Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

A breakthrough for Email Marketers may have been achived today when Gmail Labs launched “YouTube previews in mail“.  Once activated in Labs, Gmail automatically detect YouTube links in emails and displays previews with the ability to view the entire video below the message. Also included in this roll-out were Picasa and Flickr links, and Yelp reviews.  I took a few screenshots of YouTube video links in personal emails to my Gmail below:

Preview

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Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, according to a new Nielsen report “Global Faces and Networked Places. From December ‘07 through December ‘08, Facebook added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million), according to the report.  What does this mean for Email Marketing? If two-thirds of your list is on Facebook, you need to give them tools in your email campaigns to share content so you can leverage the growing audience and gain more visibility for your content – and potentially more subscribers and conversions. (This is being referred to now as SWYN (Share with your Network), which is the worst acronym possibly ever.) Let’s take a look at how you can start to integrate Facebook into your campaigns.

Share Links from Email to Facebook

For your content to be shared on Facebook, you need to use the “Share” url they have created.  By using this, it will create a preview of the content, which can then be posted to a profile or sent as a direct message.

Copy and paste the following line of code into your email and replace <url> with the link you want to Share.

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<url>

Here is an example of the process from the Thrillist, an über-hip daily email.  Here is the social toolbar from the email, located below the content.

By clicking on the , you are directed to this page at Facebook, which creates a preview with optional image selections from the page URL provided, which in this case is the link to the post on the site, which is identical to the content from the email.

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Logitech is not what you would think when you consider cutting edge campaigns, but I was pleasantly surprised when got the email, even more when I saw the site, then it fell apart.

The Email
Solid creative, a great subject line, and good use of best practices (even though the whole email is images). The call to action at the top works great in the preview pane. The branding of “Remote Disasters” is solid – it does not make me feel like you are selling me something. The call to action to pass along to a friend is clearly either the agency’s or Logitech’s poor attempt at viral.

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Well this site moved in at the speed of light and brought us into a new tech platform from KickApps in NYC. These guys let us use the back end of their system to build out a custom User Generated Content/Social Video site for Widmer Brewing. The video and design from Sasquatch Advertising who is their agency of record. (We just got to chop it up, style the design elements and mess with endless code that we had never seen) It was a fun project to work on and a good learning curve for a new project which rolled in last Thursday from HBO/Cinemax for a new series show that starts June 1st. (Yeah that gives about 3 weeks to knock it out of the park) Can’t tell you much more than that now, but it is going to be saucy and use social video and user generated content. (And has to do with Las Vegas, beautiful people and steamy plotlines.)

I would love for you to take a look at the LemonYourWidmer site as the videos we loaded it with to start it off sure are a lot of fun. AND believe it or not 100% legitimate. After you see the golf chip shot (which took only 10 takes) you will know what I am talking about. If you have an idea of how to Lemon your Widmer, shoot it and load it up.

And of course it uses emailROI to power the front page Send to a Friend functions with a custom HMTL email template.

If you think of eROI as just an email ESP, you are missing the other 40% of our business: campaign sites, blogs, DM PIN campaigns, corporate sites, Web 2.0 application builds and advergames.

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

Now we can take this down the path of “Viral Email Marketing” but in essence this was a simple campaign Nike used to drive awareness through online word of mouth to new people that might not be subscribed to the Nike.com emails. You would think that anyone in the Portland area (where Nike is HDQ’d) would be subscribers, but I am sure they are not. Not everyone, to Nike’s discontent, is a fan or user of the Swoosh.

But as a fan of the brand and what they are doing with their understanding of online campaigns, I found this to be a well executed camaign. I even found myself clicking through to see if I needed a pair of these new Techno shoes to join Sunyi on her 3 mile a month challenge. (we could all use them with the rain, snow and indoor lockdown we are currently in… how many walks from her desk to mine would it take to hit 3 miles? Guess it depends on the week’s work load)

Think about what you can do to create some interesting ways to drive your subscriber base to share your messages and help increase the reach of your campaigns. We believe in ALWAYS adding send to friend capabilities in any campaign site or even web site for that matter as you never know who will help to drive your goals. After all Time Magazine named “YOU” as the person of the year.

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Many times we see a simple button or link in emails or web pages driving people to a vanilla form to pass on an email. Ideal Bite, a favorite of mine, does a great job tying in the site/brand experience into the viral email element. Think about your own viral elements and incorporate them into your site/brand look and feel. You will only see a better lift in your list growth through your Fans.

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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

The possibilities are enough to make a marketer’s mouth water.

The ubiquity of e-mail, among marketers and Internet users, has created a take-it-for-granted attitude that detracts from its actual power. But with 90% of Internet users

Below is an email I recieved from MediaPost’s Email Insider this morning and is worth a read. Everyone wants their campaign to go “viral” but it is not the easiest thing to accomplish. It is also hard to gauge the effect on ROI.

I would be interested in knowing your thoughts on what gives an email “viral-ness” (is that a word?) I think it has to be one of four things:

1.) “laugh out loud” funny
2.) have really good looking people in it
3.) an unbeatable offer or discount
4.) just plain bizarre

Marketers Still Struggling With Viral Strategies
by Erik Sass, Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Major marketers are still coming to grips with viral marketing, it became clear over the first two days of MediaPost’s E-mail Insider Summit. In part that’s simply because viral marketing hasn’t yet produced a large enough return on investment to get execs’ attention.

It’s not for a lack of metrics, according to Syd Jones, senior manager of worldwide demand generation e-marketing for IBM: “One of our marketers has patented a viral marketing method that includes tracking of forwards to the second, the third, the fourth [recipient], that’s actually quite powerful.” Nonetheless, Jones said, “right now it’s a bit of an education among our campaign owners and campaign shapers, because unfortunately it’s still relatively new to them.”

In the same vein, Tim Dolan, vice president of marketing for Return Path, noted: “One of the things we as an organization have struggled with is the potential of ‘tell a friend,’ versus its actual value.” Dolan went on: “‘Tell a friend’ is one of those things where everyone has aspired to achieve great results, but I don’t know how many people actually see that… We’re still working on that.”

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