Last week, we had a little fun on Arbor Day, crafting, um, totally fake notes from a few of the 28,000 trees the Emma community has helped plant this year. In reply, a few of our (always stylish) customers let us know of a few great tree-related programs in their *own* worlds, and we thought we’d share a couple of them with you now:

From Meryl Dorey at Fountain of Beauty Cosmetics in Bangalow, Australia:

Dear Emma folk,

This is not a support request - just a thank you! When I signed up for Emma (only a few days ago), I had no idea of your involvement with planting trees - but what a lucky coincidence. My husband is editor of the Big Scrub Rainforest Landcare newsletter and has spent the last 20 years planting about 15,000 rainforest trees native to the far North Coast of NSW where we are (the Big Scrub). I thank you for what you do to help the environment of North America - my home for the first 30 years of my life - and am very glad to have joined an organisation that cares for nature as well as providing such good service.

And from John Spady at Countrywide Community Forums in Seattle, WA:

I wanted to draw attention to a project that my 86-year-old father has been managing for over 10 years! The “Plant a Tree for Citizenship” project is sponsored by the Bellevue Overlake Rotary Club in District 5030. Here is a short blurb about it from their club site:

One of the most memorable and impacting hands-on project that is ongoing is our Plant a Tree For Citizenship program led by Dick Spady. Plant a tree involves elementary students growing evergreen trees from seeds and conducting a tree planting ceremony a year later.

Just another good story from an Arbor Day / Earth Day perspective!

Fun editorial note: Dick Spady, the man who started the program (also, John’s dad), is the same Dick Spady who started Dick’s Drive-In, the famous restaurant chain in the Seattle area. Burgers *and* trees. Clearly our kind of guy.

Thanks to Meryl & John for sharing their stories (and lives) with us, and here’s to all the great work being done around the world on behalf of our tall, leafy friends. Cheers!

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You may ask yourself on occasion, “I wonder what the folks at Emma are up to this month?” or “I wonder if any of them will be in my town soon?” or perhaps, “I wonder what they’re having for lunch today?” Well, if you are one of those people who ask these questions, or one that talks to themselves, this is for you, question-asking-friend.

If we are coming to your town or you are traveling to one of the events we are sponsoring, please come by and say hello. You may even walk away with some sweet Emma flair (or chotchkies). Below is a list of events that Emma will be sponsoring in May and June with special offers that might help your decision on whether to attend. We will be posting another blog the first week of May for the events that are less time sensitive for registration.

BarCamp Portland
May 1 :: Portland, OR

Barcamp Portland is an unconference put together by folks in the Portland technology community that offers demos, group discussions & networking opportunities with peers.  To learn more about how you can get involved with BarCamp Portland, you can click here for more information.

NAMA’s AIM Awards
May 6 :: Nashville, TN

The Nashville American Marketing Association is holding their “Stand By Your Brand” Awards event at the Wildhorse Saloon in Downtown Nashville. If you are interested in learning more about some of Nashville’s most successful marketing campaigns, click here.

National Restaurant Association Show

May 16-19 :: Chicago, IL

We will be located at booth #5961 on Level 3 of McCormick Place North Hall, so please swing by and say hello.

We also have the opportunity to give away two event registrations that will give attendees access to the exhibit hall and educational sessions. Please contact us to inquire about the special offer.

MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum

June 8-9 :: Boston, MA

The theme of June’s event is to “re:charge, re:invent, re:engage” and that is exactly what we hope  everyone in attendance will do. As a sponsor of the B2B forum, we are able to pass along a $200 discount to anyone interested in attending.

If you are going to be in Boston and want to take advantage of this discount, click here and make sure to remember to use the discount code is ESPN7.

Open Source Bridge
June 17-19 :: Portland, OR

If you are a developer interested in open source technologies and plan on being in Portland June 17-19, this event may be right up your alley (literally).

As a sponsor, we can offer a special discount of $100 off of the $250 conference price. Register here and use the code osbemma.

HOW Design Conference

June 24-27 :: Austin, TX

We are heading over to Austin at the end of June for the HOW Design Conference. Be sure to join Jim Hitch, Emma’s Agency Relations Manager on Thursday the 25th at 3:45 to learn how email design and strategy can have a significant impact on boosting your company’s and/or client’s success.

If you are interested in attending the HOW Conference, please remember that you can save $100 by registering here before May 1st.

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In honor of National Arbor Day, we decided to send an email campaign to the stylish Emma community highlighting all the trees they’ve helped us plant through our 5 Trees program. (We plant five trees for every new customer who chooses Emma as their email marketing service.)

Since the program began back in December 2007, we’ve planted more than 28,000 trees. And we decided to feature thank-you notes from 5 of those trees. Here’s an example:

See how pine, hackberry, apple and cypress trees say thanks, too. The full campaign is online here.

Oh, and Happy Arbor Day!

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The folks at Nashville independent radio station Lightning 100 showcased 32 of Music City’s artists on the verge of making it big, and at the same time they highlighted their own indie brand in a success story we just had to share.

The idea was to get 32 great Nashville-area bands, play their songs on the radio and have their friends and fans register and vote for them on Lightning 100’s website. The promotion was called “Music City Mayhem,” which happily coincided with the NCAA “March Madness” basketball tournaments.

By using Emma’s signup screens for registering voters and Emma’s surveys for counting the votes, Lightning 100 added more than 5,000 email addresses to its database while providing a ton of exposure to the 32 artists who participated, said Brian Waters, the New Media Content Coordinator for Lightning 100 (also known as WRLT-FM, if you happen to work for the FCC).

“We acquire people into our database by offering exclusive incentives like internet pre-sales and unique content,” Waters said. “For this, the people who voted, their incentive was to support their favorite bands and help them advance. We didn’t have to give away tickets to Bonnaroo or Dave Matthews Band. We decided we wanted to do something different, with unsigned bands.

“The idea behind it was to get the bands to do the marketing, and bring their fans to our website,” Waters said.

Not only was there an increase in Web traffic, the station also attracted a fair number of new listeners.

“We received an email from a girl who said she got a message on Facebook from Parachute Musical (one of the four finalists in the competition),” Waters said. “The band told her to visit our site and vote. She went on our site to vote and ended up listening to the radio station. Now we’re her favorite radio station.”

On average, there were 230 votes per day, with the highest vote total coming as the field narrowed to eight (522 votes cast on one day). The winning band, Moon Taxi, topped Maureen Murphy in the finals. Daniel Ellsworth rounded out the final four.

The event’s main sponsor, Yazoo Brewing Company (another fabulous Emma customer), shares its building with Lightning 100 and provided the concert venue for the finals. About 800 people attended, heard some great local music and enjoyed some great local craft beer.

“With the times we’re going through right now with the recession, what we’ve seen is local people supporting local businesses supporting the local community,” Waters said. “It’s really impressive the way the local music community in Nashville supported local artists.”

Want to make Lightning 100 your favorite radio station? Visit the website, and while you’re at it, sign up for their fabulous newsletter.

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Last week, we asked our community of Twitter followers to tell us the ways they saw companies using email to play their April Fools jokes. It’s always refreshing to see companies injecting personality into their marketing campaigns, and this year’s f-f-f-foolin’* was no exception. Here are two we heard about from our Twitter friends:

Scentiments

(click the icon for a close-up)

With this email campaign, the online perfume retailer launched, ahem, Scratch and Sniff technology. When you click through to the landing page, you get the promo code for the discount - GOTCHA09. Even if the technology was fake, at least the discount wasn’t a joke.

Thanks to @PrecociousJewel for the tip!

Whole Foods

(click the icon for a close-up)

Whole Foods took a more subtle approach in their weekly “Whole Deal” newsletter, featuring one banner ad for “Organic Air” as their Sure Deal of the week alongside regular products and promotions - the “deal” being paying $6.99 for .02 ounces of air. The landing page adds a few more jokes to the mix, including a picture of local penguins lining up for their new Antarctica store.

Kudos to @StephanieKern for letting us know about this one.

And of course, there were a few other popular ones - Gmail’s a perennial favorite (thanks, @NDPtweets), and the Guardian fooled a few folks into thinking they were going to be publishing all their news in Twitter format going forward (thanks, @moragbrand). I completely fell for Under Consideration’s fake rebranding of Verizon and felt equally as stupid as I did disappointed when I figured out it wasn’t real.

What about you? Did you get a particularly clever or convincing April Fools campaign? How do you and your team find ways to add a little personality to your campaigns during the other 364 days of the year?

*Come on. A blog post without a gratuitous Def Leppard reference isn’t really a blog post at all, is it?

Technorati Tags: email marketing, april fools, myemma.com, scentiments.com, whole foods

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Thinking about one of our recent posts, Smarter email marketing in a recession, it’s a good time to consider how you can get even more personal and timely with your email communication. And what better way to do this than to give your contacts the option of what content they receive and how frequently they receive it.

Take The Onion, for example. Not only do they allow folks to sign up for their emails, but they’re giving them the option of how frequently they’d like to receive emails and in what format: text, video or both. By allowing new subscribers to choose what they receive and when they receive it, The Onion ensures that their messages are exactly what subscribers have asked for.

Now it’s time for you to think about what content you’re sending and its frequency. Try asking if folks signing up would like to receive emails weekly, monthly or quarterly. And ask what type of information they would like to learn more about. Is it your monthly sale items, seasonal promotions or a weekly update from the company sports team (Go Cougars!)?

You can even add surveys into your mix to gauge your current subscribers’ preferences about your emails. By allowing the recipient to choose, you will soon be reaching them on the most personal level: their own terms.