The emfluence Blog

Our recent whitepaper on customer retention in the banking industry painted a detailed picture of a changing marketplace where customers leave banks at an alarming rate (8-10%) within their first two years of joining, and often because of a simple lack of effective, consistent and timely client communication.

There’s an obvious and simple solution: rebuild your communication approach for your banking customers in a way that can automatically nurture them and build long-term loyalty. If your customers are leaving you for services they didn’t know you had, then all you have to do is have a better plan for telling them about your offerings.

It’s that time of year when industry experts and practitioners reflect on the year that was and predict what is to come. Rather than making bold predictions about big news events in 2013, our lead Search Engine Optimization Strategist, Corey Morris, has compiled some strong recommendations of things digital marketers should know about search engine optimization (SEO) for the incoming year.

In a 2012 study, customers cited “impersonal communications” and “lack of services” as one of the top reasons they tried another bank. Using automated profile-based communications — or Profile Pathways — can build better banking relationships.

In 2012, SocialIRL hosted half a dozen full-day conferences on using “Social Media for Nonprofits” and I’ve had the pleasure of being among the line-up,…

In just 140 characters, The Salvation Army told an impactful story. The link goes to their blog post, which unravels the full story in just 5 paragraphs with a heartwarming payoff. They capped it with a poignant ask: “Will you make a difference this Christmas?” It’s mind boggling to me that a 255-word blog post and a 140-character tweet could have such an impact. 140 characters isn’t even enough for a preface. Heck, it’s not enough for an opening paragraph!

Facebook has rolled live with their “gifts” feature that shows up on the recipient’s Facebook page. Facebook has a (not yet well publicized) Merchant Interest Form where you can submit your products as gift options that friends can buy for each other.

Last Thursday, emfluence CEO David Cacioppo presented a Lunch ‘n’ Learn at Skyline headquarters on best practices in social media for marketing at trade shows. In the last few years, it’s almost impossible to attend a conference that doesn’t have a hashtag and a Twitter strategy. And with good reason: social media enhances your visibility, brand sentiment and leads to more conversations than standing on the booth floor alone. Here are a few ways Dave highlights that marketers should be using to increase visibility and traffic before, during and after the show.

In a world of crowded inboxes and short attention spans, marketers are always looking for the ‘edge’ – that special something that makes an email stand out and, ultimately, get opened. How do you grab attention? Some marketers are starting to experiment with the use of symbols – like hearts, stars and airplanes – in the subject line.

LinkedIn recently announced new look for Company Pages. With a now-familiar “Cover Photo” spanning the top of the profile page and a company news stream, this layout update is definitely an improvement. Bigger news: Company Pages now work with the LinkedIn smartphone and tablet apps. See an example of the major updates.

It's already (almost) October, so it's about time you started planning your 2013 email marketing campaign calendar. I recently gave a presentation on the characters…

What does it mean when your email goes “missing”? How is that different from a bounce? How should email marketers identify and address them differently?

Last week, Hotmail announced it would be offering its users a new inbox experience: Outlook.com. Most of the updates have to do with the look and feel of the user’s inbox. But the biggest gasp for email marketers was the realization that some or all of our subscribers list may suddenly have a new email address: a scary thought for deliverability.

Most businesses today – large and small – are sending some sort of email marketing. Some may send a monthly newsletter or digest. Others may focus on their products and driving sales online and offline. Some may have automated messages in place, like a welcome email. What are the 4 basic types of email that every marketer should be sending?

It’s a sensitive topic… No one wants to admit that they’re old. But, when you have a list… *ahem* of a certain age, you do have to work a little harder to take good care of it.

Let’s say you’ve been collecting names for a long time, but haven’t sent to them yet (this is a bad idea, more on this later) or you have a ton of hand written names that you’ve had typed up and are ready to import into your email database. Before you upload, you should take a couple precautions to ensure that bad addresses don’t wreck your sender reputation and make you look like a Spammer.

We’re hearing the question more and more: Should my business be on Pinterest? Now the third most popular social networking site, Pinterest reached 104 million monthly visits in March 2012. If your business relies on high website traffic to increase sales, you should consider joining Pinterest. Pinterest users are 79% more likely to purchase an item they saw on Pinterest than Facebook users who saw an item in their newsfeed or on a friend’s wall. So how can your business use Pinterest to increase your website traffic, improve your brand recognition, and convert new visits into leads?

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!

Delving into the world of digital surveys? Here are 6 quick tips for creating online surveys so you can get better feedback from your respondents.

Research shows over 125% growth in accessing email via mobile devices in 2011. 77% of mobile email users check their email before they even get out of bed. On average, around 25% of email readers are viewing your emails at least once on their mobile device.

While email marketers are increasingly concerned about how their emails are prioritized in inboxes, the mobile factor has been sneakily increasing its impact. Whether you’re a novice email crafter or an expert coder, here are 4 tips everyone can use to make your emails more mobile-optimized.

On April 17, Google announced new matching behavior on AdWords for Exact and Phrase Match keywords. What does that mean in the world of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing? For one, it means that PPC campaign managers everywhere will no longer have to create variations of Exact and Phrase Match keywords, like including both singular and plural versions, misspellings, abbreviations and more…

This is an excellent case study from our friends at SEOMoz! The client did everything right with 301 redirects on their website relaunch. Maybe a little “too right” and ended up having to be flexible and make some quick fixes. Even when the SEO team and developers implemented everything perfectly, there were still issues and unknowns.

South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) felt like “Disney World for Geeks” in 2012: All the well-known characters from the Tech world were there. Souvenirs and tchotchkes were out of control, and around every street corner: something completely mind-blowingly cool and innovative. Here are easily the 9 coolest things I saw at SXSWi 2012 from Aurasma to Chevy to Google.

Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West took place last week in downtown San Jose, California at the McEnery Convention Center. This was “the biggest and best SMX show ever” according to Chris Sherman, Vice President of Event Programming for SMX. I agree! This show featured honest conversation, open sharing, and interaction between experts and novices alike. Deciding which sessions to attend was tough – there were many great options. I focused heavily on SEO, with some local search and social mixed in. Here are the top 12 takeaways I brought back to Kansas City with me.

Last week, I had the privilege of speaking on a local search panel titled “Solving Problems and Seeing Success in Google Places.” On the panel, we presented recommendations for dealing with human support at Google places, tips from an agency perspective, and a look at case study information from my work with Houlihan’s restaurants. Download my Google Places panel presentation slides for more information.

The first time I finally got what the buzz was about with Pinterest, two hours passed like 10 minutes. I’d actually tried to love Pinterest a few times before that but just didn’t get it. What’s so addictive about it? How can people spend so much time on it…? The short answer is: it’s pretty.

Pinterest is an online corkboard of sorts where you can pin images of things you like or want to save for later. Pinterest is an easy way for users to visualize and categorize content. So why is it blowing up?

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.