Archive: November 2010
Meet our Portland medal winners
At our Portland launch party this month, we created a special set of our Emma medals that we like to hand out to customers and friends now and then — this new set features Portland-centric themes such as Hopheadedness, Puddlewonderfulness, Open Sourcery and Pedalocity. Then we asked party-goers to nominate their own medal ideas, and they wowed us with topics ranging from Portland’s hipster scene to our local vineyards. We’re awarding the winner $500 to donate to a local non-profit.
Meet our medal winner and the two runners-up:
Rachel, admirer of trees.
Rachel Wilson took the cake with Tree Huggery, calling to mind Portland’s green landscape and love of all things outdoorsy. Rachel is a three-year resident of Portland and lives in St. Johns with her husband and dog, Digby. She’s donating her winnings to the Special Education department at George Middle School in North Portland, where she is a teacher.
Max, devotee of bacon.
Max Kirchoff, pictured with his pup, Godzilla, is a web developer who’s making a foray into winemaking. His medal idea gave a nod to Portland’s pride in all things bacon, thus earning him our runner-up spot. Max is also an avid biker and runs Trees By Bike here in town.
Mike, Team Skinny Jeans.
Mike Paccione, our second runner-up, gave us a chuckle with his mention of the city’s proclivity for skinny jeans. Mike’s daily bike commute drops him off at the Art Institute of Portland, where he is the Alumni Coordinator, and twice a week at Portland State, where he teaches public speaking.
Thank you, Portland, for participating and partying with us in the bside6 building.
5 Emma customers & their holiday campaigns
The holidays will be here and gone before you know it, but that doesn’t mean you have to let them pass you by without planning your email strategy. It’s true that a little holiday planning goes a long way. Take a look at these five Emma customers and how their past holiday emails have supported their brands and creative goals. And they’ve even had some fun along the way!
+ HeyDay sends holiday gift guides.
HeyDay, a lifestyle and home decor store in Bozeman, Montana, began sending Emma campaigns in 2008 to about 500 customers. By this fall, their list had more than tripled in size, and they now send monthly newsletters and special promotions to roughly 1,700 subscribers.
Last year, they saw traction with a series of spirited holiday gift guides. Forgoing traditional holiday colors, the guides instead featured their brand colors — lime green and powder blue — and an assortment of colorful gifts. Gift Guide #1, sent on December 1st, presented quirky hostess gifts, and Gift Guide #2 on the 8th featured whimsical gifts for children. Their third Gift Guide, sent on December 15th, offered 20% off any purchase and highlighted affordable stocking stuffers.
The appeal of HeyDay’s holiday gift guides is in the unexpected — not just in the appearance of the guides but also the unconventional gifts.
In short: Holiday gift guides can break the traditional mold. Find a format that’s true to your brand and products. And remember to stagger sending times — a few days to a week apart — so that your subscribers’ inboxes aren’t inundated with too much mail.
Visit their website
View their gift guides for all occasions
+ Folks at Prince Market Research poke fun at themselves.
Prince Market Research in Nashville, Tennessee, is a research firm that helps clients analyze and improve their brand, products and customer communications. Emails from a group of researchers are going to be serious business, right? Not always, according to the researchers at PMR. They’ve got a sense of humor and don’t mind being silly.
Check out their 2008 holiday campaign — that’s a fine-looking bunch of “know” men and women. Their 2009 holiday campaign adopted the same antics, this time featuring researchers that jingle-bell-rock.
Their holiday campaigns saw open rates 3-8% higher than their regular send-outs. You’ve got to wonder … what will they cameo as this year?
In short: Enjoy your holiday campaigns as much as your subscribers. Have fun creating them, and encourage participation from a team of colleagues.
Visit their website
Meet the researchers
+ Rosy Rings offers a special holiday discount to email subscribers.
Rosy Rings is a by-hand candle-making company in Denver. Their story goes back 13 years, and they started using Emma about three years ago. With a loyal fan base and timely emails, they’ve had a consistent 30%+ open rate since they began sending. And they’ve set up trigger emails that are enjoying an incredible 70% open rate.
Receiving special email offers is one of the perks of subscribing. Last year’s holiday campaign — a slice and dice created by an Emma designer — offered subscribers a 10% discount on holiday purchases. Sent on December 18, it served as a last-minute reminder to holiday shoppers.
In short: Offer your audience members something special this holiday season. They’ll want to continue receiving — and reading — your emails if there’s an advantage to being a subscriber.
Visit their website
Sign up to receive their newsletters
+ KUSC sends a Christmas-themed newsletter.
Classical KUSC, out of Southern California, is the largest public radio and nonprofit classical music station in the country. As such, they don’t do anything small, including their holiday campaigns.
Their December 2009 campaign was created on a custom stationery designed by Emma’s Jennifer Kasdorf, and each section — from a harpist’s concert to a choral show to a Mexican Baroque concert — supports the Christmas theme. They also included a ticket giveaway for their Salute to Vienna concert.
In short: Whatever your company type, consider building a campaign with holiday-themed stories. Include holiday-inspired pictures, links to your favorite songs or sites, and news about what your organization is doing to celebrate the season. You’ll win points with your fans for sharing in the festive spirit and thinking outside of the box.
Visit their website
Check out upcoming concerts
+ Valley Metro kicks off the new year.
Valley Metro provides public light rail and bus transportation for the greater Phoenix metro area. They started sending email through Emma in early 2009 and have since sent more than 200 campaigns to their list of subscribers.
In January of this year, they sent a series of New Year’s campaigns, playing with the idea of new year’s resolutions and how they might relate to riding Valley Metro. Check out the first campaign here, which gained an open rate of 37% and click-through rate of 19%. The second campaign in the series was just as popular, with an open rate of 38% and an 18% click-through rate.
In short: If you miss — or choose to bypass — the December holidays, think about sending a campaign to usher in the new year. It’s a great time to offer a new start to your subscribers and to freshen up your email strategy.
Are you in the holiday spirit? We hope these few examples will help you on your way to stylish holiday emails this year. If you have any ideas that you’d like to share, by all means, let us know.
Emma throws a party in Portland
Open Sourcery Queen Selena Deckelmann helps navigate the medal contest with a drink and a smile.
We officially launched our West Coast office with a bunch of friends and customers.
It seemed like high time to celebrate our second-largest Emma office, so we threw a party last week in this bike-riding, beer-loving, tree-hugging city of Portland that we’re lucky enough to call home.
Granted, we’ve been in Portland since 2007, but we like to build something and then celebrate it, not the other way around. This was our big chance to throw open the doors and celebrate all the businesses and organizations that help make this an Emma town, and the party was a hit.
Our friends turned out in droves, and some of them like Ruby Jewel even brought us cool presents like bags of handmade salted chocolate ice cream sandwiches. Yes, it’s true. We have the best clients ever.
Over gorgeous hors d’oeuvres from Simpatica, local Oregon wines and a keg of IPA from local brewmasters Hopworks, we lit up the night. We had such a good turnout that the keg was tapped by 9:00 PM. Party foul, we know, but a spur-of-the-moment beer run ensued to keep the hop-heads happy. The party kept rocking until midnight.
To spotlight all the things we love about Portland, we created a special set of our Emma medals, which are trinkets we like to hand out now and then. While our usual medals tout things like general awesomeness, we crafted medals for the party using Portland themes that touch on the city’s vibrant cycling culture, the love of well-crafted beer, the rainy weather and the thriving open source community.
Behind the screen, Emma's Matt Thackston gives Cristine Norine a tour of the party.
We even opened up the floor for party participants to create nominees for their own favorite Portland-themed medal, and we’re awarding the winner $500 to donate to the local non-profit of their choice.
Another party highlight was Cristin Norine’s presence. She’s a neighbor in our building (the BSIDE6 project), and she’s living in a glass room gallery space in November to explore themes about how we communicate with each other in this Internet age. Guests were able to chat with her on Skype.
In short, last Thursday felt like the ultimate coming out party. We felt like the debutante at the ball, and we only have one thing to say: Thank you, Portland. We’re so glad to be part of this amazing town.
Photo credits: Aaron Hockley
Navigating the new email landscape
Three tips for keeping up with email industry trends like Gmail’s much-talked-about Priority Inbox.
If you’ve been an Emma client or an active email marketer for a while, you’ve probably got a pretty solid group of customers receiving your campaigns by now. In an email utopia, they’d all be opening and clicking everything you put in front of them, hanging on your every sentence. But if the industry averages published by people like the Email Stats Center are to be trusted, it doesn’t really happen like that. A double-digit click through rate makes you some kind of email marketing superhero.
So are your recipients just not that into you? Or are their mailboxes so full of marketing messages that you’re lost in the shuffle? Email providers like Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo seem to think it’s the latter, and all three are trying to do something about it.
Yahoo partner OtherInbox created Spring, an add-on application for Yahoo Mail that automatically sorts and files marketing messages into pre-defined folders. Microsoft quickly followed suit by introducing Sweep, a function that allows you to choose what you want to read and then sweep the rest out of your inbox and into folders of your choice. And of course, Gmail released Priority Inbox — and typical of Google’s overall ingenuity, there’s a new wrinkle. They’re actually looking at Gmail users’ interaction with the mail they receive and making some assumptions about what’s really important to that person.
So what does this mean for you, fearless reader? Well, in short: It’s time to get to know your audience better than you ever have before. Internet Service Providers are watching you – how you send, who you send to and what they do with your messages. It’s time for you to dig into those response results and craft a thoughtful plan to reward your engaged audience members and re-engage those you may have lost on the way.
Don’t know where to start? Here are a few tips.
1. Welcome new audience members. Starting on the right foot in any relationship is a good thing. Make sure your subscribers remember why they signed up and why your emails will be important to them in the future. You can read more about welcome trigger emails right here on the blog.
2. Reward your most faithful readership. Say thanks for the support that these recipients have given you. Keeping these most engaged members happy, opening and clicking makes for good-looking response results and helps you maintain a good sending reputation.
3. Learn to let go. Sometimes, it’s just necessary. Search for people who haven’t opened or clicked in the last six months and send them an opt-in confirmation email. (Here’s how.) Let them know that you still want them around, but that you also want to respect their wishes if they decide not to receive your emails any longer. Those members who confirm their opt-in are reengaged and more aware of you than ever. Then you can remove the ones who choose not to confirm — and with them, you’ll be removing a part of your audience that’s dragging down your response numbers and potentially hurting your sending reputation.
If you need help getting started, just let us know — and don’t forget to take a look at our Help section, full of tips for becoming a well-informed, responsible email marketer. If you’re sitting there thinking “I’ve been doing this all along,” feel free to share your story with us in the comment section.
The art of the short (holiday) email
Try short emails that your audience can read on a smart phone.
As a savvy marketer, you know how important it is to send targeted, relevant emails, especially as the holidays approach. You know that a well-timed email alert to that new product line or sale can really drive your numbers. (It’s not called “Black Friday” for nothing.) And no matter what your business or organization specializes in, you know how important it is to stay in front of your audience toward the end of the year.
Luckily, you also see the other side of the story because you’re a consumer, too. Even as the daylight hours grow shorter and your to-do list grows longer, you’re still likely interested in hearing from your favorite brands. (And you might even be planning to pay attention to the sale emails to assist you with the holiday mall stampede crawl.)
Still, the fact remains: Toward the end of the year, you’re a little too busy to give the same amount of attention you normally would to each email in your inbox. Perhaps making a special, non-fat, gluten-free, vegan pumpkin pie for your picky sister-in-law is taking precedence over the shoe sale or non-profit request calling from your inbox. And your own email marketing audience is facing similar challenges.
So what to do? You embrace the art of the short, mobile-friendly email, that’s what. Create a campaign that’s easy to read on-the-go.
Here’s how.
- Keep your message simple. One large, obvious call-to-action will do better than multiple, smaller links.
- Keep your message short — ideally, with no scrolling. It’s a challenge, but it will be far more effective with busy recipients who only pay attention to your email for a few seconds before choosing how to proceed.
- Keep your message narrow. If you have some flexibility, try keeping your campaigns no wider than 600px.
If you want to get fancy, consider fitting your campaign within the general mobile phone screen ratios. For example, the iPhone has dimensions of 2:3 width to height, the early Droid is 3:4, and some blackberries are 1:1. What does that mean for you? Don’t make the height of the campaign much longer than the width (if at all), and make the font legible on a small screen.
One last trick is to give your subscribers a chance to tell you, “Thanks, but not right now.” Email has a distinct advantage over some other marketing channels because you can respond to exactly what your subscribers ask for. Add a button to the campaign that says “remind me in three days,” and use the list of clicks on that link to send a follow-up reminder.
Good luck reaching those busy consumers this holiday season (and even better luck finding that pumpkin pie recipe).
What to know about Facebook’s mail announcement
You may have heard that Facebook was deviously plotting the end of Gmail and others by creating an email platform of their very own. Well, we tuned into the announcement for a little more insight, and I’d like to share a few takeaways. Turns out email’s still not dead (no surprise there), but Facebook would love to be the center of the messaging experience for their 500 million users.
What it really is.
The most important thing to understand is that Facebook’s primary goal was to create a seamless messaging platform, and email is one piece of that. While it’s true that all users will have access to a new @faceboook.com email address, the goal is to fill a gap in an overall messaging system, which includes their mobile apps, instant messaging inside the application, texting and more. Email, therefore, helps round out a suite of options for communicating inside the Facebook ecosystem. (Oh, yeah — we called it an ecosystem.)
Why they built it.
They wanted to build a modern messaging system that eliminates the “friction” of traditional communication channels. In other words, they’re simplifying the notion of a conversation between two people, without restricting the channel that the message goes down. For example, let’s say I email my friend at her new Facebook.com email address. That friend happens to be logged into Facebook, so my message shows up in a chat dialog box. She responds to me in her chat window, and Facebook sends me her reply via email, since that’s where my message originated.
What does it mean?
The announcement raises some interesting questions about the future of social media and how we might integrate different forms of communication. Still, HTML emails — like the ones you send in Emma — will probably be a challenge for Facebook. There’s a lot of complexity rolled into how Facebook will decide how to route a message, so HTML seems like a difficult hurdle.
We’ll plan some serious testing to see how their filtering and sorting works. Your messages will be sorted with something similar to Google’s Priority Inbox, depending on your user preferences, so we’ll have to see what that means in terms of even getting a message into someone’s inbox, much less what folder it lives in once it’s there. It’s easy to see from the outset, though, that this system was built for users, not for marketers — all the more reason to make the content you send valuable.
They didn’t talk about fan pages at all in their announcement, so many people have questions about whether becoming a fan of a brand is the same as adding someone as a friend and how that relates to inbox sorting.
We’ll just have to keep everyone posted as they release it and we can test it more. In the meantime, we put together a graphic to help make sense of it all.
(Additional writing by Jim Hitch.)
Video tips: Holiday Email Ideas
Your friendly Emma support crew offers five solutions for your upcoming holiday email campaigns.
We know it’s a busy time of year, so we put together a video full of festive content ideas and examples – whether you’re planning a party, raising money or doing something else entirely. In fact, I’m so committed to helping out that I even put on my least favorite holiday sweater from Great Aunt Mildred for your viewing pleasure. So join Miles from our Community Relations team and watch our video (but please, don’t judge the sweater).
Video credits: Annie Parsons, Daniel Brown, Elizabeth Williams, Mary Claire Zibart, Miles Price, Trey Piepmeier.
Calling all biz dev pros in Portland: Emma’s hiring!
We love our Portland office -- the balcony offers an especially great view of the city.
We’re looking for someone in Portland to be the face of Emma to the local business community. (Spectacles and flip hairdo not required.)
Emma’s hiring a Business Development Specialist to join our office in Portland, OR, and that means we’re looking for someone who’s deeply involved in the local community of businesses, non-profits and agencies.
So what does a Business Development Specialist do, you ask? I think it’s best described as part marketing, part networking and part selling key accounts. You’ll also spend time building solid relationships with some existing local accounts. However you describe it, it means this person has his or her finger on the pulse of what’s happening in Portland.
In my similar role in Austin, I interact every day with great local brands like Sweet Leaf Tea, Alamo Drafthouse, GSD&M, Proof Advertising, Parkside Grill, Caritas Austin and dozens more. I also develop partnerships with associations such as Greenlights, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce and Ad Fed Austin. And I work with our marketing team to develop marketing and advertising partnerships with folks like KUT (Austin’s NPR affiliate), Austin Monthly Magazine, the Chronicle and SXSWinteractive.
I know. What a sweet gig, right? A day in the life of an Emma Business Developer is action-packed, and I’d say that my job is challenging, rewarding and engaging. Since Emma brings a stylish, branded solution to customers who understand and value that approach to email marketing, the position lends itself to working with some of the coolest companies around the country.
While based in Portland and focused on your own community, you’ll work on a team with other business developers around the country in cities like Nashville, Austin, New York and Denver. You’ll need to bring experience from past sales, marketing and business development roles — but it’s a learn-as-you-go environment, where you’ll be part of Emma’s entrepreneurial culture.
You’ll be able to test the waters on marketing and business development programs and ideas that you dream up. You’ll be measured on success both as an individual and as part of a team. You’ll be who we go to when we have questions like, “What do we do in the Northwest to drum up the hottest five new creative agencies and turn them into Emma customers?” or “What 10 upcoming small businesses are going to be rock-star brands in three years and how do we bring them onto our team of customers?” or “It’s Wednesday — what’s Portland Pedal Power bringing for lunch today?”
Come help us build a growing list of local brands, which already includes customers like Mabel and Zora, Ponzi, Portland Roasting, YWCA & YMCA of Greater Portland, Beast, Aha Marketing, Disjecta and Office PDX. (Of course, this list will soon include all of your favorite brands, too.)
Ready? For more details on the open Portland Business Development Specialist opportunity, and to apply, click here.
Free, festive buttons help your email campaigns give back
Let your email campaigns do some good this season with these free “donate” buttons.
If you’re a friend of Emma, chances are you’re a fan of charitable giving, community partnerships and, of course, stylish design. It’s in that spirit that we present to you a collection of snazzy “donate” buttons, designed by our own quite snazzy designers.
Download ‘em right here on the Emma blog, and upload your favorites to your holiday campaigns. You can then set up links to your favorite charity’s website, or to your own fundraising page if you’re a nonprofit.
If you’d like to help but aren’t sure who needs a hand (or a link), check out some past Emma 25 honorees who would surely appreciate some holiday love. (And until November 15, you can still help us spread the word to deserving charities about this year’s Emma 25 — we’re taking applications now.)
Not sure what to say? As always, we recommend keeping it simple, personal and concise. Try opening with a short description of the nonprofit and the reason you chose this one to highlight. Then use a call to action to ask your readers for their help.
Feel free to model your caption after this sample text:
Feeding America is a hunger-relief charity that touched our hearts with their backpack program, which helps children who need nourishment on the weekends. They would love your support this holiday season — click above to make a difference!
Ready to give a helping hand? Click here to download a zip file of these free holiday buttons and get linkin’! (Or pick your favorites from our Facebook gallery instead.)
And if you’d like to send your holiday greeting on some custom seasonal stationery, take a look at your design options.
Hugs and holiday spirit,
Your Emma Design Team
Thanks for the great ideas and congrats to our winner
We love all of your Facebook ideas, and we’re pleased to say: Congratulations, Jamie Rose … you’re our blog giveaway winner!
It’s my pleasure to announce Jamie Rose as the winner of our recent contest here on the Emma blog. She’s the proud new owner of a $100 gift card to use at Emma customer GoCoffeeGo.
All of you had such great ideas, and we’re definitely going to bring them to the table as our Facebook presence takes shape. You may see us highlight success stories from Emma clients, as Merritt requested. Or maybe we’ll focus on the ins and outs of designing more customized campaigns – Matthew, LPete, Susan and Jessica all are interested in that topic. Perhaps we’ll even include some Tom Brady trivia, just to keep things interesting for Paul and Heather and their fellow football fanatics. Or it could be that we start to share more and more about members of the Emma Community. As Jamie said, so many of them are doing wonderful things that the rest of the world would enjoy.
See what I mean? They’re all great ideas!
Thanks for playing along, everyone. We really do appreciate you putting your thinking caps on and joining our team, if just for a brief few minutes. See you next time.
Want to see more Emma customers in action? You can find customer stories on our website and also right here on the blog.
Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
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