I spent the last week preparing for a speech (to 100 marketers) at Innotech on “Bringing Sexy Back to Email Marketing“, and I must admit that I got pretty philosophical about the email marketing industry and the real definition of what sexy means to me and to marketers.

The genesis of the idea for this speech came from attending a panel on email marketing at MediaPost’s OMMA Hollywood show last month. At that panel, the nation’s top email experts, who I have a ton of respect for, all had a similar response to the question, “what’s exciting coming up in the near future for email marketing?” After a few chuckles and shrugs that it’s the same old same old in the email world, these top email software and agency experts’ answers included “email is a workhorse” and it “is the plumbing of the internet.” To paraphrase the response, email has the highest ROI of any online marketing medium, but it’s ultimately boring in its implementation.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Where is the passion? Where is the sex appeal? Email has been around for a long time, but don’t tell me it’s boring. Email is dead sexy, but first let’s explore who is sexy to you? Before you look at the images below, think about who you find sexy and why are they sexy? Great looking. Hot body. Amazing voice. Atheletic. Bad girl or Bad boy personality. Something luring you in?

Ignore these pics below, and tell me WHO IS SEXY to you?

What does this have to do with Email?

Email is Dead Sexy and here’s why:
–Email is the Killer App - only true push medium
–More brand touchpoints than any other medium
–Highest ROI - Email Works
–Core of Building Online Community
–Successful Email Trigger Campaign - Fosters 2-way dialogue

Download the Full PDF presentation of “Bringing Sexy Back to Email” here>>

It’s the second downloadable document on that page. Tell me what you think.

Nothing better than hanging out w/ musicians from your own company that jam out at a casual dinner party at our house.

The big question is, will eROI retain its crown as champion of PAF Battle of the Bands in ‘08?

I’m going to try to do 4 blog entries in almost as little time as I’d Tweet 4 times. Let’s see how it goes. Alright, beginning now - here goes.

My twitter profile is www.twitter.com/ryanbuch!

I’m re-editing this blog post to let you know the answer: NO no no - Twitter is way way faster. This is proof that optimizing for a new channel like Twitter is a very good thing to do.

Cheers,
Ryan

As our fellow blogger Dylan Boyd broke the news just minutes ago:

“eROI Abandons New Offices, Goes Green
Portland Interactive Agency Takes ‘Natural Approach’ to Marketing

Portland, OR - In a move that both shocked and surprised the city of Portland, eROI left the urban grid. After 12 months of negotiations, remodeling and settling into their new building in Old Town Portland, they just picked up and moved to a field of solar powered yurts just east of their world HDQs along the Willamette River.”

Read the full story on eROI’s other blog: The Email Wars

www.LogoBama.com:

My friends over at a relatively new Portland, interactive agency, Substance, launched this site a few weeks ago. I asked founder Stephen Landau about his inspiration to do the site. He responded, “We figured if we’ve been talking about beliefs and change for the last 15 months, we should support the candidate who says the same stuff. Plus, it was a fun little project to work on. Not sure why we set the donation goal so high ($5,000) but then again, what’s the point in shooting for a small, attainable goal when you can aim for a bigger, more audacious goal.”

I especially like the way the logo you create can map into Flickr automatically and can be ported at any size into Flickr and a dozen other social networking sites. Nice work.

Here’s my quick, uncreative creation using the site: