressed with the content and relevancy of their email program.

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 10:22 AM | Permalink

Give Us Your Best Email, Get a Creativity Journal

February 19, 2007

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

Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 5:38 AM | Permalink

A Tipping Point for Advertising + Interactive Agencies

February 15, 2007

Everywhere I turn, there is another article on major agencies changing the way the advertising industry has worked for the past 100 years.

AdvertisingAge ran another article on the subject about a Creative Director Roundtable. In that article, William Gelner, group creative director, BBH, New York sums it up perfectly with his thought, "I'm finding that many of our clients are actually encouraged to hear that we want to invest in something, whether it's an entertainment property or a product or something else. If we're willing to invest to get a piece of the back end, we become a partner, not an expendable vendor."

At eROI, we have done this with one or two clients, but I'm encouraged to try it more often as the industry is validating this as something other than just a hair-brained idea.

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 8:48 AM | Permalink

FontShop Article Features Web 2.0 Fonts

February 13, 2007

Isn't it such a crazy coincedence that so many Web 2.0 companies look similar. Maybe not. The following FontShop article on Web 2.0 Fonts explains why:

"There is no official standard for what makes something "Web 2.0", but there certainly are a few tell-tale signs. These new sites usually feature modern web technologies like Ajax and often have something to do with building online communities. But even more characteristic among these brands is their appearance. Web 2.0 sites nearly always feel open and friendly and often use small chunks of large type. The colors are bright and cheery -- lots of blue, orange, and what we jokingly call the Official Color of Web 2.0: lime green."

Read the full article here >>

Comments (1) | Posted by ryan at 11:06 AM | Permalink

Agencies are Tired of Giving Away Ideas

February 11, 2007

Here's a novel concept. I read a great MediaPost article, then took action, and it profoundly helped my business. If you are like 99.9% of creative agencies out there, you pitch business on an informal or formal basis and give some of your ideas away in hopes of tempting the prospective client to actually pay you for strategy and idea implementation. Up until this past week, we at eROI have given our ideas away in the form of a custom proposal. Thankfully, as an interactive agency that works with many other agencies, we seldomly do full-blown pitches with spec creative work. However, we have had several prospects and even current customers take our ideas without paying for them and either implement them in-house, or use an intern, or hire another agency to do at least a piece of the work.

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.

Comments (1) | Posted by ryan at 10:41 AM | Permalink

The Secrets of Email Deliverability Unveiled (Part II)

February 9, 2007

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...

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 1:11 PM | Permalink

The Secrets of Email Deliverability Unveiled (Part I)

February 8, 2007

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

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 12:55 PM | Permalink

What Agency Owners Want

February 3, 2007

Agency owners don't have any peers in our own companies. It's too cliche to say that we're a lonely breed, because we're way too social to be lonely. However, we have a lot of questions that need answers from other agency entrepreneurs who've been there before. What is normal for an annual profit margin goal for other agencies? Should our agency charge for the value of an idea or simply charge for our hours? What operational efficiencies can we learn from one another?

We want to know what other agency owners know. Recently, a group of agency owners in Portland, Oregon started a peer group discussion called the Agency Owner Roundtable facilitated by the Portland Advertising Federation. These conversations are completely confidential, so I'm not able to share any individual responses. One of the most interesting pieces to the discussion overall are the topics of interest to our group of a dirty dozen agency owners:

• Intellectual Property and Agency Compensation from clients
  
• Employee Recruiting and Retention
  
• Employee Training
  
• Organizational Structure

I like all 4 topics above, but the first one surrounding the concept of clients "Paying for the upside of the idea, instead of just hours" is of particular interest. Check out these articles:
1. As Agency Work Gets More Engaging, So Does Compensation
2. Fed-up Agencies Quit Punching the Clock
3. Portland ad firm tries pay-for-results

If you are an agency owner in Portland and want to talk about employee issues, agency compensation, or innovative ideas of where the marketing industry can evolve, please shoot me an email (ryan at eroi.com) or comment to this blog posting.

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 10:59 AM | Permalink

UK Gets Tough on SPAM

February 1, 2007

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 >>

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 11:30 AM | Permalink