Let me put some scenarios on the table to give you some real world examples of challenges I have been facing in some recent work with a retailer.

1. Your customer opts in from your site. First time here and they subscribe to your newsletter. They want to simply get your newsletter about alerts and deals. Easy and done.

2. They buy some merchandise from you and at the checkout, since you had the box checked (bad idea) they opted in again to your newsletter through your store. Simple enough as I am sure you would not duplicate the opt in as you already have that record and relationship in place. Or do you. Best idea here is to flag the change in record date and location of subscription again OR at least have a data point in your subscriber record to reflect this secondary opt in. Also at risk here depending on how you have your welcome stream set up is triggering: another double opt in message, not letting them know that they are already subscribed and maybe pointing them in another direction for something else to subscribe to (hey maybe a customer communications preference center?), or making sure that you do not start your welcome or email customer lifecycle string again and quickly make yourself look foolish. Okay easy to handle.

3. They come to your store and your clerk asks them for their email address (that I assume you just want to append the customer record in your CRM to the merchandise that they purchased and the location) that you add to your file. Hope you remember the examples I gave in the 2nd one above as all of those could happen again here.

4. They are on their mobile device and text in to subscribe to something you are doing for a mobile contest. Ready, the shampoo effect here of lather, rinse, repeat of the examples above.

OK here is the kicker. What happens in between any of these steps when they opt out and then proceed to any one of the examples later? Are you welcoming them back? Do you know? Do you have a new string of a re-welcome email or do you just turn a blind eye to it as you were not prepared for this and don’t have programs in place to think about this?

Do you care?

What throws all of this for a loop and can cause so many issues are that there are 15 other scenarios I have played with from partners, contests, product registration etc that can really make things ugly.

Where does opt in start and end and then begin again? AND do you have your systems set up to handle this?

Many of the clients that I have worked with have not thought about any of this and stare blankly at me when I walk through the big list that I have accumulated from real world projects i have worked on over the past years. I can tell you that it can be a data nightmare and an even bigger nightmare for the customer or you if you are dealing with a spam complaint from any ISP.

These are the things that keep me up and night thinking about how silos keep us all from having one hell of a job that most normal people not in this space ever confront, realize of can comprehend.

Time to audit your own programs, make a flow chart, hell draw it on a piece os scrap paper or a white board and see just how many places you are set up to not deliver the right program. It might shock you to find all of this out.

But look, I have been there as have many 1000s of other people and you can work through it. Knowing about it is the first step in making a plan. Good luck.

Many of you might have used simple things like Evite or EventBrite and those have a place out there, but what they don’t have is the APIs and the ability for a team to rapidly build, write business rules, apply theming, and deploy and event for a company or group in little time that does not feel like someone else’s site. Those have always been my personal dislikes of these event software applications, the non-ability to make it mine. After all it is my event and my brand, not that of the provider that throws ads, upsells and data collection in place that does not benefit me but them. And with eROI Event you even get open data exporting to take the data you collect into your own systems, CRM, ESP or something as simple as Excel if that is what you need. It’s yours not ours and you have control at your fingertips. Take a look at all the features here.

We are releasing it to anyone that wants it in a no cost version that has many of the abilities that you will need to construct custom events for your company, your personal event or even an event for your business that needs to be sent (yes here comes the email side) to drive registrations to an in person or online event. Simple. But we did not stop there. The system even allows you to build custom themed emails that are automatically triggered to your registrants under the same theme as your events. Yep no more email from other brands to your customers or friend. Genius right and completely worth the no cost involved.

But you can go the low monthly cost route and get even more abilities like payment gateway interface to allow you to process transactions, sell tickets etc into your already existing payment system - not ours, and unlimited data fields to enable you to build any custom event you might dream of. We also add some very cool revenue reporting systems so that you can really dig deep into what is going on with your events and help you make decisions around your promotion ideas around them to get SOLD OUT.

Stay tuned as we are hard at work in this release building new features and expanding the road map to allow this platform to become even more powerful for everyone to use.

As a quick example of the party we are having at eROI this Friday for our team Ryan posted about the whole creation of the event and how easy it was to do it. You can read it over on his blog here.

Anyone that wants an account of their own to use and try out is free to grab one and give it a spin. Let us know your thoughts and help us to develop this new tool into something that will be a powerful new event marketing on demand software application for all.

Now how hard was this? Not too terribly difficult from speaking to them. It was something that was readily available and already being produced in the digital publications they worked on every day. So why not leverage what already exists and use it as a source of compelling content to share and drive engagement and exposure for not only their clients but for themselves.

The great part about this idea is that it completely maps back to the business goals… selling digital magazines and publications. WIN.

It makes me think about all of the clients we work with that might have existing content that they don’t realize they might be able to use, driving down the cost of campaign creation and mapping back to success. Are you blogging, Tweeting, posting, writing, uploading images, videos etc in your other business units and marketing activities? If so are you making sure that the time spent doing all of these things are being utilized and exposing them to the fullest in your audiences? So many times I see companies all working hard on siloed content that is only being used by certain teams and being shared with specific people. Why not think bigger and think about how you can share this content across relevant segments of your markets? Who knows you might just stumble on a gem of a email marketing program and end up boosting the bottom line not only of your team but of the company as a whole.

Get out and take stock of what you are doing and what you are producing to see if you too can benefit from content in your companies already existing tasks.

Simply enough right?

Well no. What happened was a major let down to me. They wanted me to create an account. Last thing I checked I was just signing up for some newsletters to come to my inbox and not thinking I needed a full blown account to do so. Quite a disconnect IMHO. Well one good thing they had going on was using Facebook Connect to log me in. But yet this did not solve the problem of signing up for the newsletters. It was only to log me in temporarily into the site. Although I am a BIG fan of using Facebook Connect for the log in ability (we use it on many eROI client sites now) it did not close the loop of getting me registered for newsletters.

These are two different beasts and they lost me here. Now being someone that lives in this world I would assume that the average user would be even more confused as to why they had to jump through so many hoops by taking so many steps just to opt in. My point of sharing this example with you is that you need to be clear when you set expectations from a call out to opt in. Give them the experience that they know and expect or you will lose the conversion to your goal.

As for me, I guess I will just opt for the RSS feed into my mailbox and check things as I remember to. I will be checking back in to see if they make changes to this later on as I hope that they are paying attention to conversions down this critical path.

It made me write it down to look at later and see if I could find any correlation between the two. It made sense due to the fact that you were top of mind in the hours, days or week after getting the attention of someone in the inbox. Now they might have not had time to take action on the email but there is sure to be some latent impact to search traffic afterward.

I set out to investigate timing of search traffic against sends in our own and some of our client campaigns that I have site analytics access. So what did I find? Well I did see an increase in each of the accounts for a 3-5 day period after a major campaign deployment. But note that in most of the campaigns that were segmented and targeted drops and not large newsletter pushes there was less of an impact on direct paid search lift, but still enough to warrant some additional thought about it.

Not that I would want to drive any new costs in PPC towards a campaign cost, but if it exists we need to start taking it into consideration when we are planning future campaigns. It was, until now, a hidden cost in my mind that I had not thought of nor noticed a direct tie between. Now knowing this I am thinking a little different not about email marketing, but about the timing of ads and ad spend in search during these times. If you can plan for it you might be able to actually make a larger impact on the overall campaign conversion goals by managing your search terms, keywords and ad copy used.

I leave you with this thought to go explore for yourself and see if there is a way that you can leverage this in your own campaign planning. If you can be using great landing pages tied to the paid search terms that are reflective of the email campaign creative, calls to action or offers you might just close that loop.

I was happy to see an eROI client take this to task with the updating of their daily news email recently. In applying some simple techniques of colors, boxes, headline copy sizes and the addition of some images it is now such a better experience. What really made an impact to me was the division of information/content in the changes. I can now easily scan and make decisions based on what is important in this email.

Here is the old version - notice how the entire email feels like one big article with no clear presentation of information and calls to action.

With a little care and following of some best practices in email design they have transformed the experience to now be one that is engaging, easy to read, sets up content blocks and uses colors to drive the eye in and out of article. It really makes me want to read more now as I know what is in the newsletter.

I love this idea as so many of us think that we know the best way to do everything. I took a few tests on this site and I can tell you I was not 100% in my gut answers. I missed some based on what I thought would have been the best test. That was refreshing not only to know that my gut is not always right, but that I was educated after my guess as to why one test out performed another.

It led me to think more about the importance of testing as what we “know” is not always what works best. It hammers home the fact that if we are not testing we might not get the best result. Sure we might have good results with our campaigns, but if we are not challenging our own concepts of perfect execution than we might be missing out on a a significant lift or impact to our campaigns.

Thanks Anne for popping back onto the old interweb and giving us a place to learn in an interactive manner and test what we “know”. I am looking forward to seeing what weekly tests are up next to help me and our clients at eROI.

What some people might immediate feel about this creative though is that it is ALL image based. So little copy that what happens if images are blocked? I agree on this point, but since I did not have my images off nor did I have this coming to an inbox that blocks images I cannot tell you if they had alternate versions set up to render differently in email clients with different settings.

But what I do know is that the visual presentation was enough to make me want to read down to the bottom of the email. It is simple, well organized and easy to navigate. Even the “footer” area with the city names were great links to “save” my scroll and incent me to explore the cities that I travel to often in order to see what might be of interest to me on my next trip.

Why do colors matter to drive action? Well they make us take notice of action. Anne Holland shows us this in a recent test she ran that might help you understand why. I encourage you to try bringing more “life” to your emails and the experience that color brings to action.

June 25 (SFO), June 29 (PDX), July 1 (SEA) - yes we live by airport codes now.

Designing Your Email Program From Online Outreach to the Welcome Message

So often the basics are missed at creating an experience from the point of engagement of your email practices to the relationship building process. Come learn about how to properly set expectations, develop relationships, and onboard your new subscribers in order to maximize the efforts your online search, campaigns and programs deliver to your online marketing efforts. Learn from real world examples from leading consumer and business to business companies that are doing it right.

You can find Alex Williams in SEA and PDX and Dylan Boyd (me) in SFO. Love to see you there.

Other events we know of through the summer months will be close to home in PDX. In the fall we will be jumping back on the road so stay tuned if you want to meet up with our team.

Smith and Hawken did just this in their recent campaign from this past week by using the top of the email real estate to tell subscribers thanks while at the same time not only giving them access to save through this email campaign, but using it to extend an offer that lives through the whole month of June. Why do I like this? Well we often use email campaigns to present an offer that is focused on just this specific campaign, leaving people to trash it if they are not interested at this exact moment. But using the whole month as an extension of this one email campaign provides a way for people to keep this email available.

You might not be in “market” today but the idea that you might anytime in a month is a good way to increase the value of the offer. Not only on one purchase but on anything you decide you might want to get over a 30 day period. Smart.

I also love the subject line as from tests I have tried the numeric list (10 things) seems to tell people that there might be something of value besides just the one offer.

Try to think of new ways that you can extend the value of your campaigns past NOW while at the same time making it feel more important by thanking them at the same time. Well executed.