The emfluence Blog

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.

Flip through the slide presentation from Jessica’s presentation on integrating emerging media into your event crisis management plan, given to the PCMA Heartland Chapter on Sept 19th.

Pop Quiz, social media marketers: What’s the difference between Oreo’s “You can dunk in the dark” tweet during the 2013 Superbowl and the Golf Channel’s #DreamDay promotion on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream…” speech? One is a cheeky quip about a current event. One is making a speech that inspired and liberated an entire group of people somehow equivalent to golfing. And there’s a lesson in there for us social media marketers and brand managers.

Google+ for Business offers strong SEO opportunities by actively passing relevant traffic, if not through preferential treatment from Google itself. Tyler takes a look at 3 ways incorporating a Google+ plan is still worth it for your SEO team (even if the social media team pushes back).

emfluence emsights features posts about email, social medial, mobile, search marketing, and digital marketing.

I’ve been working on upgrading a client’s form autofill options. Right now, they have server side ip sniffing, and forms I’m unable to cache because of the defaulted information. So, blank forms with client side geolocation through the the javascript navigator object is required. I’ve done this kind of thing before, but it’s always been on the page, assuming everything would work. This time around, I’m doing things a little differently, anticipating using this over and over for their many forms.

As just about everyone in web development knows these days, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become one of the preferred cloud hosting services in the US. Why? Because it’s relatively easy and cost effective to set up robust yet flexible web sites and applications. And because it lets web devs large or small use the same kind of hosting as the biggest companies on the market.

When you start getting into scalability, you want to be able to use your web server (EC2) instances with your virtually limitless storage bucket (S3). That way, you can boot up as many EC2 instances as your traffic demands and they can all access the same files.

One of the world’s social media darlings proves why email + social = love. Pinterest has been a model user of email marketing since their first full year as a social medium. Have you ever received a Pinterest email on your phone and seen the same email on your desktop? Notice the clever shift between mobile version and desktop version? It’s a simple 2-version email…

It’s official: 2013 is the Year of Mobile. Statistics on mobile read rates for emails, social media usage on mobile devices and the market share of smart phones vs. “feature” phones are everywhere. Even our own emfluencers have asked “Is it time for responsive email design?” But, more important than trends and even best practices as email marketers consider mobile is knowing your *own* list and whether mobile or responsive email design will pay off.

We have an increasingly growing audience accessing information and connecting in a mobile environment that fits their time. In this new digital world, donors are just a click away…how will you reach them? Many brand marketers have been working towards mobile solutions, but unfortunately, I see too many of my favorite non-profits and causes failing to take advantage of mobile… and falling behind.

Gmail has rolled out their new Inbox, featuring a tabbed (categorized) look. There are three default tabs for “Primary,” social notifications and promotions. Many email marketers’ emails will probably be classified as promotions, and so many are concerned that it will decrease open and click through rates.

This is the first of 3-part blog series on shaping your social media strategy. Step 1: creating social content that is current and fits your overall marketing strategy.

Social media is a powerful force in how brands are perceived, received, shared and discussed and I’d argue that content is at the crux of that. Social Media Marketers have a challenge on their plate: we have to come up with the great content to support our brilliant marketing strategies. If you’re like me, you’ve had that day where you just think, “What the heck do I talk about?”