Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

Here it is, your May Email Marketing Idea Calendar. May is interesting month for marketers. The sun is coming out, people are starting to plan vacations and think about having fun. What a perfect time to establish a good season-long relationship with your subscribers. Time to brighten things up in your emails and have some fun with campaign ideas and creative.

Below is a list of holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in May and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.

Saturday May 1st – Kentucky Derby

The “Greatest Two Minutes in Sports.”  Talk about an event rich in tradition! Roses, Mint Juleps, fancy hats, bottles of milk – the list goes on and on.

Tuesday May 4th – National Teacher Day

On National Teacher Day, thousands of communities take time to honor their local educators and acknowledge the crucial role teachers play in our society. Giving a discount code or special for teachers would be a nice touch. Or perhaps a gift campaign to allow your subscribers to purchase something for the teacher in their life.

Wednesday May 5th – Cinco De Mayo

If you sell goods or services, think buy 5 get one free, $5.00 off, 10% off all products that end in 5… you see what I am getting at. If you are a destination, Americans are always looking for a reason to go out and party. Why not celebrate Cinco de Mayo at your establishment or event. Make sure you get it on their radar a few days in advance, then send a reminder early on Monday.

Thursday May 6th – International No Diet Day

KFC, there has never been a better day to promote the “Double Down“!

Sunday May 9th – Mother’s Day

A holiday that needs no explanation, it’s for Mom. But how do you stand out in a crowded inbox? (more…)

Here it is, your April Email Marketing Calendar. April is an interesting month. From April Fools to Tax Day to Earth Day, the emotions run the gamut.

Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in April and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.

Thursday April 1st – April Fool’s Day

April Fool’s Day is the one day of the year you have free reign to play practical jokes and pranks on family, friends, coworkers, and most importantly your email subscribers. I will warn you, this is very dependent on your product or service. If your content is heavy and serious, you will want to consider whether a joke is appropriate. On the other hand, it may be the perfect opportunity for you to loosen up your tie and connect with subscribers on a different level.

Sunday, April 4th – Easter Sunday

The nice thing about Easter is that you have multiple angles you can work from a marketing standpoint. Easter bunny, Easter eggs, Easter basket, etc… One idea to consider is to add a hidden element to your email layout, which is essentially a hidden item that is only accessible by discovering a hidden link (known as an “Easter Egg”). Since users don’t typically spend a great deal of time with an email, you need to make sure the hover isn’t to difficult to locate – think 20x by 20x pixels instead of 5px by 5px.

Wednesday, April 7th – No Housework Day

Think of all the great products, services and locations that can be enjoyed instead of housework. Procrastinators world-wide will rejoice with your No Housework Day special!

Monday, April 12th – Walk On Your Wild Side Day

Push your edgy content on Walk On Your Wild Side Day. Some fun creative of your staff or some of your more eccentric content will do the trick. Lou Reed approves.

Thursday, April 15th – Tax Day

For the procrastinators out there, April 15th might not be the day. It might be the 16th, after a good night of sleep and dreams of refund or less worry about payment just paid. If you want your subscribers to blow off some steam and celebrate, it might be interesting to A/B split the 15th & 16th and see what works best for future campaigns. Stay away from politics and focus on the value your content of offer provides.

Friday, April 16th – High Five Day

National High Five Day originated at the University of Virginia in 2002, and has since spread across the globe. Anything and everything can be high-fived, and gives a perfect opportunity to focus on the social/viral side. The official website gives some great ideas. Can you adapt them to your email?

Monday, April 19th – National Hanging Out Day

The goal of this holiday is not to sit on a couch, it’s to educate communities about energy consumption. National Hanging Out Day was created to demonstrate how it is possible to save money and energy by using a clothesline. Can you come up with a list of ways to save energy with your product or service? If not, maybe just in general?

Thursday, April 22nd – Earth Day

This year is the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, and a chance to provide the tools and structure for individuals and organizations to organize around environmental issues. The official website offers ideas and tips to take action.

Wednesday, April 21st – Administrative Professionals Day

We all know how important the administrative professional is, don’t we?  Celebrate them, empower them, reward them, or spoof them (in a fun way). Think about your list…how many of them consider themselves “Administrative Professionals”?

Last Friday in April - National Arbor Day

You can find the official date for your state here. Continuing on the environmental kick in April, how do you reward your subscribers for planting a tree?  How can we prove that they did it?  Easy: through user-generated content on Flickr, Twitpic, YouTube, etc. Sounds like a perfect chance to seed a social campaign through email!

See you next month for the May Email Marketing Calendar… in April.

Here it is, your March Email Marketing Calendar.

Below is a list of real holidays, wacky holidays, and pop culture events in March and ideas you can utilize to develop timely and relevant email marketing campaigns.

Tuesday, March 2nd: Read Across America Day – Dr. Seuss’ Birthday

It doesn’t have to be a book does it? How about blog posts, white papers, or customer reviews?

Thursday March 4th: March Forth – Do Something Day

I’m sure there quite a few things you have in mind for your subscribers to do, don’t you? This day is also used as a celebration of goal achievement.

Sunday March 7th: The Academy Awards aka The Oscars

Lots of folks getting together on this Sunday night, if your site or product or location can enhance their experience, get out in front of it.

Monday March 8-12: National Make a Referral Week

A perfect opportunity to ask and engage your loyal audience to refer you to their friends, write a review, or send a gift to a friend from your store or site. Make sure to make the process easy using forms or social sites. The official hashtag on Twitter for the week is #marw10.

Wednesday, March 17th: St. Patrick’s Day

Green Email. ‘Nuff said. (more…)

For the last Tip Jar Podcast of 2009, I had the pleasure of talking with Dave Delaney, Social Media Coordinator of Griffin Technology (the company that makes those killer gadgets your iPhone, iPod, Blackberry, Stereo, etc…).

I met Dave at SXSW last year and jumped on all of Griffin’s social media streams. I have been really impressed with how they run their Social Media efforts, so I thought having Dave on the Tip Jar would be a good opportunity to take a look inside how a Consumer Product company like Griffin got into Social Media and how Dave keeps up with and manages the community and voice of the company on the web. Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Griffin is on the road to CES right now in a bright Orange VW bus for their CES Bound campaign. Keep an eye out!

You can follow Dave on Twitter at @griffintech

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I had the pleasure of speaking to an energetic AMA audience yesterday with David Veneski from Intel (@dveneski) at an event called “Tweetshop”.

The event gave all levels of Twitter users some perspective from both a client-side marketer and an agency marketer. With a topic as expansive as Twitter, an hour was tough to meet everyone’s expectations.  We probably could have spent all day!

Here are David’s slides from the event. (download) He covers a lot of good points here, including demographic and usage stats, suggested apps and tools, and corporate social media strategy. Intel has 850 social media practitioners representing the brand – enough said!

I have also curated a list of what I believe are great Twitter resources for marketers of all levels:

Start Reading – Mashable’s Twitter Lists, Resources & How-Tos

Mashable is a Social Media blog that is definitely on every social media marketer’s radar.  If you are just getting started on Twitter, this site is your first stop.

Start Listening – Twitter Search

The first step in a Social Media Strategy is to start listening to the people.  What are they saying about your Company?  If they aren’t talking about your company, you can search for your product types or services.  You can also search for your competitors and gain valuable insight.

Start Following – We Follow & ExecTweets

We Follow is a directory of Twitter users organized by keyword.  If you are looking to follow top users to follow on certain topics, this will be a great resource. Another site to check out is ExecTweets, which allows you to find and follow top business execs on Twitter. You can also locate your network by searching your email contacts.  If you mainly use Outlook, a good tip is to export your contact list, then import it into a Gmail account. Once you have done that, you can enter your Gmail credentials and locate those users.

Start Engaging - 50 Content Ideas that Create Buzz

There is great post by Valeria Maltoni on the Coversation Agent blog to give you content ideas.  That are a lot of good posts here on Twitter as well, I recommend you check them out.

And one last note, just be a real person.  They call it “social” media for a reason. Don’t be afraid to let people know a little more about you.  It will go a long way towards building real relationships.

UPDATE: Oregon Business posted a recap of the event: On the Scene – Businesses take flight with Twitter

In this post I will show you how to add a custom tab to your Facebook Fan Page using the Facebook Static FBML application. The process isn’t terribly complex, so buckle down for a few minutes and we’ll bust this out. A few things you’re going to need to get started – a Facebook Fan Page and HTML opt-in form code from your ESP. (more…)

Ok, maybe that was a stretch, but this is a very important survey.  The future of email marketing is hanging in the balance. Ok, stretch again… but you can win cool stuff just for just a few minutes work.

The Use of Testing in Email Marketing Survey

At eROI, staying on top of the latest in email marketing is always a top priority. In this new email marketing survey we ask you about  ways in which you test your marketing emails.

To show our appreciation, all survey participants will be automatically entered to win a Flip Ultra camcorder or one of many Retail Gift Cards!

This survey should take just a couple minutes of your time, and we will share the results with you after we crunch the numbers.

Various studies have reported that 25%-50% of your subscribers are blocking Images in HTML emails.  So why are so many companies still sending image-only emails?

Let’s take a look at an example of both the right way and the wrong way from JetBlue Airlines.

All Image Email

Image/HTML Text Email

You can clearly see above, that a balanced email with HTML text still gets the point across, while the all image email is basically blank. So why would a company like JetBlue, or any company which knows the best practice way to do it, still send an all-image email? Here are two reasons this happens: (more…)

The goal of the eROI Resource Center is to provide best practices, case studies of client work, informative survey results, and fresh ideas to the online marketing community.  We want everyone to market more effectively, client or non-client. 

I thought I would share with you today the 5 most downloaded resources in 2008.

1.) Wacom “Power of the Pens” case study
2.) Email Marketing Guide
3.) Pre-Launch Email Marketing Cheat Sheet
4.) Cradle & Grave Email Marketing Survey Results (Q2 ‘08)
5.) Elements of Email Marketing Survey Results (Q3 ‘08)

Have you signed up for the Resource Center yet? Tell ‘em Return on Subscriber sent you!