The tips shared above are spot-on. Remember to keep the message simple and include enough call-to-action buttons for your audience to click and get information easily. Don’t make your reader work to understand your message. Constant Contact’s templates are great in that they have clean designs and easy to read fonts. Use them as a starting point.   Know your audience when designing your email. For our technical clients, our emails are designed very cleanly, our graphics provide technical information concisely and we include videos and downloadable brochures since we know those elements get the most response from our clients’ technical customers.   For some of our other clients, such as those in recreation or retail industries, we create emails for our clients that are colorful, with more images and easily digestible blocks of information. We sometimes incorporate small gifs for eye-catching effects. Gifs can be created in Canva (which Constant Contact links to) but they need to be used sparingly and need to be well executed.   Reach out if you have any questions. I’m always here to help. ... View more

Thank you for the link. I see that you are balancing the dark blocks at the top and the bottom with a white background for the information in between. It looks good, but as you mentioned, it can present a problem when viewing in dark screen mode. One solution would be to avoid using a black background for the entire top portion of the email.  You could have the top bar with the logo be black and the body with Tommy’s image in white. That would still provide the balance in your design. Direct Your Focus could also be in black. In addition, choose a color for the background in Constant Contact that contrasts a bit with the white, perhaps a light grey, so when your email is viewed on a desktop there isn’t a sea of white showing around the body of the email. Because this is an email introducing your audience to Exhibit Craft, other suggestions to consider are: Add contact information at the top of the email so your audience doesn’t have to scroll down and hunt for a way to contact you. Include one video from your YouTube account to show off the exhibits such as this one https://youtu.be/WqQw5sTX400?feature=shared or your most recent https://youtu.be/TseX3t_lHhU?feature=shared Offer a promotion to incentivize your audience. Add more CTA buttons to link and drive traffic to your website: Show a few images with completed exhibits so your audience can see the fantastic results. The gif you have included is very fast and difficult to register. The images also include the exhibits prior to completion. You have a great photo gallery on your website. Show the completed images. (Drive home the idea that this is what you will get when you work with us.) Include a button to “View More Exhibits” and link to the gallery page on your website. To spark further interest and another opportunity to drive traffic to your website, link to a blog post from your website. Include a few lines and a button to “Read More” I hope this is helpful. Feel free to schedule a call to discuss this further and learn about how Solutions for Growth can help you achieve your marketing goals. ... View more

A very high bounce rate can mean a number of things: The list has a lot of invalid or incorrect email addresses or they are old. If you're using purchased or scraped email lists, they might contain a lot of invalid or inactive addresses. The subject line might be triggering a filter. You can use Constant Contact’s subject line checker that appears below the Subject line field or use a free subject line tester such as https://www.omnisend.com/subject-line-tester/ Constant Contact has a great feature that identifies emails that are “Recommended for Removal.” These are suspended, non-existent and undeliverable bounce types that should be removed because they are unlikely to become active emails again. We usually see only a small number of emails that are identified as such and we use this to clean our client’s list. Here is a video that explains the feature – it is very helpful. https://youtu.be/E3Vsn7UAfF8?feature=shared If we see an unusually high bounce rate for our clients, we often look further into the reasons why and work with Constant Contact’s deliverability team. Our clients do not generally have extremely high bounce rates.  If you are experiencing an unusually high number of bounces that you haven’t experienced before, there may be an underlying reason that needs to be examined. If we can be of any help to clean up your email list, please reach out. ... View more

Good question. There could be a few reasons why your open rates are decreasing. If you would like to provide a link to a recent email, I can give you some personal suggestions. In the meantime, here are some ideas that will help: Make sure your subject line is compelling. It’s the “front door”to your email. Personalize it or include emojis when they make sense. Mention an exclusive offer or information that benefits the reader. For our clients, we sometimes include a local event or recipe in the preheader to spark interest. Test different days and times for sending emails. Mix it up. Send on a weekend or evening. You may be surprised at the results. The content of your emails may be too similar and no longer resonating with your audience. Review your content, include a promotion, an interesting article, new information. Redesign your template. Sometimes the look and feel of an email becomes stale if used for too long. Ensure your design is mobile-friendly. Regularly add new email subscribers to your email list. Add a pop up to your website to attract new email addresses. Reach out to me if you have any questions. I'm happy to help. ... View more

Hi John, you can certainly create a registration form, but the moment you are collecting a credit card, you need to have the form on your website and within Payments Card Industry (PCI) compliance (a set of technical and operational standards that businesses must follow to protect cardholder data). The best approach is to use your Constant Contact account by creating great emails that lead people to that website. You can create a form on your website using several tools ranging from WooCommerce to PayPal and when you use such tools, they take care of the PCI compliance. By doing it that way, you also avoid the concern that people may have of entering credit card information in a "generic" form.  Constant Contact's sign up forms are ideal to collect non-PCI compliance information and they are a smart way to grow your list. If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to reach out. ... View more