marketing automation

If you’ve heard my position on CRM systems before, it should come as no surprise that I firmly believe marketers should have at least a 50% stake in every CRM system—and perhaps more so if you’re a B2B marketer. CRM systems are one of the most valuable repositories of data for marketers, and understanding how they work—as well as how they might work better—can help you refine your targeting strategy, improve your budget projections, prove out your ROI on marketing spend, and help you make marketing decisions based on data […]

Featuring an average open rate that can be eight times higher and an audience that requires a broad opt-in policy, it’s no wonder that transactional emails have sparked your curiosity. You’re probably here because you’re looking for transactional email best practices—the rules on what you can—and can’t—do in a transactional email, and you’ve come to the right place.   Let’s dig in:   What Is a Transactional Email? Let’s start with the groundwork. If you haven’t read Dave Cacioppo’s post on The Art of the Transactional Email yet, click on […]

emfluence is delighted to welcome Joe Ramsey to the role of Customer Success Director! In this role, Joe will be responsible for nurturing long-term relationships with our emfluence Marketing Platform and emfluence agency customers. We’re excited to have him dig into goals and metrics—and even more excited for our customers to work with him on their individual measures of success.   Joe joins us with more than 20 years of marketing and support leadership across B2B and B2C companies. He has overseen marketing strategies in financial, telecommunications, and technology industries, […]

Re-building websites costs money and time. The trick to approval is justifying the expense. It has been my experience that rarely is the decision to rebuild a website up to one person. That being said, since different internal team members will need to be excited and inspired by the idea to rebuild, you will want to share different customized ROI stories. It would be smart to start with crafting a few ways that you see the website redesign benefiting the company and then tell the right story to the right […]

It’s only the single most critical shopping day of the year. We’re either the shoppers fighting crowds to catch the best deals to fulfill our holiday shopping lists, or we’re the marketers behind the scenes creating the strategies that get them buying!   2017’s Black Friday represented 4.6% of revenue for the entire year’s sales, and this year, sales are projected to be better than ever. It’s important to prepare ahead of time for what’s to come, and to ensure you stand out from the competition.   That’s where a […]

As a digital marketing agency, we are highly focused on identifying strategies and tactics that will work to drive further engagement and conversion online. We love digital because of the high level of “measurability” we have when it comes to monitoring the tactics that we deploy. However, we also know that most businesses rely to some degree on their offline footprint to drive ongoing engagement beyond the typical digital channels like search, email, and social media. That’s where offline to online ad targeting comes in handy.   These business that […]

You know the value in attending the emfluence And Then Some Conference. But how do you relay that effectively when asking for your company’s support in sending you? Getting time off and budget approval can be a real challenge sometimes, so here are three things you can share with the budget-boss in your life to help elicit a successful send-off: It’s designed to enhance your skillset. It presents an opportunity to connect with Kansas City’s brightest digital marketing minds and a variety of local, regional and national organizations. You’ll be […]

Attention all e-commerce businesses…if you’re not running a bounce-back email campaign to your buyers, you’re missing out on some major additional revenue.   What is a bounce-back offer? Let’s first review…what exactly is a “bounce-back” offer? Think of something like this: We’re not talking email delivery failures here. Plain and simple, a bounce-back offer is created to entice the client to “bounce back,” or return and buy more from you in the future. Brick and mortar retailers invented the bounce-back with return offer mailers, and with good reason: the cost […]

Summer vacation is almost here, but don’t swap your shoes for flipflops just yet. For marketers in higher education, this is the perfect time to map out your social media calendar for the academic year.   Social media is a key component of a good content marketing plan, and like any plan, you should start your social media calendar for the academic year with goals and KPIs. Here’s how:   Social Media Marketing Goals Content marketing is most successful when you understand what you hope to achieve. Setting goals (examples […]

How to evaluate your email mistakes so that you can use that information to become a better email marketer. At some point, everyone sends a bad email, whether that’s an email with clunky design or mistakes or image issues, and some of these email mistakes can be embarrassing at the least. But look at the bright side: there’s good that can come from carefully examining email mistakes. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? Same goes for making mistakes. By learning from the email marketing mistakes you make, you’re […]

Once upon a time, community banks and credit unions cornered the market on personalized communications and a neighbor-to-neighbor experience for their customers. But now, with the help of marketing automation platforms, big banks are poised to take back the customer experience. If community banks and credit unions hope to challenge those big banks, they’ll need a strong content strategy and an engine to deliver useful content to their customers. A great place to start is by building a user generated content guide for community banks or for your credit union. […]

Quality over quantity is usually a solid life motto to live by, and your newsletter email list shouldn’t be any different. If you want to grow newsletter subscriptions, start by placing emphasis on opt ins (i.e., people who signed up for your content). Quality users that have chosen to opt-in want to see your name in their inbox, look forward to receiving your content, and are typically your highest engaged customers that are likely to convert. However, getting opt-ins for that healthy list can sometimes seem more like a marathon […]

There’s hidden revenue potential in your existing customer base, and you can upsell using CRM data to find it.   Welcome to the art of upselling techniques: upselling is a way of encouraging existing, happy customers to spend more with you. On average, anywhere between 70 to 95% of revenue generated at B2B companies in a given year comes from upsells and renewals. For ecommerce and B2C companies, there’s a 30% chance a customer will make a second purchase, and a 50% chance that customer will make a third purchase. […]

Call it customer retention, customer loyalty, or brand affinity: what we’re really after as marketers boils down to one word, and that word is love. There’s nothing so powerful in marketing as the love of a customer, but fostering that kind of love takes patience, time, and maybe a little automation.   How to Build and Promote a Customer Loyalty Program Using a Marketing Automation Platform Your marketing automation platform isn’t just a lead nurture platform. If you want to improve customer loyalty, you can apply the same principles and […]

What Gets Measured Gets Managed – A FREE Content Calendar For SEO and Social Media   Peter Drucker was a legendary business thinker. If you’ve never read any of his books on business and management, you should (at the very least) memorize his most famous words. What gets measured, gets managed. It’s not rocket science, it’s pure common sense. At past companies, I felt like Marketing Departments worked in silos, which doesn’t help year-end goals. You have the Search Team over here working on X, Social Media is working on […]

Like it or not, the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is coming very soon. The legislation is designed to put control into the hands of consumers regarding how their personally identifiable information (PII) is obtained, used and shared. Most would agree that giving consumers control is the right thing to do. It does, however, present some significant challenges for businesses, including non-EU based companies, who do business with or market to individuals who are part of the EU.   GDPR consumer advantages:   Increased security. Companies are required […]

Are you subscribed to a regular or daily roundup email of some kind? Office Snapshots has been a favorite of mine since before we moved offices, for example.   One of our clients, YRC Worldwide, is a North American authority on shipping and is in the position to lead awareness of news coverage and recent industry developments. They started a daily news briefing email and it took off. The only problem was that the emails were cumbersome to build.   Extending the marketing stack with a daily roundup email This […]

If you’re talking about a CRM system, love isn’t usually the first word that comes to mind. It’s not uncommon for CRM to be a source of conflict for sales and marketing teams, and I’ve heard members of both teams question why we spend so much time worrying about our CRM systems.   In an ideal world, Marketing deserves at least a 50% stake in every organization’s CRM system. It’s our source of truth—it’s where everything we need to create a custom experience for our prospects lives. We deserve a […]

If your retail email ROI isn’t generating the highest return of your marketing budget, you might want to take a second look at your strategies. That’s because across all industries, email ROI can be as high as 3,800% (according to the Direct Marketing Association). For retailers who have limited ways to connect with customers, that rate of return is a good goal to set.   A recent report from market intelligence firm Retail Systems Research suggests that even retailers who are good at email could be doing more to improve […]

An engaged alumni base can help higher education marketers tap into a network of advocates that can refer future students, share stories about their experiences, and fundraise for future initiatives they care about. But first, you’ll have to create an alumni relations experience that’s worth engaging with.   How to Use an Alumni Email Series to Engage Post Graduates If you want to truly engage your alumni base with email, you’ll need to ditch the batch-and-blast approach. We’ve pulled together six of the best alumni email series campaigns that can […]

Ah, the holidays—the perfect time of year to cuddle up with an inbox full of offers from your favorite brands.   Thanks to email marketers, holiday shopping has become less stressful and the deals are just as good. This year alone, Black Friday online retail sales pulled in $5.03 billion, which is up almost 17% from last year’s online Black Friday sales. Online retail sales for the 2017 holiday shopping season are expected to break $100 billion.   For digital marketers, these numbers are nothing but good news. The only […]

No one has perfected email marketing. If they have, I hope they are enjoying retirement on a beach and have the urge to pass along their knowledge to the rest of us. But until that box of secrets shows up at our doors, the burden is on us to stay ahead of the ever-evolving preferences of our audiences.   Email marketing isn’t stationary, and what worked last week may not work this week. In truth, it is nearly impossible for an email marketer to know what always works all the […]

I set out to answer an age-old social media question with this blog post: is there any truth to the claim that social media platforms (particularly Facebook) punish brands for posting content from a third-party tool?   I had a plan to answer this question very simply, and it was a question I wanted to clarify for all of us using marketing automation platforms to post content to social. I wanted to state that prior to 2011, the claim that Facebook favored content directly posted to Facebook was true. That […]

Ah, the spam filter: an email marketer’s nemesis. Finding our way through that filter and into the inbox keeps us email marketers on our toes—and away from too many exclamation points. But if you’re following email best practices (like the ones seen here) and still having trouble, you may need to approach the problem through a technical angle.   DKIM’s Role in Deliverability Inbox deliverability is never a guarantee, but understanding how DKIM affects email deliverability can improve your chances of landing in the inbox rather than the spam folder. […]

Marketing departments within healthcare organizations face a unique challenge: balancing the need for personalized communication without running afoul of HIPAA guidelines. Often, the challenge isn’t one of not having enough information, but one of too much – most of which you shouldn’t use. The following is a quick guide to help you organize your email strategy so that it is effective and compliant with HIPAA requirements.   The good news for marketers using the emfluence Marketing Platform is that our software is HIPAA compliant. That means we adhere to a […]

Early on in my career, my peers and I focused a lot on individual keyword bids. If Cost Per Action was too high, lower your bids. If you want a higher volume of traffic, increase your bids! With the increasing availability and sophistication of Bid Automation (which I’ll cover in a later post), I focus very little on individual keyword bids anymore. A Max Cost Per Click by Keyword simply doesn’t matter that much anymore, and a big reason for that is the ability to apply bid adjustments by Audience. […]

It’s never too early to start forecasting what’s going to be ‘the next big thing’ in the digital marketing and tech landscape in 2017. emfluence has compiled trends and expectations from across our agency team members to bring you an array of predictions for what to look for, and more importantly plan for in 2017. The boldest prediction of all? 60% of the time our predictions are right, every time.