How The Blank Canvas Co. Mastered the Art of Staying Connected with Constant Contact

Erica Meunier, founder and artist behind The Blank Canvas Co., always knew she wanted to find a way to bring creativity into her career. She just didn’t know it would mean building a business of her own. 

After graduating with a degree in business marketing, Erica spent years working in brand and product marketing while creating art on the side. What started with $20 and $40 commissions for friends and family led her to Boston’s makers markets and eventually grew into The Blank Canvas Co., a Boston-based creative brand filled with colorful, maximalist art Erica describes as being made “for the bold at heart.”

After two pandemic-era layoffs, Erica decided to see if she could turn that side hustle into her full-time job. In 2021, she gave herself six months to make it work — and she hasn’t looked back since.

Today, Erica sells her artwork as prints, stickers, greeting cards, and more both online and at makers markets throughout Boston. 

As The Blank Canvas Co. grew from a side hustle into Erica’s full-time business, she’s had to become more intentional about where she spends her time. She needed ways to reach people buying her work, stay connected with those who discovered her at markets, and continue growing the community around her art.

With a background in marketing, Erica knew email could help. The problem was finding an email marketing tool she actually wanted to use.

Walking away from email marketing

Erica had tried using ActiveCampaign earlier in her business, but the platform never felt like the right fit for her highly visual, product-based brand.

“It wasn’t aesthetic. It really was just a tool to connect …I felt very uninspired by it.”

Creating an email could take hours as Erica tried to manipulate the design into something that she felt represented her brand. Even after putting in the work, she often wasn’t excited about what she was sending.

“It took too long. I can’t even quantify it. I just feel like it [the emails] never looked how I wanted it to look. I was just sending it to check the box and be like ‘I sent an email.’”

Eventually, she stopped sending emails altogether because it no longer felt worth the effort. 

“There were three or four years in between where I just wasn’t sending emails because I was like ‘I’m paying for platforms that I don’t like and I’m not using them and I’m not actually sending the emails.’”

Instead, Erica poured much of that marketing energy into social media, particularly Instagram. There she shared everything from new artwork and product launches to behind-the-scenes reels and other content, as well as promotions designed to drive people to her online store. But creating content for social media took time and even with an established following, there was no guarantee her audience was actually seeing what she posted.

Giving email another chance

In 2025, Erica was introduced to Constant Contact through the scholarship program offered during Snowport, Boston’s annual holiday market. Through the program and Constant Contact’s ongoing partnership with the makers community, she got to know the people behind the platform and saw firsthand how Constant Contact supported small businesses. That relationship gave Erica a reason to give email marketing another try.

That support extended beyond the market and into Erica’s day-to-day use of Constant Contact. She worked with Constant Contact’s professional services team, who helped her build campaigns, answered questions, and walked her through how to do things herself so she could repeat them the next time. 

After years away from email, Erica began to see what had been missing from her marketing.

Making email feel like The Blank Canvas Co.

One of the biggest changes for Erica was simply how much easier creating an email became. 

She built templates for the types of emails she sent regularly, including newsletters and product-focused campaigns. Once the upfront work was done, she no longer had to recreate everything from scratch each time she wanted to reach her audience. 

“Now that I have those, it’s rinse and repeat because I can use them again.”

For someone who admits she can easily spend half a day getting caught up in design details, that repeatable process matters. 

“[Templates] have made my life so much easier to just be able to replicate it and just switch out the images that I’m creating in Canva and changing my newsletter headline from April newsletter to May newsletter.”

But efficiency was only part of what had been missing from her previous email marketing experience.  As an artist and marketer, Erica also wanted the emails she sent to look like an extension of the Blank Canvas Co. 

That’s where the Canva integration became particularly valuable. Erica can create graphics using her brand fonts, colors, and visual style in Canva and bring them directly into her Constant Contact emails. 

“The ability to integrate Constant Contact with Canva has been really great. It’s easy to resize everything and it’s easy to make it branded and make it look like me.”

It’s a significant change from the experience that caused her to give up on email in the first place. 

“There wasn’t that option with ActiveCampaign. So it looked ugly. It was clunky. I would spend hours trying to manipulate it to look how I wanted it to look. It would never look how I wanted it to.”

Now, Erica says, “Constant Contact has saved me a lot of time and it’s just made me more excited.”

Building a community beyond the algorithm

Making email easier to send has allowed Erica to focus on what she wanted from the channel in the first place: a better way to stay connected with her community. 

For years, much of that responsibility fell on social media, particularly Instagram. But, the problem she ran into was that she could put hours into creating content and still have no guarantee that the people following her would actually see it.

“Sometimes I’ll spend an hour or two making reels and content and no one ever sees it,” she said. “You’re really relying on an algorithm that you have no control over.”

Email gives her another way to reach people who have actively chosen to hear from her. 

Her emails now average an open rate of around 38%, which is 5% above her industry average. 

“The biggest thing for me is just seeing how much more impact something in someone’s personal email can have.”

Erica doesn’t see email as a replacement for social media. Instead, it gives her another way to reach the community she’s already building. 

“Having them all in the email list as well gives them a second touch point to automatically get information and communications from me if I’m not posting on Instagram. So it’s like a second touchpoint for them to come to my website or get to know me.”

And oftentimes, that email community begins with the people Erica meets face-to-face.

Turning market visitors into lasting connections

Markets remain an important part of The Blank Canvas Co.  They give Erica the opportunity to meet and talk with customers face-to-face. In the past, Erica might tell someone to follow her on Instagram or hand them a business card and hope they stay connected. 

Now, Erica uses a QR code at her booth that directs shoppers to a Constant Contact landing page where they can join her email list and receive 15% off their first online order. She uses the same offer on her website and Instagram, giving people multiple ways to stay connected. 

Over the past 12 months, her contact list has grown 75%. And during Snowport, Erica says she saw a “massive spike” in signups. 

But the impact of that growth becomes especially clear after a market is over.

Erica remembers talking with shoppers who weren’t ready to buy while standing in her booth, only to see them join her list and return a week later to purchase the print they had been considering.

“Constant Contact really gives me that opportunity to stay connected with them and to give them those touchpoints to come back to my website if they’ve forgotten the card or they never followed on Instagram. It’s a much more direct way to stay connected to them outside of just the first sale, too.”

Connecting her emails to Shopify

As Erica grows those relationships, the Shopify integration helps connect her email marketing directly to the ecommerce side of the business. 

When she has a new product launch or sale, the Shopify integration allows her to include products directly in her emails, so subscribers can click on the products that catch their eye and go directly to her online store to make a purchase.

“It’s been honestly very easy, which is great.” 

This connection is already translating into revenue. The Blank Canvas Co. currently generates about $83 in revenue per email sent with the Shopify integration. 

Bringing her marketing and artist brains together

Erica regularly reviews the reporting in Constant Contact to see the open and click-through rates of her emails to understand what is resonating with her audience and what she should change. If an open rate is lower than expected, she considers whether the send time or subject line could be the problem. If people open but don’t click, she looks more closely at the content. 

“I’m able to figure out what those trigger points are that drive it up or down and then make changes to my next email to make it more impactful.”

She also uses the heatmaps in Constant Contact to understand what people are clicking within an email. One thing she’s learned? Her photos are getting more engagement than text. “I’m like, okay, more photos, less text.”

Combined with Shopify data, those insights help Erica understand what people are interested in, what brings them to her website, and ultimately what leads them to make a purchase. This is where both sides of her background finally come together. 

“This is where my marketing and art brain connect to be like, ‘okay, i made this beautiful thing, but did people actually engage with it?’”

Building on what works

Erica still sees her email marketing as something she’s growing into. After spending years without sending emails at all, she made it a goal this year to send at least one newsletter a month. Now, she has the templates and processes in place to do that without spending hours creating every campaign.

More importantly, she has an audience that has chosen to stay connected. “I know that people are right here and they’re engaged and they opted in.”

As The Blank Canvas Co. continues to grow, Erica wants to continue finding more people who connect with her work, create new pieces for existing collectors, and grow the business without losing the balance that made owning her own business appealing in the first place. 

Email has become one way to make that growth more manageable. Instead of relying on an algorithm or hoping someone remembers the business card they picked up at a market, Erica is building a community she can continue to turn to. 

“Constant Contact is helping me build and foster relationships with people in Boston and beyond.”