Invite your email subscribers to be a part of the relief efforts in Haiti. Emma’s endlessly talented graphic designers put together a suite of donation badges that are yours to add to your next email campaign. Here’s how it works:

1. Download the badge that suits your style.

2. Add it to your email campaign.

3. Link it to this donation page we’ve put together with the help of the fine people at Network for Good:
http://www1.networkforgood.org/emma-haiti-relief, or pair it with your own program.

There you have it, and here’s to doing some good with our email campaigns.

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Every year, we award free Emma email and survey service to small, deserving non-profits that our customers tell us about.

Today, the nominations are in — over 100 fantastic groups doing fantastic work around the world — and we’re asking *you* to vote for your five favorite groups anytime between now and the end of January.

Vote now at www.myemma.com/emma25, and tell folks you know to get involved in the giving back good times, too.

Here’s to sending some email and doing some good!

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VideoLink is a stylish video production company headquartered near Boston. And, as an Emma customer, they understand that a stylish email stands out in the inbox. But in a recent campaign they added video, and it stood out in the response data as well.

They set up the campaign to promote their new (and, may we add, fabulous) website. But before hitting send, they were true to their name. They made a short video, added a screen shot to their email and linked it to a video landing page they made through a service called Flimp On-Demand.

“We worried that a text-only email would be overlooked,” said VideoLink Sales Manager Marty DeLoreto. “So by adding the video player to the email we hoped it would attract more attention and hopefully more click throughs.”

Plenty of folks clicked through, all right. Their click-through rate was a fantastic 26.2 percent. And while Emma was tracking all the email response data, Flimp was tracking the data for the video page. Of people who started the video, 64.5 percent watched the entire thing. And 127 people clicked a link to visit the website.

While video in email may not be for everyone, it’s certainly worth trying. Consider these statistics from Forrester Research:

• 71% of online audiences watch Internet video.
• The number of video streams likely will double by 2013.
• Video in email can increase click throughs by two to three times.

Still, there’s no perfect way to embed video to play within an email (yet). But what VideoLink did is fairly common and effective: use screen shots and text links to send people to a landing page that hosts the video. Emma customers can also host videos in their document library and link to ‘em, too.

And the video doesn’t have to be fancy to be effective, either. VideoLink’s video lasted only 49 seconds and it was fairly simple, with CEO Gina Chudnow describing the new website’s features.

“We also had more personal comments back to the CEO praising her performance and congratulating her on the launch,” Marty added. “That kind of communication would rarely happen with a text-only email.”

Marty plans to use email and video together in the quarterly newsletter, featuring other high-level employees. How about you? What kinds of things are you doing (or want to do) with video and email? Do let us know, won’t you? We’d love to hear about it.

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The Emma crew took a trip to Austin, TX last week for the HOW Design Conference, one of the largest gatherings of design professionals each year. Jessica and Allison went to represent our design team, Steve and Kendrick came to chat with the attendees about Emma and I led a breakout session about designing emails with clear goals (and revenue) in mind. After the conference, I sat down to summarize the ideas that will stick with me for a while. Here are the top five…

1. Creativity transforms the common into the extraordinary. Even the wrist watch has outer limits that are still being explored. Speaker: Rob Walker

2. Pretend like your email’s on the retail shelf. The same elements of humor, the unexpected, the obvious and the quirky are keys to success in the inbox and the store aisle. Speaker: Mitch Nash of Blue Q.

3. Powerpoint gets a bad rap, but it may be for bad reasons. Nancy, from Duarte Design, posed the question ‘Is Powerpoint broken? Or is the way we use it broken?’ It made me think of email marketers that aren’t quite happy with their results. It’s a hard question, but is email what’s broken? Or is it the way it’s being used? Speaker: Nancy Duarte

4. Good copy can (and should) come from bad. Wayne recommends writing the boring version of your headline first, and then creatively translating the idea from there. Speaker: Wayne Geyer

5. Wayne is a cilantro hater. For a good laugh, check out his anti-cilantro website experience.

Did you make it to HOW, too? What ideas will still inspire you long after the shock of 106-degree heat wears off?

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We’re having a great time in Austin at the HOW Design Conference. This week has so much to offer, so we’re doing our best to take it all in - the food, the live music and of course the inspiring conference events. Yesterday I got a chance to do a breakout session about designing emails with clear goals in mind, so I thought I’d share a few links to statistics and stories I told during the presentation.

+ It depends on the industry, but about 50% of folks surveyed by Epsilon said they were more likely to buy in the future if you have an email strategy. Click here to read more.

+ MarketingSherpa and SmartBrief told the story of how adding social networking links to emails can give a big boost to your traffic from those sites. (subscription required) Click here to read more.

+ Hollis Brand Culture and The Sofia, my favorite hotel in San Diego, helped me tell the story of a boutique hotel trying to boost the bottom line by sharing discounts with guests. The team described email as their 12th man. (Thanks for all your help, Amy!)

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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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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.