The emfluence Blog

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?”

A few months ago, an email marketing client called who had been collecting email addresses for over 8 years, and they’d never sent out an email. They ask what they needed to do to start sending, since some of those addresses would be pretty old and I answered: time for a Re-Permission Campaign. First, we had to talk about why we needed to ask permission again…

Many email marketers know now that just because you send it, that doesn’t mean it went anywhere. There are many factors that go into your deliverability – the science of whether or not your email makes it to the Inbox. Last week, a client asked us if they would automatically get a one-way ticket to the junk or spam filter if they used “free” in the subject line. They’re thinking with the right mindset – content does matter! But, luckily for promotional email marketers…

Today, the highly visual social media site, Pinterest, announced that they’ll be helping pinners find fun stuff like recipes, movies and products by creating ‘more useful’ pins; great news for social media and digital marketing practitioners.

There is definitely an art to writing for social media, and for Twitter in particular. You think you have 140 characters – already a hard task — but you actually only have 97 characters to say what you need to say. The anatomy of a healthy, sharable tweet looks like this…

It’s almost summer which around emfluence means it’s time for our annual emfluence Marketing Platform User Conference! A full day of sessions on best practices, training on new features in our Platform and case studies from our savvy clients. We’re brewing a lineup of super powered content for this year’s conference and we thought we’d let you sneak a peek at the sessions:

Storify is among the newer tools for a social media practitioner and has been gaining popularity as a way to collect and organize tweets, especially those collected around a specific hashtag or top. Today, they launched their Storify Business account option, offering journalists, agencies, brands and bloggers the chance to upgrade their toolset.

Responsive web design was a popular topic in many sessions. One in particular I attended “What You See Is What You Spec’d” touched on not just the importance of a flexible web design but the how-to. Here are my five takeaways from the session.

In a fantastic SXSWi panel on the growing area of social customer service, the people behind the social media voices of Southwest Airlines, Chase Financial and Samsung spoke to a packed room about how the big guys handle (and learn from!) social media. My 3 favorite quotes:

When email marketers go from an email platform that doesn’t utilize authentication tactics like Domain Keys and SPF records to one that does — like emfluence — it’s not uncommon to be confused. Why do we have to take these steps?

Have you noticed that if you try to style your email links black, Gmail will override and turn them blue? Try this fix…

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek & The 4-Hour Chef, insists, “You can become word-class in something in 6 months or less” if you learn to learn the right way. In his many experiences, he’s broken down the process of successful learning and shared a few key tips with session attendees:

On Tuesday night, emfluence and our clients won 4 KCDMA AMBIT Awards! Two for search engine optimization and 2 for email marketing.

I’m finally getting through some of my notes, tweets and photos from South by Southwest’s Interactive Conference in Austin just over a week ago. I’ve found more good tidbits than I know what to do with, so for the next few days I’ll post some of the juiciest content. In this pic-filled post, check out some of the coolest promos and giveaways I ran across.

Congrats to the emfluence Search Engine Optimization strategy team for pulling in their 3rd BMA Fountain Award in 3 years in the category of SEO!…

I’m finally getting through some of my notes, tweets and photos from South by Southwest’s Interactive Conference in Austin just over a week ago. I’ve found more good tidbits than I know what to do with, so for the next few days I’ll post some of the juiciest content. First up: 9 of my favorite takeaways from various sessions.

A big thanks to all who joined for my Future15 session at South by Southwest Interactive, “I Want My $28! Rockin’ Email Marketing ROI.“ As…

In this presentation, I go into the 6 Steps of Getting Started with Twitter, plus a diagram of “the perfect tweet.” The tips in this presentation are largely for marketers, but a lot of the material is helpful even if you just want to dive in personally!

It’s an ongoing discussion in the email marketing world: Do you choose to grow your list via opt-in or opt-out methods? I had a client ask me this week what were the real pros and cons and how can they decide what’s right for them.

Twitter recently rolled out – a bit early – their character-reducing update for tweets with links. Now instead of counting all URLs (including photos/short links) as 20 characters, they’ll count as 22.

Last Sunday, Americans gathered ‘round our televisions for a rare real-time television event: a really big football game. But something has changed in television – really, in any content consumption: fans are experiencing real-time TV by pairing it with social media, like Twitter. Most notable was the quick and clever thinking of several brands that had been actively engaging in social media during the entire game, especially when the unexpected happened. Some brand responses were home runs and some, not quite.

This year, our Community Director, Jessica Best won’t just be attending South by Southwest, she’ll be presenting! Among the top notch speaker line-up in Austin this March, you’ll find our emfluencer speaking on how to make your email marketing really… well, *rock.*