The emfluence Blog

I recently had a client start bidding on their brand words only after they saw a competitor was bidding (poaching). Not only was someone bidding on the client’s brand, they were sending traffic directly to the client’s real website. There weren’t even diverting traffic to an outside site! By running ads on the client’s brand and sending traffic to the client’s domain, the official ads for the client are effectively blocked because the offending party was there first. Even though our client provided official and more accurate ads, they’d been blocked by a company that put up so-so advertising leading to the client’s website. This is a key reason you should be bidding on your own brand keywords for paid search.

Online marketing is full of perks. One of the biggest benefits is the ability to track results so accurately. We can measure exactly how effective our online marketing campaign was at driving online sales. But what about the influence it has on offline sales? Of course we know it happens. But we can’t always measure the exact results, especially since in many cases a retailer’s products can be purchased both online and offline.

How do search and social intersect? Google and Bing (and thus Yahoo!) have different social signals built into their algorithms to allow social media popularity to impact rankings.

Attending SMX West for more search engine marketing knowledge? Be sure to catch our own Corey Morris, Search Engine Marketing Strategist for emfluence on the…

Google rolled out a big update recently called “Search Plus Your World.” While the search community has written many in-depth articles about how it works here’s a brief look at what marketers need to know about the update.

Search Plus Your World has caused quite a stir in the search marketing community on a number of levels. The short version is this: This update is the biggest Google update in a decade. While the hype may be overdone, it’s not something we can ignore.

Here are a few things that you should know about the Search Plus Your World update and some steps you should be taking to ensure that you are evolving your digital marketing activities to keep from being left behind.

How frustrating is it to see clients and colleagues miss opportunities? Answer: Not nearly as frustrating as seeing mistakes made that penalize website rankings over time.

As an SEO, I pride myself in being able to join a project at any point and welcome new challenges. But, there’s no doubt that being on a project from the beginning produces the best search engine optimization results. Here are three reasons why you should involve your search marketing team from the very beginning of your site design.

Successfully integrating a marketing plan takes some work and is based in good planning. To your consumer, an integrated marketing plan will look seamless. The tone and information will be consistent, the consumer will know exactly where to find you and what to expect when they get there. What can you do to inject harmony and coordination to your brand experience?

8 aspects of your search engine optimization you should consider on a keyword-by-keyword basis
by Corey Morris, emfluence Search Engine Marketing Strategist

One thing we hear often at emfluence is how unavailable digital marketing education seems to be. Sure, you can take another 1-hour webinar on LinkedIn, but where can you find a seminar on strategizing and intgetrating every aspect of your digital marketing?

The answer is in Kansas City, November 9th.

Announcing emfl-U: Digital Bootcamp

Your email deliverability – whether or not you’re being delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes – is a huge factor in what return on investment you earn from your email campaigns. After all, if the subscriber doesn’t see your email, they can’t act on it.

Domain Level ReportingOne of the benefits of email marketing is that, like all digital marketing, it comes equipped with analytics and reporting that can talk to you about the status of your campaigns. One of the most important set of metrics to watch is your results by domain. Domain-level reporting allows you to see results not just of your email as a whole, but also across each receiving domain.

Whether you attended or if you didn’t get the chance, the notes will be worth gold. Take a peek at the top takeaways from the three keynote presentations at the 2011 emfluence Marketing Platform User Conference.

Helzberg Diamonds offered a deal last week that seemed too good to be true… and turned out it was. Their online system had a glitch and their advertised “surprise savings” were a surprise even to them! These are the moments that define a company’s reputation. There are a lot of lessons to be taken from how Helzberg handled the potential catastrophe.

What counts as oversharing information in a world where people tweet their breakfast? What is TMI (too much info) about a person or company you follow? Some might argue that it would depend on if it’s content from a personal account or on behalf of a brand (comma?) but I have a rule of thumb that I think you can apply to either situation: Act as if the online world were one big cocktail party.

Email frequency – how often should you send your subscribers email – is a hot topic among email marketers. Just about everyone has a different opinion and usually everyone fiercely believes they’re right. Some will answer “It depends.” In this case, try this on for size: Ask.

My first South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) experience definitely lived up to the affectionate moniker “geek spring break” From social media to widgets to guerrilla marketing, I had plenty to learn from. But as a marketer, my heart was captured by some of the best non-traditional promotions I’ve seen by an industry bursting with new ideas every day. Here’s my “Top 8” list of the best promos at SXSWi 2011 (and the brands behind them):

A scary fact: in 2010, only 33% of email users have images turned on by default in their email client, down even further from the 2006 number of just over 50% (Source: Marketing Sherpa, 2010). Yikes! When you’re designing beautiful emails, does your email still fly without images turned on? Check these 5 ways that you should design without images in mind.

A few notes about things in the search engine optimization (SEO) world that you may or may not have heard about, including changes to Google’s algorithm thanks to JCPenney’s recent press and social media’s impact on how we search.

What email marketing’s popular younger brother, social media marketing, can learn from its elder.

Ok, so the time to get local was last year, or the year before. But if you haven’t taken the time, or are new to the search marketing arena, here’s some insight that you want to take note of: local search is changing. Components are merging and the lines are blurring in the search world and businesses that aren’t paying attention are falling behind. The good news is, this is a good — no, a great opportunity to get on board. And when better than at the start of a new year?
But where to start?

A rule of thumb in the age of the Internet is that if you blink, you probably missed 28 updates to the various sites you use on a regular basis. Sometimes the changes are minor, but even those minor changes can be game changers for marketers and advertisers. So, it’s always good to take a second to consider any kind of changes on the sites you frequent, put your business hat on, and think about how it might affect you or your client.

In the spirit of giving this season, we thought we’d share a few bonus How-To Holiday tips:

Last week, I got a great question from one of our savviest email marketing clients: “How are you advising your clients to prepare for the changes with Hotmail? Should we be versioning or quarantining our Hotmail lists and watching them more closely?”

Not that you’ve ever done this, but sometimes people type their email address wrong. When was the last time you checked out your own opt-in process? Do you know if your form will accept these common input mistakes as valid entries?

How do you measure the success of your email marketing campaigns? When our clients ask us our thoughts, we encourage them to measure email marketing like you do any other kind of marketing: by calculating your Return On Investment (ROI). Sure, we know that you know that email marketing still has the highest ROI of any marketing channel. But are you actually measuring your success?

At the emfluence User Conference last month, our CEO and Head Email Brainiac, Dave Cacioppo, gave a rockin’ keynote: “Email ROI: Let It Rock!” Our users voted it the best takeaway content of the day, so we thought we’d share the good info. So, Dave, how do you rock your email ROI?

Social Fresh’s fifth social media conference was hosted April 19th just across the state in St. Louis. We sent Jessica Best to soak up some knowledge about emerging media from some heavy hitters. Here’s what she gleaned: