Change is hard—however it usually leads to a better solution. Your Email Marketing subscription has evolved. Take the time to learn some of the new tools and design changes that your Email Marketing tool has added and start using them. If you don’t have an email marketing subscription, take a free test drive on Constant Contact by setting up a trial account here. I think you will be impressed. If you do have a Constant Contact account, here are some tips on navigating and updating your campaigns to ensure you are growing your lists with full reporting benefits.
- Are you using the latest features of your email marketing program? If you have been copying old email templates, events or landing pages, you are missing some great new features that make your email and event marketing tool much more efficient. Email Marketing programs have evolved and, in some cases, (like Constant Contract) they now provide features like including a more effective AI tool and easy to design autoresponders in your email marketing program. You can now use their campaign builders that integrate multi-channel campaigns, creating templates and content along with suggesting scheduled social media posts and branded invites for you when you set up an event or start a new email. These and many other design tools are available now for new campaigns and events only—not past legacy templates.
- Is your email marketing getting delivered from your email associated with your website? If you did not yet authenticate your email address associated with your website, chances are that your email provider set up a new email address using their website to send your email marketing. Your subscribers may not recognize that address and that can affect your open and click-thru rate since your emails are coming from a different email address. Go into your program and authenticate your email address and post the code into your domain servers to authenticate your website email address.
- Privacy changes have changed some of the data that is automatically added to your Contact Management System (CMS) in your email marketing program. Particularly check your last subscribers and event attendees to see if their contact information is part of their Contact file within your email marketing program. If you use an event registration, you may need to upload any information you collected for your event into your email marketing program if you want that information added to your CMS.
- Are your email sign-up landing pages working? If you set up your newsletter sign-up or other landing pages long ago, they may not be mobile responsive formatting. In addition, if you used an email marketing sign-up app, you many need to update that app on your website for it to work correctly. Go to the sign-up landing page section of your email marketing program and look at the latest sign-ups you have received. Compare them to the past two years and frequency of sign-up to see if any of those forms need updating. I suggest creating new mobile responsive sign-up forms or landing pages to replace your old sign-ups. Custom landing pages offer many more features to incentivize a sign-up.
- Constant Contact has increased their formatting tools to include automatic branding. Once you set it up (it will grab graphics from your website or you can upload them), the program will copy your branding, colors and main images on all the campaigns you create moving forward. You can also change the footer on your emails and remove the Constant Contact logo. You cannot use this feature on old email templates or old event layouts, but it will bring in the images for any new campaigns you create from templates—saving you time and keeping your templates branded consistently.
- The AI feature that helps you create content works great for all the new campaigns, including campaign builder multi-channel campaigns that create email, events, landing pages, social media posts and SMS text marketing for you once you identify your goals. While you may want to tweak the content, the AI tool will save you time and help you write more compelling content and target your message to the right digital tool.
- Did you know that Constant Contact has a new Premium subscription that includes their add-on products along with all their other tools? Get a much more efficient autoresponder that is easily integrated with your ecommerce website to help automatically segment content based on past customer behavior. To boost this tool, they have included SMS Texting and sign-up tools along with better reporting and Dynamic content to be more effective. The AI content generator and multi-channel set up really saves time. Premium subscriptions include Facebook Lookalike ad targeting and Google ads manager to streamline your advertising campaigns using more AI. Premium also includes their SEO tool that helps you improve your website SEO with recommendations on how to improve your website search results.
Click here to try Constant Contact which provides tools for trackable Email Marketing, AI content & campaign writing, Landing Page creation, SMS Text Marketing, Event Marketing, Social Media Scheduling & Posting and simple Drip Marketing Campaigns— all integrated in one solution with 3 package options.
If you need help with your marketing strategy or help designing, critiquing or improving your marketing plan, contact Tailor-Made Advertising here or call them at 310-791-6300 to keep your organization thriving.
Liz Harsch is the owner of Tailor-Made Advertising in Torrance, CA. Her firm provides marketing, training and consulting to identify marketing and media alternatives for business owners. As an experienced Marketing Director, Media Planner, Liz has trained small business owners for Constant Contact, SCORE, SBDC, SBA, Cities, MWD and County outreach partners plus many Chambers of Commerce for over 25 years. She can be reached at her Torrance, CA, office at 310-791-6300 or by email at liz@adteamla.com. Visit tailormadeadvertising.com for more information.
