The emfluence Blog

You've almost definitely seen the pre-header of an email before. It's the line or two of pure text above the graphic header banner in an…

Another round of congratulations to the emfluence Search Engine Optimization strategy team for winning a BMA Fountain award for their work on ProPharma Group’s SEO during website relaunch in 2013.

In a world where email marketers know the value of each email and, therefore, want to send as much email as possible, it seems unlikely….

On Wednesday night, emfluence client work scored 11 KCDMA AMBIT Awards for excellence in targeted, measurable marketing, including a Gold in each category of email, search and social media marketing!

Search engines have made a variety of changes over the past year. The state of search is changing into the state of search + social + content. Check out these trends you should know for Search Engine Optimization 2014.

Today, Gmail inbox users noticed appearance of a new easy unsubscribe link at the top of many promotional emails. And this is pretty good good news for email marketing practitioners.

For bank marketers, social media strategy is crucial to being accessible to customers. It’s also very different than, say marketing for Oreo or Boulevard Beer. Bank marketers need to find a way to make your Facebook campaign particularly likeable. Here’s how one of our clients did it.

There are a lot of great ways to grow your email list from pay-per-click ads to affiliate marketing to trade shows, but these are 3 quick ways to test the actual sign-up form to start increasing your email list size right away with the traffic you’re already seeing on your website.

When two brands come together to create a partnership or co-branded effort that works, it’s a beautiful thing. Brand partnerships and co-branding efforts can strengthen audience impressions and elevate the love of a brand to a whole new level.

At last year’s Superbowl, Oreo’s “dunk in the dark” tweet was declared the launch of real-time marketing as a social media marketing trend. Yesterday, I declare, was its death.

When Facebook added the extra metric beneath all posts that shows “how many people saw this post”, social media managers all over the web were enthralled…and outraged. Social media managers grab their hair in frustration when a LOL cat video goes viral and their post stagnates – “only 5 likes and 25 people saw this post? That stuff was genius – GENIUS!” By teaming great content with some careful strategy that plays to Facebook’s rules of reach, you can better maximize the reach of your Facebook posts in 2014.

Even a top-performing restaurant chain can make mistakes. It’s important for marketing managers to ensure that reputation monitoring is part of their restaurant marketing plan for 2014. When slip-ups happen, what’s the next move? Here are 3 simple steps that restaurant marketing managers should take when a negative review shows up on a review site:

Restaurateurs don’t need to look any farther than the smartphone in their own pockets to glean insight into restaurant marketing plans for 2014. According to wireless carrier consultant Chetan Sharma, 27% of all internet traffic came from mobile devices last year, a 5% increase over 2012.

What generation wants to party with their parents? No generation. Millennials are no exception, as illustrated by their declining use of perennial social media juggernaut…

If your paid search ads are seeing great click through rates, but garnering few leads, chances are the problem isn’t with your ads, it’s with your landing page. Here are 5 tips for making your landing pages conversion-friendly

Working on an email campaign, my stomach did that familiar little backflip it does. The Email Marketing Nightmares backflip. And I started thinking of all the email marketing nightmares that make that flip. So I thought I’d compile a list that explains why email marketers all have Send Anxiety. Enjoy!

Costs to develop a website increase as the project nears completion, because once website developers get involved, costs go up fast. Planning and research during the discovery phase is invaluable to launching or relaunching a website on time and under budget.

I’ve had the revelation that after all of that hard work becoming “grownups”, it turns out, just like our high school years, the Internet is a popularity contest. Practicing general SEO is kind of like enrolling and beginning high school classes; using link building techniques is like getting noticed by the “cool” kids.

We do a lot of subject line testing around here at emfluence, so we recently took a very unscientific poll among our staff to see how well we, professional email marketers, can choose the best performing subject lines.

emfluence CEO, David Cacioppo and our client Kris Nielsen from Soave Automotive Group/Mercedes-Benz of Kansas City will be speaking at the 2014 Email Evolution Conference in Miami, January 23.

Nexgate’s report also noted that 1 in every 200 social media post are considered by consumers to be spam. It’s difficult to have a substantial ROI, if your followers think your posts contain spam, meaning it is seen as overly promotional or irrelevant. Try these 5 tips to prevent sabotaging your own social media content marketing.

The blogosphere may be buzzing about mobile-responsive email templates and video in email, but the bottom line is – if you want to optimize your email design to boost your open and click rates, you’ve got to know where and how your own audience looks at your emails.

Subject lines are the movie trailers of email marketing. They are a snapshot of what’s to come and should leave the audience wanting more. The difference is – subject lines usually get one shot to make their impression. That’s why I say all subject lines should be “3D”… Try these 11 tips for writing a great email marketing subject line.

A few of us marketers don’t have all our campaigns planned out just yet and Holiday Season kicks off next Wednesday. In fact, some retailers are starting this week since Thanksgiving is a little later this year! Here’s a look at the important dates for digital marketers in the 2013 Holiday season.

Headlines are more important now than ever, thanks to social media. Think about what is shared when you Tweet, post to Facebook, or share a link on LinkedIn. What auto-populates when you click “Tweet This” above an article? Usually, it’s the headline. And if it can’t capture attention in 100 characters or less, that share isn’t working as hard for you as it could.

Google recently announced that they are moving to encrypted (https) search in an effort to make searching “more secure” for users. Whether the move actually creates a more secure search experience is up for debate, but for the SEO world, this announcement has created quite a stir.

Per an email from Pinterest founder, Ben, in my inbox this morning, it sounds like Pinterest is starting to get serious about how to monetize. They’ve announced that their dipping their toes into the idea of sponsored pins. If they do it well, this could be great news for marketers, especially of products in popular Pinterest categories.