Constant Contact Best Practices Blog

If the Who's lackluster performance at halftime Sunday night was good for something — other than promotion of the various CSI franchises — it was that it served as a reminder about one of the most important questions in all of email marketing: Who are you? (Who who, who who)

When your customers and members receive email communications, how do they know the messages are from you and not some other business or organization like yours?

Last week, I wrote a post about adding some fun and interactivity to your communications in the form of a poll. In that blog post, I asked you to vote on who you thought would win the Super Bowl this year. With the big game taking place this weekend, I figured it was a good time to post the results (after all, sharing the results of a poll or survey is a best practice).

By their very nature, events are social interactions. So it’s no surprise that social media networks are one of the best ways to get the word out. These sites let your customers and members interact online before they’re all in a room together. Connections can be made, networking can be done, and your event can be even more engaging. And even better for you: Get people talking, and they'll do the promotion for you.

The Constant Contact Event Marketing product makes it very easy to share your event homepage on sites like Facebook and Twitter — take the URL, shorten it using a site like http://bit.ly/, and then post it on your preferred site. But don’t stop there. Use social media to build buzz and help spread the word. Here are five easy things you can do to promote your event on social media sites.

I’m writing this blog post from the Boston area, where snow in the winter is just a fact of life (in fact, we had some just last night). It’s funny, though: Every time a storm is predicted, people still tend to freak out a bit. For example, there’s always a run on eggs, bread, and milk at the grocery store (one local website has even created a French Toast Alert System to help people gauge how bad the storm will be).

No doubt, business owners all over the area (and the country — after all, Boston is not the only place with snow in the winter) freak out too, because they know no one likes to go out in a storm.

And yet, if people have a good reason to leave their homes (and can do so safely), they often will.

I recently attended a Constant Contact customer event in Washington, D.C., that addressed the topic of Event Marketing, our newest product. The audience consisted mostly of Email Marketing customers and some Online Survey customers. A few of the Online Survey customers were using their surveys to manage registrations and RSVPs for their events, and one of them asked me, “Is there any reason to switch to the Event Marketing product and use the registration system to manage my meetings and events?”

I found this to be a very insightful question. Upon further discussion, it appeared that Online Survey was satisfying this person’s ability to manage events, so why use one over the other? Why should she switch?

Here at the Constant Contact corporate HQ near Boston, we’ve considered the football season over since early January, when the New England Patriots lost their first-round playoff game to the Baltimore Ravens. Alas, the season continued, and we’re now less than two weeks away from the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl presents a great opportunity to add a little interactivity to your email marketing or your website. Why not add a quick poll to ask who your customers and members think will win the big game? Include the link in your email and on social media sites, or post the widget on your business or organization’s website. Here’s an example.

You’ve heard the talk: These days, it’s essential to have some kind of social media presence. So you’ve signed up for a Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn account (or maybe some combination of the three).

You’re already using the sites to extend the effectiveness of your email marketing, but in between issues, you still need to stay top-of-mind with your Followers and Fans. After all, the pace of social media is fast and if you don’t keep up, then you may fall behind.

So what else can you use social media for?

I was talking recently with our New York–based RDD, Wendi Caplan-Caroll, and she was telling me about something she does at her events. When Wendi talks about the importance of providing value in an email communication, she will ask someone in the audience, "So tell me, what do you do?" After the person responds, she says, "So what?"

Now, at first, that might sound like a rude way to reply. But the larger point is: What you do is not as important as what benefits you provide to your customers and members. With that in mind, Wendi coaches attendees to stop focusing on features and to keep the focus of their email content on their unique value. The answer to the question of "So what?" helps them to clarify their benefits.

In email marketing, permission isn’t just important, it’s everything. After all, if someone hasn’t given you his or her explicit permission to send email messages to a specified email address, then your messages will likely be unread — or worse, they could be deemed spam.

How does explicit permission differ from implicit permission? Think about it this way: If you’re at a trade show and you collect people’s business cards in a fishbowl, those people are giving you their permission to contact them. That they want to hear from you is implied by them giving you their cards, but they’re not being specific about how they want to be contacted.

On the other hand, if you put out a sign-up sheet labeled “Sign up for our mailing list,” then anyone who signs up will be giving you his or her explicit permission to send your newsletter and other email communications. There’s no debate about what the person is asking for.

In the world of email marketing, explicit permission is preferred. So how do you build a mailing list that’s explicitly permission-based? Here are some ideas.

If you were to ask my friends, I’ll bet some of them would tell you that I talk too much. And that’s unfortunate, because while I think everything I have to say is important, sometimes my friends just don’t care as much about what I have to say, and they'd rather tell me what they think. (Yes, I can admit it.)

When you’re communicating with your customers, are you listening as often as you’re speaking? Email marketing should be looked at as a two-way dialogue, even if you can’t literally hear the other person replying. When you do all the talking, you miss out on hearing some valuable responses.

If you need some suggestions for how to incorporate feedback into your communications, here are five easy ones.