behind the scenes

emfluence is excited to welcome two new members to the team this month!   Jana Hainey joins us as an email strategist, where she will work hands-on with our agency clients providing email strategy, inspiration, and execution.   Cory LaGrange joins us as our Director of Digital Strategy, bringing with him a love for SMART goals, more than 10 years of marketing strategy, and just a smidgen of an accent from his home turf in South Louisiana.   As Jana and Cory wrapped up their first few weeks as emfluencers, […]

emfluence is excited to welcome LaToya Rozof to the role of HR Manager! In her role, LaToya will oversee employee engagement, hiring, and in her own words, making sure we continue to have fun without breaking any laws.   LaToya joins us as an HR superstar with a passion for fashion. She has 13 years of HR experience and has expertise in employment law, employee relations, and HR strategy. One of her favorite work tasks is finding ways to help make the workplace a destination and not a dread (a […]

emfluence rounded up another year of marketing success at the 2019 Fountain Awards on March 7th at the 2016 Main Event Space. The Fountain Awards, which are co-hosted by the ANA Business Marketing Association of Kansas City and the Kansas City Chapter of the American Marketing Association, feature results-oriented marketing work from agencies and brands across the greater Kansas City metro.   Featuring categories honoring work for both B2B and B2C oriented brands, The Fountain Awards gathers entries from dozens of marketers, all of whom are competing for the clout […]

emfluence is delighted to welcome Joe Ramsey to the role of Customer Success Director! In this role, Joe will be responsible for nurturing long-term relationships with our emfluence Marketing Platform and emfluence agency customers. We’re excited to have him dig into goals and metrics—and even more excited for our customers to work with him on their individual measures of success.   Joe joins us with more than 20 years of marketing and support leadership across B2B and B2C companies. He has overseen marketing strategies in financial, telecommunications, and technology industries, […]

Ah, summer. College has wrapped up for the year and agencies are offering their internship programs to those looking to get their foot in the door and gain some real-world marketing experience.   At emfluence, we place a high value on the interns who come to work for us. Agency interns aren’t just coffee getters and copy makers. They get a chance to see the inner workings of an agency that prepares them for careers in a way that a classroom simply can’t.   Just because you got a college […]

As emfluence continues to grow and forge new partnerships with more great clients, we realized we were getting stretched a little thin when marketingourselves and our business. Enter: Natalie Jackson, emfluence’s new Marketing Director. I took some time to chat with Natalie shortly after joining the emfluence team about her background, interests and goals in her new job.

emfluence Digital Marketing is excited to introduce our new Senior Account Manager, Lindsay Waters! Lindsay joins us after 2 years at Lionshare Marketing, a full service CRM provider for the healthcare industry. She also has spent time working in marketing college athletics, experience of which some of the college sports fanatics (including yours truly) are certainly jealous. Lindsay took some time to answer some questions and introduce herself this week, here’s what she had to say: Tell us a little about yourself, you know, the basics.  Lindsay: “I grew up […]

We sought to improve our digital agency’s proposals through testing various tools outside of the traditional Word, PowerPoint, and InDesign documents. I average seven proposals per month and with my growing team, I assist in more than I can keep up with. I needed a way to create documents for sales templates that were easy for my team to access, with easy design capabilities to save time and a way for us to track the results more effectively. One of the tools I came across in an article was Qwilr. We decided to give it a test run.

It's that special time of year when email and digital marketing enthusiasts gather in Kansas City for smart strategy and new features in the emfluence Marketing Platform: the emfluence Digital Marketing Conference! We're back at the snazzy Gallery event space for another year of best practices, feature announcements and of course, user feedback. We invite all marketers (users or not) to attend the emfluence Marketing Platform Conference… and we have some pretty sweet reasons why you should!  1. Email Marketing Insights: Creating the Perfect User Experience The “Trends in Email […]

Here at emfluence we are all about hard work and producing award-winning campaigns for our clients. The relationships we build with our wonderful clients make us proud to be able to be part of such a great Kansas City community. When we aren’t working however, we love to get involved with our communities and live life to the fullest. To show a little bit more of our personal sides we are starting a series called Emstagrams so you can get to know the people behind the brand.

The 2016 KCDMA AMBIT's Award show was a great night for the emfluence team and our wonderful clients! This year, the gala was held at the Overland Park Convention Center and was themed with Broadway musicals. Our team selected the musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" because…why not, it's important to have a little fun when celebrating all that hard work!  Best in Show! Tyler and I took home the Best in Show award for our social media campaigns and analytics dashboard work for the Center For […]

How the Zero Moment of Truth Paradigm is Shifting to Micro-Moments

As a marketer, you've been hit over the head with the value and importance of a well-rounded content strategy for a few years.  It's the topic of conversation because it's one of the most critical pieces of a sound inbound marketing strategy. In Digital Marketing, it's an arms race to get eyeballs and no matter what your weapon of choice you're going to need ammo, and there's no cheat code for unlimited ammunition (if there IS a cheat code, drop me a line). Suffice it to say, having to reload […]

Today is bittersweet for us at emfluence: One of our own is pursuing a wonderful opportunity. That happens to also mean that he won’t be working at emfluence. Today we say goodbye to Lance!

It’s been a year full of knowledge on our emfluence blog page where we covered everything from Email send best practices to Minions! If you missed some of our top posts from this year now is your chance to get caught up. Below you will find a quick recap of our top 10 ranked blog posts of the year and links to the original articles, enjoy!

If you’re like me, and check Instagram a few (hundred) times a day, you have probably noticed that your feed has included a lot more “Sponsored” posts, aka “ads,” recently. That’s because, in September 2015, Instagram gave access to all brands to advertise on their platform, opening up a new way for companies to engage in the social space. Its no longer just a way to build a brand by having a profile; it now allows brands to push products and promote themselves to just about anyone. Instagram advertising is […]

Yesterday, a few members of the emfluence crew took a trip out to KC Pet Project to volunteer at their no-kill shelter. The basement of KC Pet Project houses all of the donations (food, toys, medical supplies, cleaning supplies), and is overseen by a very sweet woman named Mary. Mary works diligently to keep all the donation areas clean and navigable, and the emfluence crew was happy to help her with some of the projects that required more heavy lifting.

If you’re a web development agency like us, hosting a growing number of clients in the cloud, you may sometimes feel like this guy with the balls in the  air. That can be especially true when it comes to managing resource costs in Amazon Web Services. Don’t get me wrong: I love that we can spin up an array of servers at a moment’s notice with minimal fuss. It’s one of the greatest reasons to use AWS.  But I also love feeling in control of the costs so that I’m […]

Customer acquisition is only a small piece of your audience’s marketing journey. Oftentimes, marketing efforts are successful in bringing customers onto a website, but your website isn’t grabbing the baton when it’s time to finish the race. This is where an oftentimes overlooked piece of digital marketing comes in, conversion optimization. Many people know the phrase, but believe this part of strategy can only be accessed by user experience pros. It’s time we take the veil off of conversion optimization. Here are 5 useful tips to use during your website […]

A key part of any brand is consistency. We regularly work with brands to help ensure their voice, image, and communication mediums are reliable. The key to consistency is standards – easy to find, understand, and follow. If you don’t keep it simple, you’re bound for failure. That’s why an early part of any web development project should be establish the style guide for your project. Style guides are not sheets of paper, or creative briefs. If that’s where your head is at, you’re stopping too soon. You, the marketing […]

Last week, emfluence and our wonderful clients won 13 KCDMA AMBIT awards for excellence in targeted, measurable marketing – 2 more than last year! emfluencers took home 6 gold and 7 silver awards in the Email, Social Media, Business-to-Consumer Marketing and Search Engine Optimization categories.  The AMBIT awards are particularly important to us because of their judging criteria. AMBITs are awarded based on results and measureable goals in addition to design and creative, perfect for our marketing standards! Congratulations to the emfluence Email Marketing team and SPIN! Pizza for winning […]

Before Thursday of last week, as an Administrator of the emfluence Facebook page, anything I posted or liked showed up as emfluence comment or like. With the new Voice feature, I can toggle between if I want the post to come from me (Jessica) or from emfluence as a brand. I can now weigh in on company posts as myself!

What else can be said but "80s Night at the K"?  The emfluence team headed out to watch the Royals battle it out with the Seattle Mariners at Kauffman Stadium for the 80s Night, hosted by local fave cover band, the Zeroes! We think the pics speak for themselves.  Favorites are when a huge stray cat bolted out onto the field and the game had to pause until the critter could be rounded up http://idek.net/Po6 and the eighties-ladies paparazzi shot http://idek.net/Po7 Though an honorable mention goes out for the next […]

We’ve added some long overdue pictures to our Flickr account: Ones & Zeros (aka the biggest bash of 2008) through Marketing Sherpa’s Email Summit in Miami last month with a speckling of around-the-office fun.