We were flattered to see that FOLDRite, a service that lets designers easily allow for folds in their print work, chose our brochure as last week’s Fold of the Week. Evidently, our brochure features an “iron cross with cool reveal,” which is neat, although we didn’t realize that our brochure folding technique may also double as a gymnastics routine.

Anyway, thanks to the folks at FOLDRite for featuring us. You can see other folds of the week, and read about folding technique and strategy to your heart’s content, at FoldFactory.com.

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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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We’re sending a batch of trees to Vermont.

Last year, Emma started planting 5 trees for each new customer who joins us for email marketing and communications. The states where we plant the trees come from a list provided by our tree-planting partner, Plant-It 2020. Vermont was the only state on the list not to receive trees from Emma, but we “fixed” that last month by making Vermont the only possible choice.

Now we’ve got a fresh batch of tree-lovin’ places up for a vote. So where’ll it be?

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During this year’s SXSWi, Emma asked participants to help decide which 40 classrooms to help through DonorsChoose.org, an organization that helps fund classroom projects that fall outside public school budgets.

One such request came from Ms. F., who teaches math, science and reading to 44 sixth-graders in Wisconsin. In her classroom, there are two pencil sharpeners, one of which doesn’t work well, the other of which just doesn’t work. It takes two students to sharpen a pencil here, as one holds the broken sharpener steady while the other turns the crank.

Ms. F. appealed to DonorsChoose.org, asking for a pencil sharpener. Her students, she wrote, have great potential despite many obstacles: they’ve run out of glue for science fair boards, they don’t have enough graph paper to practice graphs in math and have no poster paper for group presentations. Plus, they share a limited number of pencils.

“The truth is, I teach in a rough neighborhood,” wrote Ms. F. “My students put up with more disappointment than they should have to and I would love to provide everything for them but, unfortunately, that is not possible. What we’re asking for is a working pencil sharpener and a few other basic supplies that will make our day run just a little bit more smoothly.”

Emma and others helped fulfilled her $276 request. Here’s what she wrote in response:

“Thank you SO much for funding my project! These resources are going to greatly enhance the learning in my classroom. Not having to send students to other rooms to sharpen their pencils or try, desperately, to manipulate our broken pencil sharpener is going to be wonderful. You don’t realize how amazing a working pencil sharpener is until you don’t have one.

“People like you who are so willing to help out students in need truly amaze me. There are so many people in these students’ communities and lives who are not even willing to support them and here you are, strangers to them, and more than willing to put their needs in front of your own. I hope you know how much your generosity is appreciated.”

Working with DonorsChoose.org is just one of the ways Emma gives back. Click here to learn more. See the full list of classrooms we helped fund here. And learn how you can sponsor your *own* classroom project here.

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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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We at Emma have been working with Donors Choose to help fund teachers’ education proposals that fall outside of regular school budgets. Here’s your chance to  help us, and all you have to give is about 5 seconds.

Emma is trying to help 40 classrooms during 4 days of SXSWi, a festival in Austin, Texas that celebrates all things new media. We’ve placed a not-so-secret message on their lanyards that shows them where to vote. Care to join them?  Vote today for the region and academic subject areas mean the most to you, and we’ll use the results to guide where we send our funding. You’ll be helping kids in no time at all.

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Chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you’re a bit of an email marketer. Probably a stylish one, at that. So, to reward you for your email savvy (and your blog subscribing prowess), I thought you might be interested in MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Marketing Awards competition.

Dig through your archived campaigns to grab your best examples - perhaps you had a record number of sign-ups for a promotional campaign, or an engaging newsletter that boosted web traffic. Whatever the email, this is your opportunity to receive those accolades of praise you’ve deserved all along.

Click here for the entry form and information, and good luck!

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Hi there, friendly Emma blog subscriber!

We’re moving our feed from:

http://www.myemma.com/blog/?feed=rss2 to http://feeds.feedburner.com/emmaemailblog.

What does this all mean? How will this affect me? Hopefully, it shouldn’t, since the switch isn’t a big deal. In fact, you should continue receiving new posts in your feed like usual. But if you don’t notice anything new from us in the next few days, simply subscribe to the new feed by clicking that big, pretty orange RSS icon on the right.

Of course, if you have any questions, please leave us a comment here.

Thanks!

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