Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

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!