Wacom and eROI Win Email Experience Council's Email Performance Award

February 14, 2008 — The Email Experience Council (eec), the Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) email marketing arm, presented Pen tablet manufacturer Wacom and email and interactive agency eROI with its 2008 Email Performance Award, which recognizes an organization that has created an email marketing campaign that demonstrates the full power of the email channel. The award was presented during the two-day Email Evolution Conference, which concluded yesterday afternoon in San Diego.

The eec’s other 2008 award finalists were Accor, AOL, Genentech, and REI.

The new eec award is being sponsored by Merkle, one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing providers of data-driven marketing solutions.

In announcing the winning campaign last month, eec Founder Jeanniey Mullen said, “Wacom was the clear winner, garnering a majority of the votes from eec members. Our members were asked to vote for a leading example of excellence in email in many areas, including creativity, relevancy, and community engagement. Each of our five finalists represented superior email work. I am thrilled to see such high quality effort throughout the email community.”

Working with eROI, Wacom created an email campaign that ran for 12 consecutive days, with each day highlighting a different month of calendar artwork created by up-and-coming artists who used Wacom products. The emails invited Wacom’s more than 270,000 subscribers to download the calendar as well as upload their own art to Wacom’s site, where the community could vote on their favorite. The winning artist would receive a Cintiq 12WX tablet. During the first six days of the campaign, more than 33,000 new visitors went to Wacom’s site. Visitors spent more than three minutes on the site, uploading more than 1,300 works of art.

Wacom Company Ltd. is a global company based in Japan with subsidiaries around the globe. Founded in 1983, Wacom’s vision to bring people and technology closer together through natural interface technologies has made it the world’s leading manufacturer of pen tablets, interactive pen displays, and digital interface solutions.

eROI, Inc. helps its clients generate and capture qualified leads online through email marketing, e-commerce, search engine marketing, and Web site development. eROI's unique approach transforms clients' Web sites into effective vehicles for capturing leads. The company's email campaign management services include planning, email design and email list management and their award-winning technology platform enables clients to build, send and track HTML emails. Clients include Hewlett-Packard, InFocus, Kettle Foods, Konami, Learning.com, Microsoft, NW Natural, OHSU, PGE, Planar, Papa Murphy’s Pizza, Providence Health Plan, Red Bull, Salomon, and SEGA. For more information, please visit its Web site at www.eroi.com.

In addition to claiming the eec’s highest honor, Wacom and eROI will also be placed into the semi-finals of the Direct Marketing Association’s International ECHO Awards, which recognize the world’s outstanding direct marketing campaigns based on excellence in strategy, creativity, and results. DMA’s 2008 ECHO call-for-entries campaign kicked off yesterday. This year’s honors — including the Diamond ECHO, which goes to the “best-of-show” campaign — will be presented on October 14, 2008, during the DMA08 Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas.

For more details on Wacom and eROI’s award-winning campaign — and those of the four other finalists — visit the eec’s Email Performance Awards page.

About the Email Experience Council (eec)

The Email Experience Council (eec) (www.emailexperience.org), the Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) vertical working group that is focused on the email marketing industry, is a global professional organization striving to enhance the image of email marketing and communications, while celebrating and advocating its importance in business, and its ROI value. The eec is committed to regularly conducting a broad series of email initiatives for a variety of organizations that highlight the positive impact and importance of email as a marketing tool, communications vehicle, and branding device. Additionally, eec members are setting the standards for email through Marketing Roundtables. The eec members are representatives of other trade organizations, agencies, advertisers, technology partners, clients, and companies focused on the potential of email marketing via mobile and other digital devices.

About Merkle

Merkle (www.merkleinc.com) is one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing providers of data-driven marketing solutions that enable organizations to maximize the results from their marketing investment. Merkle provides strategic consulting, database services, content solutions, analytical services, creative services, and production services to Fortune 1000 companies and leading nonprofit organizations. With over 900 employees, the privately held corporation is headquartered near Washington, DC in Lanham, Maryland with additional locations in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, Seattle and Hagerstown, Maryland. For more information, contact Merkle at 1-877-9-MERKLE.

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