Blogs

In this month’s issue of Hints & Tips, Donna Glick, a senior manager in Constant Contact’s product strategy group, discussed some of the more important elements of great email design. There was plenty that didn’t make it into the article, so I wanted to share some of the other things we discussed.

What is the most common type of survey you conduct? Share your answer in our latest poll. Once you vote, you will instantly get to see how other small businesses and organizations have voted, and you will know how your answer compares. Enjoy!

A friend recently called me in a panic. She had just sent out her email campaign and found some typos after the fact. She was so embarrassed. What should she do? I told her to take a deep breath and use this as an opportunity to show her customers that she is human. This would bring her closer to her readers, and create a more loyal customer base.

I’m guessing my friend wasn’t the first person to include errors in her email message. What should you do if this happens to you?

Part 3: Plan and execute follow up actions to strengthen customer relationships and have a significant impact on your organization’s success. 

You've uncovered your baseline numbers, and you have discovered where your strengths and weaknesses are. Now it's time to begin the cycle of change so you can reap the rewards of getting and analyzing your customers' opinions. Here's how:

Part 2: Find out what your audience is really telling you

Last time, we established a baseline so you can quickly and easily measure the effects of changes you make to your business. But do you know what your audience's message really is?

Analyze your online survey results to identify actions that will improve your baseline numbers. Here are some suggestions for how to do that:

In our most recent issue of Email Marketing Hints & Tips, we discussed some deliverability basics and some ways that you can avoid being branded a spammer. We received some great feedback about the issue, but some of our readers responded that they were confused because it looked like some of their emails weren’t being delivered at all. How do we explain this?

Part 1: Understanding what you're seeing and finding a starting point

Small businesses and organizations that run smoothly, profitably, and efficiently know the answers to these kinds of questions:  

What about our offerings have our audience extremely pleased?
What existing or new topics/products/services are our audience most interested in?
Where will investing our time/money yield the biggest payoff?
What changes can we make that will get our audience engaging with us more often?
What is the competition doing that we are not doing, and that has our audience taking notice?

The best place to get these answers for your organization is your own audience -- whether for you that means your customers, clients, members, or donors. And as more and more small businesses and organizations are discovering, online surveys are a very simple and affordable way to gain the opinion of the majority of your customers quickly. Once your online survey is out in an email or on your website, as soon as you can say, "Badda bing, badda boom," your answers are in! The ability to receive instantly computed results is one of the great bonuses of getting your feedback online.

The feedback you need is easy to attain, but once you have it, then what?

Have you ever used skip logic? Share your answer in our latest poll. Once you vote you will instantly get to see how other small businesses and organizations have voted so far, and you will know if you are in the minority or the majority. Enjoy!

Are you challenged with retaining members? Experiencing less attendance at your events? If so, it’s unfortunately no surprise. Because of the down economy, fewer employees are receiving subsidized membership and event fees. According to the American Society of Association Executive (ASAE)’s 2008 Operating Ratio Report, meeting registrations account for 12 percent of associations’ revenue, while meeting expenses are 11 percent of their annual budget. So suffice it to say, small changes in attendance can greatly affect any association’s profitability. (You can see more about the affect of the economy on membership here, in another recent study by the ASAE.)

You may be asking, what can we do to face our challenges of retention and profitability? It’s critically important to make sure you’re on the same page with your members and to give them frequent opportunities to share their changing wants, needs and concerns. With this information, you will have the knowledge to consistently have very satisfied members. And online surveys can be a big help in understanding what your members think and how successful your events are without breaking your budget. (See how online surveys have helped this member organization.)

Here are two ways to stay in tune with your members and keep them involved:  

As we were planning and developing Constant Contact AppConnect, one of the “real world” case studies we routinely circulated around the office was the Golf Course Management Application. We talked about the difficulties that a user (a golf course manager, for example) of such an application has when trying to manage contacts and members in the software and then communicate with them using Constant Contact.

Two applications, both in need of the same set of data. 

We discussed that there were “pain points” that led to frustration for the users as well, and how our APIs would help to alleviate these pain points. We verbalized the golf course management app because it was, in our minds, an easy story to tell. Most people understand the business problem, and many also have personal experiences with golf courses (not all are worth bragging about, however -- especially mine).