Fall Into The Holidays Sweepstakes!

[Nick_S]

The sweepstakes is now closed! Thank you so much for everyone who participated and shared their insights. We really appreciate it. We will be randomly selecting a winner soon!

Fall Into The Holidays!

It’s hard to believe the holidays are fast approaching! It’s the time of year where most businesses and nonprofits are rolling out the red carpet for their patrons. But with so many organizations vying for attention, how does one rise above the rest? That’s what we’re here to find out!

Well, at Constant Contact we have some ideas, but we’d rather hear from our illustrious small business owners and nonprofit organizers! Which is why we are back again with another excellent sweepstakes to entice our lovely Community members to share what their marketing goals are for the next couple of months! 

How to Enter: Reply on this Community article with an anecdote about what your goals and strategies are to produce a successful winter holiday business season! For example, you can share:

• Email template design ideas
• Subject line ideas
• Communication frequency
• Holidays you will focus your marketing efforts around (Black Friday, anyone?)
• Contact collection strategies

These suggestions aren’t exhaustive! They are just some ideas to get the ol’ brainstorm raging.

If you’re in need of some inspiration, or some assistance, don’t hesitate to check out all the awesome services our Professional Services (it’s in the name!) team offer! For example, they offer animated template packs, premium template design, and more!

What is the prize? We are offering up a $100 credit on your Constant Contact account!

The sweepstakes will run from October 22, 2021 to November 19, 2021. Once completed, we will select a winner for each prize at random and notify them!

If you are the winner we will notify you by the contact email address listed on your Constant Contact account, so make sure it is up-to-date! Thank you.

Questions? Let us know below!

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*No Purchase Necessary. The Constant Contact Community Fall Into The Holidays is open to legal residents of the 50 United States (and D.C), 18 years or older. For Official Rules, visit here. Promotion ends on November 19, 2021 at 11:59 PM ET. The Sweepstakes is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Khoros, Pinterest, or Twitter.

[LisaM429]

Strategies?   Doing business has so changed these past 14 months, not sure what works.  Not sure if product will make it in time.  Just saying, will be throwing the kitchen sink at all media and ways to connect with customers!  Whew...

[BeckyB1]

We are promoting holiday shopping earlier this year in anticipation of shipping challenges. We are also being creative with using video to engage our readers and share via our Constant Contact lists.

[FirstNameL46397]

We are using a social media revamp to get followers' attention with the hope of gaining new contacts.

[EileenA12]

We are hosting a Holiday Open House, debuting local artisans, Christmas Candles, Locally Made Spa Soaps, Flickering Canvas Prints, and lots of beautiful apparel gift ideas. We are offering specials that day, including a raffle, and posting on our website and social media platforms as well. Last year was a huge hit, during the height of the pandemic, and the only thing we did differently from normal, was offer goodies individually wrapped and limit the number of people in our shop at one time. Everyone understood and we had a great turnout!

[SamirG70]

For the holiday season, we plan on creating custom graphics such as animated snowfall over our model home units (we work in real estate). Also thinking about animated steam over a cup of coffee or hot chocolate, with the subject lines including snowflake or snowman emojis to capture the reader's attention for a higher open rate. We want to provide more than just offers in our emails, maybe giveaways for our tenants (target only our tenants) and start a "what are you thankful for" question that they can respond to, and share with other tenants. Hope this gives others in our field some ideas! - Jacqueline | Marketing Specialist at Paramount Assets

[Romantic-Wedding-CT-Officiant]

As a Justice of the Peace, I try to provide help to everyone who calls, texts, or emails.  As a wedding officiant, my business does not fit into any of Constant Contact's categories.

In each October, wedding professionals (please do not call us "vendors"!  we don't sell our services like hot dog sellers) are between wedding season and engagement season. This year recovery from the COVID-19 Pandemic is slow, and things are beginning to look up for 2022.  Because we're not getting calls, etc., from couples who want to have a wedding (as opposed to getting a few calls for elopements), now is our season to tweak our websites and other marketing, such as email.

An anniversary email (Campaign) goes out two days before a Contact's anniversary through Constant Contact.  That helps to keep me top-of-mind in case one of their friends is planning on getting married.

There are other Campaigns for sending answers to FACs, which lightens my email burden during wedding season.

I'd be happy to share thoughts with other SMBs who are NOT wedding officiants.  Each of us needs all the advantages we can obtain legally.

Good luck to all,

Ernest Adams

RomanticWeddingCT.Com (Contact form on website)

[OlympicPeninsulaTourismCommission]

We are running a sweepstakes of our own right now which will gather new email addresses for our monthly newsletter this holiday season. We ran a similar sweepstakes last fall with great results. The entrants who opted to sign up for our newsletter have been consistently showing over 30% open rate all year. 

[JessicaV128]

We love all opportunities that Do Good and Give Back. Those opportunities often lead to relationships that lead to customers. Our strategy is to network and look for places we can live up to our name Karma. Good Karma is always a good thing. The best things in life come from giving. 

[NewBeginMaine]

My strategy to make this a successful holiday season is actually really simple.  All year I have been working with the mentality of "If you stay ready, you ain't gotta get ready."  Leading up to this season, I have been editing my contacts to make sure we have all the right updated information and that they are subscribed to the lists that matter to them.  We are a non-profit centered around improving the lives of the homeless youth in our state so getting the message out is massively important.  We send updates about shelter options, weather advisory notices, and updates about getting supplies like blankets or tents.  If an important campaign is missed or sent to the wrong person, it can make a huge difference to the youth they serve.  

[DebbieL2]

There are some super ideas here - thanks to everyone for sharing!

Since I do not discount, and yet over the 15 years of my practice, I offer consideration/appreciation for loyalty and repeat engagements, and a monthly offering both personally and professionally, as well as 1 pro-bono engagement a month, I will have a "Thankful November" and offer the first three clients to reach out to me with a charity or start-up to receive a complimentary keynote/talk will be surprised with the "gift" from my client. The subject line will be "Award a Non-Profit with a Complimentary Talk for Thankful November". 🎙

And, because my business is (gratefully) quite booked with speaking engagements, teaming/training and performance coaching, and the offering of strategy/facilitation has not been requested much when it is often booked in October for November, December and January, I am going to offer a Business Strategy Session package of Not too Late to Prepare for 2022, with two 1/2 days or 1 full day of strategy or planning for 2022 at 2019 rates, as people are nostalgic for 2019 as they face/anticipate 2022. The subject line will be "Plan for the Future with Rates from the Past Holiday Appreciation". 

Cheers to everyone having a safe, fun, productive holiday season!!😁

[ValleyCommunityDevelopment]

I work at a nonprofit where there is a lot of focus on year-end giving! I anticipate Giving Tuesday and the approach of the year's end to be the biggest focuses of our marketing efforts as 2021 wraps up. 

[JenniferC26506]

Our motto is "Planning the Spectrum of your Life" and we focus on our clients. Every holiday season we remind our clients that they have the availability to gift financially to family members. We anticipate using this platform this year as a thank you to our clients and a reminder to make sure that they have their financial affairs in order before the end of the year.

We also run a holiday giveaway, and although we mail postcards to our clients for this, we are starting to obtain more and more clients who have email addresses, and they provide them to us by entering our holiday giveaway! We give away golf balls, travel mugs, and other items, as a thank you. The clients also provide a charity of their choice and we donate to the winners' charities. We utilize the mailing to update Constant Contact because we can get UPDATED email addresses to create new lists! 

[FMFD]

We revamped our newsletter with bolder colours to catch the eye of members, highlight the value of our content; this will hopefully smooth our annual membership dues renewals. Although we always try to provide very high value content, it is of particular importance that it's noticed during this time of year. We also have a website redesign in progress, which will hopefully further boost our visibility.

[WilliamT595]

We're a volunteer non-profit trying to get back onto our feet following COVID.  So we're sending out several high energy, bright photo prominant, announcements about our events.  Our goal is to revivie enthusiasm, optimism and engagement with the community.  

[DianneB6121]

I plan to focus on all the 'holidays' for the rest of the year - Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas, Small Business Saturday, Giving Tuesday, Cyber Monday and anything else I find on the calendar 😉

[HarlemArts]

I have a non-profit organization that promotes the arts of all kinds in history, current and future works. We are using constant contact to raise funds for #GivingTuesday and for our Holiday Market that will be open every Sat in Oct - Dec this year! We also are using it to gain volunteers and memberships to assist with classes and funding our Bloomin' Arts Festival! We love this email software ad we appreciate the fact y'all have added the ability to add our social media sites AND flyers!

I love the pics and the addition of Canvas! I was using it on the backend before Constant Contacts!

[MCCMarketing]

We have been ramping up our social media posts, specifically focusing on our teammates and showing the world what we can do! We also made a few tweaks to our company website and have been making sure to direct people to our website through most of our social media posting.

[JerryFaught]

Since our last Constant Contact person quit and didn't help the new person (me) I was on my own.  I am the newly appointed Communications Director at the Rotonda American Legion Post 113 in Florida.  I'm not a "beginner" on the computer,  I can find my way around (I love the "back" button) and I have a son-in-law as a "computer master"(he helps with the really hard stuff).  I have redesigned our webpage through your program and in the process of linking the old with the new one.  I make all the flyers for events at our American Legion, and boy, are we busy this time of year.  We have a lot to catch up on with our communications with our members (since the last one dropped out unexpectedly).  They have been very appreciative of their emails.  Communication is vital to our members. Vibrant colors, and stand out titles with cute pictures to capture the eye are a big hit (I wish you had more free animated ones).  Our goal is to get more and more emails to send out and opened to our members and guests to keep them up to date and informed. The end of the year holidays are my favorite time to make up these colorful flyers. I can truly say, your program is easy to use. "Holiday excitement Coming", "Let's get stuffed together"(Thanksgiving), "Thank a Volunteer Today", "Shhh, Don't keep This Secret", Thanking a Veteran is in our nature", Children and Youth always keep us young", "Take a page from our Children and Youth".  These a just a few of our headlines to come this year.

[PMRW55066]

After our museum was closed for more than 140 days last year, we have been working on re-opening and welcoming visitors back to the museum. We focus our fundraising this time of year on Give to the Max Day, a state-wide day of giving held the third Thursday in November. We work on a variety of platforms for this - Constant Contact, Facebook, Instagram, our website, our page on GiveMN's website, email blasts, newspaper articles, and direct mail. This is the biggest fundraiser of the year for us, and gets us through the slower winter months. We have generally had a board match challenge on a 1:1 basis. This year we are doing a 2:1 match; current and former board members will match $2 for every $1 raised, up to $15,000.

[StevenH433]

We're planning to start a weekly digital newsletter next month, sent on the same day at the same time every week. Consistency is key!