eROI Blog Email Marketing News, Articles, and Strategies
Monday, February 23, 2009
Creepy Comcast
This morning I came across the recently launched Comcast campaign. Have you seen it? It's the one with lots of colors, crazy animations, bad music, and indie kids. At the end of the commercial, they display the address for their microsite, comcasttown.com. Here I can participate in the Comcast community by making my own "room", watching commercials, and even downloading sheet music to the songs. In the next coming weeks I will be able to download ringtones and play flash games. But will I want to? Out of curiosity, yes.
In all honestly, I am creeped out by this campaign and it makes me feel uncomfortable. I've never had this type of relationship with my cable provider before.
Until today, Comcast has never used any hip drone-ish people to lure me to their services. They have pulled a complete 180 from their previous commercials that once featured 40 year old sports loving dads alongside their families complimented with zooming text highlighting specials. But, I do admire how they have given fluidity to the campaign with the utilization of many different interactive mediums.
In the end, they got me to do what they wanted. . . I gave them my information and am now a citizen of Comcast Town.
As a college student I've been using Twitter for the past 2 months now and love it. At first, it was a struggle to understand what Twitter is and why I would want to use it. In the beginning, I just couldn't understand why I should micro-blog and why I should care about everyone's tweets. It got me thinking, what do my peers think about Twitter?
Over the past two months I've been casually asking my friends if they use Twitter and how they feel about it. Many of them are unaware of Twitter and those who do, either love it or hate it. Their feelings are parallel to those expressed in this video created by HackCollege. In it, they asked 101 students about Twitter:
In conducting their "informal study", they found only 25% of students knew of Twitter. How can it be that so many college kids are unaware of this hit social media? Probably because they are still occupied with Facebook. But, if you show us how to sync the two applications through the Twitter application on Facebook, you'll get us to tweet with you.
Twitter seems to be that one piece of social media that the "grown-ups" have beat us youngsters to. But don't fret, we'll catch on and be ahead of the game on the next one.
Congratulations! Someone clicked on your ad, now where are you taking them?
Hopefully, you'll take them to your kick ass landing page where they will remain engaged and you can squeeze valuable information from them such as name and email. In reality, you're probably just sending them to your homepage where they will be overwhelmed and misdirected.
Get with it, you need to create and implement an effective landing page.
I've recently come to find landing pages a very fascinating and intriguing topic. Here are a few basic landing page suggestions to ensure you are getting conversions.
Centered screen with content above the fold
A giant beautiful button with call to action on it
Navigation bar across the top of the page
A form with field boxes on the right hand side
A captivating element: free demo, flash graphics, video, or neat image
Several opt-in boxes
Simple copy
Remember, your landing page should serve as a place where visitors are taken to learn more about your services and form a relationship with you.
Over the past 4 weeks, I have been interning at eROI with the marketing department.Naturally, I’ve developed an obsession and passion for all things interactive.While my experiences have been fun and beneficial I have not noticed a change in my day to day life . . . until this past weekend.
I was busy working on writing up a quick email to promote an event for my American Marketing Association collegiate chapter at Portland State University.Suddenly, I began to worry about the dreaded, “hierarchy of messaging” in my amateur email.I started to consider the format of the message with how many lines of content I had and if my message was clear to readers.Then, I became concerned that the title of the message wasn’t following eROI best practices for subject lines.Next thing I knew, I found myself counting on my fingers the number of characters in the subject line and strengthening my call to action.After hitting the send button with much hesitation, I started to wonder about how many members would actually read the email and attend the event.
After this weekend’s experience I realize that I have been enlightened about email. I pledge to never again send out a mass email that I’ve merely corrected for punctuation marks, but to apply my new found email practices everyday.
I am a believer and a preacher of all eROI email best practices.
