Return On Subscriber - Email Marketing Blog

College Basketball is in the air and that means it is bracket time. We are working with our InFocus to bring the 2nd annual InFocus Hoops contest. This year winners take home PlayStation 3, Bose systems, and lots of other goodies. This site shows you the power of encompassing a campaign around a large social event.

Check it out and see how we use the Send to a Friend or Invite a Friend feature to drive more competition and a larger base of participants

I was having a discussion with our director of new technologies, creative director, and one of our Flash developers talking about what is viral. Now many campaigns have touted themselves as Viral and any project that Crispin Porter touches is labeled viral. Nearly every agency that has ever come up with an advergame or Flash-based referral campaign is “viral.” At various Ad Club meetings and networking events I have overheard conversations between agencies and big prospects explaining how well they “do viral” and then having to explain for 5 minutes the major viral campaign they ran and how it worked.

If you ever have to explain in any type of detail what your viral campaign is, IT IS NOT VIRAL.

A viral campaign needs to be described in one sentence or less or even better is for you to just say the name of the campaign and everyone within earshot knows what you are talking about. Now this does not mean you have to explain all of the inter-workings, but the concept must be clear and readily understood.

I truly think that for a campaign to be considered viral, it must jump into everyday discussion or pop culture.

I believe that agencies are setting themselves up for failure if they tout how well they do “true viral” and companies need to understand that viral means letting go and don’t be afraid.

A number of companies have approached us for viral campaigns but they want to lock down the flexibility the user has or they want “Monk-e-Mail” but don

I sat on a panel today speaking to a group of non-profits on “How to create impactful e-Publications”. As much advice as I gave, I learned a lot.

Every Non-profit needs a email marketing Macgyver.

As the joke goes, Macgyver could make an ESP out of a pencil eraser, a toothpick, an ice-cream sandwich…(fill in the rest). Non-profits need someone who has the expertise in this area and can get the job done on a shoe-string budget and minimal resources.

I always tell non-profits about the power of email, the relative inexpensive cost compared to printed newsletters, and the ability to drive quick donation opportunities through the emotional impact of their messaging.

What I realized is that the task is daunting for some and can seem impossible.

My advice is to use the free resources at your disposal, find an ESP that can work with your budget, and embrace the channel. It will pay off.

We recieved this alert form MarketingSherpa concering BellSouth. After verifying the issue through our ReturnPath account, we switched every BellSouth address on our internal list to text and delivered just fine.

Alert: Use Text-Only if You’re Emailing BellSouth Names

This story was part of the EmailSherpa newsletter from MarketingSherpa

This is a must-read if you are emailing to BellSouth addresses. Just this week, we at MarketingSherpa learned that around 400 of our newsletter subscribers who use BellSouth haven’t been receiving our emails.

Evidently, the ISP modified its filtering system in January — because, after suspecting something was fishy with our recent open rates, we ran a series of tests with our ESP, ExactTarget, and discovered that text-only messages were the ONLY types getting through. In fact, not even emails being converted from HTML to text with a multipart MIME detecting system will land in a BellSouth inbox.

So, you need to immediately do what we did: get on the phone with your ESP to segment your BellSouth customers and start sending them text-only.

What else does this small-but-useful story tell us? First, you cannot rely solely on your deliverability reports — because they really only tell you about hard bounces. Click this hotlink for charts chock full of deliverability info: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/images/bg-b2b-delivery.gif

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