Return On Email Subscriber

At eROI, we’re always searching the net for the latest new trends and time wasting/saving sites. Of course, we tend to search for sites that we can use for marketing purposes; however, these sites expand well beyond marketing usage. Check them out. They’re fun.

Remember Everything Save Everything (Best Application Ever)
Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.
http://www.evernote.com

Need more Chaos in your life?
Check out this site where users can post just about anything.
http://www.soup.io

Record & Tweet 12 Second Videos
If you like YouTube, check out this 12 second video site. Find creative uses for this site.http://12seconds.tv

Use for Testing Subject lines
This site predicts the success of book titles, but it can also be used to test email subject lines.
http://www.lulu.com/titlescorer/index.php

Free Digital Magazine Subscriptions
Worried about your carbon footprint? Save some trees by subscribing digitally to your favorite magazines.http://goreadgreen.com

Get Real Feedback from Peers
A great site for designers to get feedback on their campaigns from other professionals.
https://www.conceptshare.com/

Email Marketing meets Social Networking
Want to join a network of email marketers? Email Marketer’s Club has more than 1,700 of them.
http://www.emailmarketersclub.com/

Do you rent 3rd party email lists for acquisition and lead generation?  Costs are dropping.

Foliomag.com is reporting that the downturn in the economy has resulted in a downturn of CPM rates for both B2B and B2C lists:

“Permission-based e-mail b-to-b, which is the highest priced category, saw a decrease of $12 per thousand to a straight average price of $293 per thousand. The second largest price decrease occurred in the permission-based email b-to-c lists, which saw a decrease of $11 per thousand.

“The findings are extraordinary, yet not surprising, considering this is a mirror of the U.S. economic conditions,” Worldata senior vice president Ray Tesi said in a statement. “It is likely this trend will continue, at least for the next quarter or two until the U.S. economy is stabilized. We are seeing strong usage in the Technology, Small/Medium Business, and HR channels of the business-to-business category, as b-to-b marketers take advantage of this attractive pricing.”

I have seen wildly different results for email list rental campaigns. Success usually comes down to list targeting and concept execution. If one step of the process is off, you can lose the conversion and waste your money.

If you are considering renting an email list, ask for references and average metrics. If the list broker will not provide these, keep looking.

List Rental Prices See First-Ever Decline

I heard from fellow ROS author, Alex Williams, that Evernote was a great product to keep notes and access them from your iPhone, desktop, etc. So I decided to do a quick search on Google for “evernote” and found the results. The thing that jumped out at me was their PPC ad that says “Info management that’s so good our competition buys the keyword.” It is creative and confident, however it does not work well when no one else is buying the keyword…

Here at eROI we go to great lengths to keep you up to date on the latest trends in email marketing. Our latest survey asks for your input on the Subscribe/Unsubscribe Process.

This survey should take just a minute or two, and we will share the results with you when complete.

All survey participants will be automatically entered to win one of a handful of iPod Shuffle mp3 players!

Take the Survey Now

We have set up a Twitter feed for eROI to keep you posted on news, blog posts, cool things to check out, new project launches, and resourceful tidbits you can use to become awesome.

If you are not on the Twitter bandwagon yet, now is the time to jump on. Twitter is the new micro-blogging service that a lot of us at eROI love, especially Dylan.

We don’t have much up yet, but head over to our Twitter page and follow us. We’ll do the same to you.

Thanks to our friend Tamara Gielen, who posted this great video description of Twitter on the blog from the folks over at Common Craft.

Twitter in Plain English

Actually, it’s “Gold Consumer: Best Promotional Blast-Direct Sale or Lead Gen Offer” - Wacom & eROI’s 2008 Email Marketing Award from Marketing Sherpa.

Marketing Sherpa has posted all of the winners, with creative and details. You can get a lot of great ideas from these, I know I did.

Visit the “Power of the Pens” Page

See all of the Awards

We have all been at the EEC conference this last week listening to some of the top minds in email. One question that has come up a number of times over the years is whether or not you should have a dedicated IP when sending email. MarketingSherpa recently released a new paper Top 12 Email Newsletter Mistakes Nearly Everyone Makes. In this report Mistake #7: Deliverability: Content, Formatting & Lack of Self-Advocacy was to insist a dedicated IP from your ESP. This sounds great in theory, but not in practice.

Deliverability relies on a number of factors and one of them is volume. Low volume and/or sporadic volume hampers your deliverability dramatically. Since many ISPs base their blocks and temporary deferrals on complaint rate, your low volume and inconsistency of sending, albeit, dedicated could be one of the worst things you could do. All of those other senders might actually help your deliverability as long as your ESP employs best practices. So before you “insist” on a dedicated IP like MarketingSherpa says, ask your ESP if it would benefit you. Our job is to provide you with the best solution to get your email to the inbox.

We are headed to San Diego for the eec’s Email Evolution Conference. The eROI crew will be there in full force, so make sure to say hello if you see us.

Also, eROI’s Dylan Boyd will be sitting on a panel with fellow email marketing bloggers Tamara Gielen of BeRelevant, Chad White of The Retail Email Blog/EEC Blog and Maddy Hubbard of Blue Hornet. They’ll be talking about all aspects of blogging.

For those of you who won’t be there, I will be blogging about the panel session from the show. Visit www.theemailwars.com on Feb. 13 in the morning to see the play-by-play.

Below are 2 very similar emails I received that are worth taking a look at. It looks like the ESP (probably the same one) lost some data, to the extent

What I don’t understand is why the only thing to do in this email is unsubscribe or ignore. I think a “profile update” or “check your preferences” option should have been added as well.

Chad White of RetailEmail.Blogspot.com and contributing writer to the Email Insider on Media Post had a great email article yesterday that focused on simple mistakes marketers and agencies make in email. We are all guilty of a misspelled word, a link pointed to the wrong place or the wrong image. Here is a snippet of Chad’s article.

“While mistakes are pretty much inevitable, there are some processes that you can put into place to minimize them and to respond appropriately when they occur. Some tips:

1. Develop a pre-flight checklist and follow it every time.
2. One word: Spell-check.
3. View a test send in accounts from all the major email clients, or use a rendering tool to ensure consistent rendering across platforms.
4. If you make a mistake in an image, simply correct the source file.
5. Don’t resend emails that contain minor mistakes. Only resend those where the mistake has significantly impaired the message.
6. If the error is significant, see if you can halt the send. You may be able to stop your entire list from receiving the erroneous email.
7. Develop a protocol for your apology emails, so you can respond quickly when serious mistakes happen.

Let me end by saying that the best feedback I got on last year’s Oopsy Hall of Fame was from a marketer who said, “I feel so much better after seeing the mistakes that other marketers made. They make my mess-ups seem not nearly so bad.” I hope that’s how all of you feel after reading this.”

Read the full post here