Get Advice: Spring Cleaning Sweepstakes

[Nick_S]

The sweepstakes is now closed! Thank you to all who participated and we are working on selecting the winner now!

And we’re back! The Community is trying something new and our lovely user base reaps the rewards! Every month we plan to keep the Get Advice Sweepstakes rolling, providing different themes to focus the feedback efforts around. With Spring in full swing, we thought we would encourage everyone to review their Contacts and solicit their peers for advice and/or if you happen to be having a successful streak with managing your contacts, then drop us a line and share your insights!

 

It works like this: First, for your fearless contributions you will be entered for a chance to win a $100 credit on your Constant Contact account!

The sweepstakes will run from April 14, 2021 through May 5, 2021. Once completed we will select one winner at random and notify them!

How to Enter: Visit the thread you are currently in and perform one or more of the following, up to two times maximum:

1. Sharing advice related to contacts management, either independently or in response to another user's request.

1. Requesting assistance with your contacts management, by providing some insight into your current contacts situation. ‘Insight’ is defined by providing the audience details on your current or historical Open Rates and other contacts reporting, examples of your subject lines, and/or short URL to an email campaign, so potential advice givers can assess and give appropriate feedback. Please note: Do not provide account sensitive information, such as number of contacts in the account, specific email addresses, or list names.

Additionally, one participant each week of the contest has the chance to win one bonus entry by having their advice chosen by a panel of moderators (i.e. the Community Team) as exceeding expectations. 'Exceeding expectations' is defined by the subjective standards of the moderators, but is judged by clear instruction, attention to detail, and lengthier than one or two sentences.

The bonus entry will be chosen on the Friday of each week during the course of the Sweepstakes by 4:00 P.M. EST. If there are no entries posted in a given week then we will skip the bonus entry selection for that week.

Here is an ‘exceeding expectations’: “Your Open rate has historically been above 20% but dipped to 8% around November and has stayed there. I looked at the short URL of the email campaign you shared for your November campaign and it looks like your template is a single image containing all the information. Generally, you want to have a balanced image-to-text ratio as a single image email is more likely to end up getting caught in spam filters. Constant Contact actually has an article on this. Have you always been using a single image for your emails?” 

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 Get Advice Sweepstakes: Spring Cleaning 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 May 5, 2021 at 11:59 PM ET. The Sweepstakes is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Khoros, Pinterest, or Twitter.

[debbies8621]

Our opens use to be 12% or more, good by industry standards but lately opens are way down. Business-to-business, so I can't get real funny with the subject lines. I try to do a general interest Monthly email & then split out the subjects with more info throughout the month. I think I lost some of my active subscribers when I switched my CC account. 

[ExecutiveD39]

Hi Debbie, do you also include photos, graphics, or video to catch the readers' attention? The stats show the average person receives 121 emails a day and spends less than 14 seconds reading each email.  Subject lines that create a call to action (i.e. messages like, last call, urgent, limited space, etc.) work well to get an emailed opened, and dynamic content with images and color engage the readers.  

[Nick_S]

Hi @ExecutiveD39,

Thank you for your advice! You make some great points about the behavior of recipients and what tactics might draw their attention. You also got your advice in under the wire, so you are the lucky winner of this week's bonus entry toward the prize! Thank you so much for participating. 

[PlymouthChurch]

Debbie - I'm curious what you meant when you said you "switched your CC account".

If the email looks like it's coming from someone new, they might not know it's still you.  (For example, the sender name used to be "Debbie's Dynamite Donuts" and now it's "DDD Express".)

If what changed was your return email address (debbie@email.com is now ddd @email.com), your recipients might need to add the new address to their address book so it doesn't go into their spam folder.

Either way, I would try sending a cross-over email with a subject line of "we've moved" (or something similar) telling folks about the transition with the name or email.  That might reconnect some folks who were lost.  Good luck!

Crystal

[debbies8621]

Someone else used to handle the emails thru constant contact. When I took over as Marketing Director, I started doing the emails. Long story short, we had to create a new constant contact account. Lost our history and had to re-enter our contact list. It's my belief that I lost some of our more active contacts. 

[FirstNameL459781]

This entry is to confusing.  To much steps.

[Nick_S]

Hi @FirstNameL459781,

I apologize if any instructions seem complicated or are unclear. We actually aimed to streamline it from the previous sweepstakes by keeping it contained to one thread.

To summarize, in order to enter, all you have to do is post here and either:

1) Give your own advice, either directly to another user's request or independently, on how you manage your contacts. Think hints & tips.

2) Request advice by sharing some of the pain points you have when trying to manage your contacts, as @debbies8621 did above.

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Additionally, we are offering a chance at an additional entry once per week. My moderator team and myself will select one user's advice and award them the bonus entry.

In short, you can either ask for advice or give advice on contacts management. And then you will be entered!

I hope this helps. I appreciate your feedback!

[Murphy_Consulting]

Not sure that I see how the example is about contacts or contact management and debbie8621's comment/question doesn't relate to contacts or contact management. So, I am confused as to what you are looking for.

[Nick_S]

Hey @Murphy_Consulting,

You're right, it might seem a little vague how it fits in. Contacts management can be very broad. In this case, @debbie8621 was asking for advice on why her Open rate was dropping, which we do highlight in our instructions as an option to ask for assistance. @ExecutiveD39's advice focused on changes they could make to their email that might help improve their open rate. It does skate the line a bit, as it's focused more on email design, but also suggests subject line additions that might help.

I'd encourage @debbie8621 and others to share a little more insight into how their contacts are organized, too, as it could be something like segmentation might make a big difference!

[PlymouthChurch]

To clean up our list(s), I downloaded the "Least Engaged" report from the Contacts / Insights page.  Then I went through them one-by-one and unsubscribed those names who hadn't had any actual contact with us in 4 years.  It was a time-consuming process, but it feels good to be rid of the 175+ folks who didn't really want our emails but hadn't taken the time to unsubscribe themselves.

I also regularly check the bounced emails, so we weed out the bad emails too.

[DaveR7]

I would suggest instead of unsubscribing your least engaged contacts to simply delete them. Resubscribing a contact is a bit involved where a contact that has been deleted can be added back to your list easily. I have also found that it is common for contacts to not be engaged for long periods of time for many reasons, and express gratitude that I kept reaching out sending the occasional email, even though they did not open, and are quite happy to reengage. The most common comment is that I was staying "in touch".

[CHERYLP146]

I definitely need to do this. Now to find the time to do it.

[ChristinaD249]

I'm just starting out!  I have created a few test templates and imported in content.  I wish the formatting from the import would stick -- it seems I have to go into the email and add the line breaks, bullets, etc. to make it pretty again.

[ChristinaD249]

And I haven't uploaded any contact yet, just typed a few in.

[ALPost-147]

Several years ago I started with Constant Contact. I had been sending a weekly news letter with my personal email. My email list got large enough that I began having problems. I joined CC and their rep talked me thru the simple process of importing my email lists. Additionally, the duplicates were recognized and only sent 1 new email from me. Best move I made from a time savings standpoint and at a $$ I could live with.

[JayA289]

if you receive leads from FB or any other plattform, is really easy to import them to CC, (at least you run your FB campaings trhu CC, they will auto update), the fun part is that you can actually rename any data field when you upload contacts, for easy recognition and for import back on another platform, we use podio as well, so  we receive leads from FB, upload the lists to CC, engage them via email if they don't pick up the phone, and import the leads with their repective follow up on podio. 

[vjrussolaw]

We review our unsubscribe list weekly. We have an auto notification come in from Constant Contact and we check that list with our client base. We want to make sure our clients are receiving our content and most of the time the unsubscribe is done by accident. 

[samj072]

Nick are we automatically entered?

[Nick_S]

Hello @samj072,

Yes. We are monitoring this thread and keeping track of participants!

[ChantelB38]

Hi I run a local ice cream truck and I was wondering what can I do to get more of my email subscribers to come to my business.

I also need help a better open rate and click rate for my emails I send out.