Read the transcript below
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Constant Contact community demo or walk through.
You might already be a part of the Constant Contact community.
You might be hearing about it for the first time. But today is just a sort of walk through to tell you about all the advantages and features available to you on the Constant Contact community.
So in this session, we have a little bit of an agenda. I'll be giving you a brief overview of the community, how to navigate, registering, logging in, setting up your profile, and finally, how to engage in the community.
So first off, welcome to the home page of the community.
The address is community dot constant contact dot com.
You can also find it through Google searches, or you can also find it linked in our main website.
On the home page, you'll see a little bit about welcome and all the things sort of available to you, ideas, learn from marketing experts, connect with other small businesses.
You could see the current number of users online, the number of active discussions happening, and the number of problems solved or users' questions that have been marked as answered.
There's also a net little more of a navigation bar at the top here. You can introduce yourself, ten webcast, ask a question, get advice, go in a group, and my rewards.
We have featured content, kind of at the higher one of the higher points of the community home page.
Anything that's going on in the community from upcoming events to announcements, news, will be featured here. So if there's something more prominent that we think should be brought to your attention, we'll feature it here for you.
We have a get involved area, which serves similar to most social media feeds. All the latest discussions, questions, posts are all brought to you right here.
You get a little avatar image, the author, the date and time of a post, as well as the title of the post. You could see the number of views, number of comments, number of likes.
On the right hand side, you get a quick, glance at upcoming webinars we might have on the community, and we are updating this constantly. So always feel free to check back.
We have groups you can join, and we also have a great podcast series called be a marketer by Dave Charest where he has a lot of guests on his podcast talking about various marketing, small business, nonprofit, business needs. So how can we better market new in person classes?
How many follow ups should occur after the first email? These are really great, you know, podcasts to listen to if you're into podcasts.
So at the top is our main navigation.
The community is open to the public, which means you don't have to be a member to browse the community, read it, but you do have to have a Constant Contact account to log in, which will allow you to engage in the community. What does that mean? Like other posts, reply to posts, ask questions.
And signing up is free.
So if you're not a member yet, you can click this sign up free button in the top right here, and it'll just ask you for your email, password, first name, last name, organization, and your phone number.
It asks for that, obviously, for, multifactor authentication, you know, keeping your account more secure.
If you already currently have a Constant Contact account, all you have to do is log in with the same account credentials you use to log in to Constant Contact.
So you would just input the same email address, and password that you use to log in to the Constant Contact account.
So you can see here, I clicked log in. I'm in product. One of the first steps I suggest to all users is to update update your community screen name.
So I'll come to the top right here. I'll click account settings, And once account settings load, I'm gonna go to account details and hit edit.
And I can update my community screen name right here.
When you first join the community, you will get a randomly assigned community screen name. It won't be your business name or, the primary account name on your account. It'll be randomized, so I suggest you can update it to your, business name, nonprofit's name, your name, whatever it may be. I just recommend not sharing any, confidential information in your community screen name because it will be publicly visible.
So once you update that, you have a new community screen name. You'll hit save.
Welcome to the community.
I'll hit log in, and this will be linked to my Constant Contact account.
You could see the sign up free and login buttons are gone. Instead, I have a profile here.
Next sort of step I recommend for you is updating your profile.
And what I mean by that is updating your profile pictures.
At the start, you will have a randomized profile picture. It'll be a, an avatar basically of an animal or architecture, food, hobbies.
I like to make mine a bit more personal, so I upload an actual picture of me as one of the community managers for, Constant Contact.
You can use your business logo if you want, family photo, logo, whatever you prefer or just a headshot of you.
So I do recommend updating that when you come in. You can also update your time zone, the language, if you ever wanna just do a little bit more customization for your profile.
So now that we're logged in, you'll see here in the navigation, we have a few areas for you to start.
We have get help, which is a great area for if you have any questions, related to your Constant Contact account, you need some support, we have the support forum.
We have FAQs, so everything you need to know about the most frequently asked questions of the community.
You'd be surprised how many questions are have already been asked. Like, as you saw before, we have over twenty six hundred successfully answered.
So your question might have been asked already and successfully answered, and you don't even have to ask. You could actually find the answer in one of our FAQs.
You could use search, how do I, how do I unsubscribe landing page. That might be what I'm looking for.
So we recommend searching before you ask a question, and this will bring in content from every area of the community. Questions, ideas, events, blogs, whatever it may be.
Then we have our actual questions and discussions area.
This is where all the questions are happening within the constant contact community related to all these categories, AI, apps and integrations, email, landing pages, my account, reporting, sign up forms.
And this is just like the home page. You could see it's brought in by a feed. It's populated by the most recent, by date and time. You could see there's a few pinned to the top here, which is just sort of announcements from, the community.
These change from time to time, but usually, you'll see at least two sort of pins at the top here. And then beneath that live, you'll see all the questions that are currently coming in.
You get a user's profile avatar image.
Like I said, these are a lot of the standard randomized ones applied on first, accessing the community, so that's why I suggest updating yours.
You can see the, username right here for the community, and you can see the views, the number of comments, likes, and you can feel free to navigate to other pages to see questions that have come in earlier.
So you can see here, workout lab. What are your top three goals for the week? If I click on that, you'll see the title of the post here.
I'll see who the, creator of the post is, which is one of our community managers, and I'll see the rest of the post here or the body of it where I can see more details.
You'll see there's a thumbs up icon, which is where you can like or a kudo to, something that resonates with you in the community, something that you think is relevant or deserves alike and you wanna, you know, give that to that user.
And beneath the post, you could see all the replies which are presented in a threaded option.
So these are coming in from users across the community. Each one you can like, you can reply to.
If I wanted to contribute to this conversation, I could hit reply.
I could also just go to the bottom of the page and hit reply to this topic.
When I hit reply, the actual text editor will be brought in.
So we have a very feature rich text editor for you. There's a bunch of options available. You can even expand it.
You can format your text, align it, add bullets, numbers, spoiler tags, HTML. We have emojis.
You can insert photos.
So you can actually upload them from your computer. Once they're uploaded, they'll be in your saved photos.
You can insert videos. So you can, actually embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, whatever it may be and insert them into your post.
And you just type your response here. So here is my response.
Obviously, I won't post that because it's not that great of a post.
And I would just hit reply here. And anybody who's participated in this thread would receive a notification that somebody else has participated, Nate, and they'll come in. They can read it, like it.
Obviously, I won't post this, so I'll hit cancel here.
You don't have to feel obligated to respond to everything you see. You can like it if you want, if it resonates with you.
You can find related recommendations on the right hand side. So questions that are related to this one, to see maybe if, like, you're looking for a specific answer. You might say, oh, this one didn't really answer it. Maybe this one will, and it'll bring you to this new post.
You'll see this question's a little bit different. It has this sort of green solved text with a checkbox, and it also says solve, go to solution.
This is a really great feature because any question that has been successfully answered, users can say, yes. This answered my question.
And what it does is it brings that accepted response to the top of the page. So if you are coming in and saying, you know what? I'm having the same sort of question, issue, I can just come into this post and get the the response that answered that user's question right at the top, saving me a lot of time. I don't have to, you know, read through the entire discussion thread.
You absolutely can if you want to, but the relevant answer is brought to me, and I'm gonna go ahead and like that.
You'll also see that these sort of questions that have been marked as answered look a little bit different in the feed.
You'll see here that there is a big green check mark on the right hand side as well as a little check mark here, which means this question has been marked as answered.
So if you see something similar, you'll you can sort of distinguish, okay. This one hasn't been answered yet. Okay. This one has been. I'm gonna go into that one.
Or you might say, I wanna answer a user's question. Hey. I know the answer to this question. I'll come into here. I'll write a reply.
I might have the full answer, or I might to be able to offer just a little bit of advice or guidance. We have a lot of small businesses, nonprofits in here, anybody that could use any amount of help. You know?
So anything you could offer, feel free to just chime in, offer it. You know?
The the more help that you people can get, you know, the better.
You might also be saying, okay. These questions didn't really ask my answer my question. I I have a new one. All you have to do is hit ask a question.
We just have a little note at the top Just to remind you, this is a public area. Please refrain from person personal or private information such as your account credentials, phone numbers, emails.
Yeah. Anything you don't want shared with the public.
Subject, the more descriptive you can be, obviously, the better.
So go ahead and give the subject or title a pretty descriptive title such as I need help with SMS marketing.
You'll see that, posts similar to my subject are brought in.
So here's a blog getting started with SMS, how to and checklist. So if I were saying, oh, actually, it looks like this is relevant. I might not have to ask my question.
It might save you a bunch of time.
If they're not relevant, just like posting response, you can come in here, enter the body of your question. So this is where you would really give specific details. The more details you can give, the better, because it'll help other users in the community answer your question quicker.
We have users who have been members of the constant contact community for years now. They have incredible amounts of knowledge, and the more details you could share with them, the better constant contact employees are in here.
And, obviously, the more specific you can be, the easier it is to help troubleshoot your answer.
We also have labels on the right hand side. I recommend choosing one of these. So for instance, I said I need help with SMS marketing. I'm gonna select SMS.
This just means it'll go into the SMS area of the community. So I'll just make sure that experts who really know SMS, this is brought in front of their eyes, which will make your question you know, make sure it's seen by the right people and be answered, probably a little bit quicker.
Again, I'm not gonna post this because it's not such a great post.
But if you were to post, you would see your question at the top of the thread here.
A great thing is is once you create a post or engage with another one, you responded to somebody, you don't have to keep refreshing the page to see if your question was answered.
You'll actually receive an email notification, when anybody responds to your question.
So no need to worry about, oh, I need to refresh this page all day just to see if somebody answered.
Much like, the support form, we have template feedback.
So users, small businesses, nonprofits, whoever they may be, you know, they might say, you know, I'm working on this template. I'm really looking to get some better results from my marketing initiatives.
You can actually share your current template, share a screenshot of it, link to it, and users can come in. We have marketing experts for who have been in business now fifteen years, twenty years, twenty five years.
They'll come in. They'll take a look at your template. They'll give you some subject line suggestions if that's what you're looking for. They'll help you edit your messaging. They'll maybe offer some tips on how to rearrange the template.
Really valuable feedback to help you, you know, increase your marketing efforts, whether it be, you know, trying to increase sales, growing your your contact list, increasing donations, getting volunteers, whatever it may be.
Everybody's thrilled to help here.
We have another area called events and webinars. So this is upcoming events.
They're free, and these are all hosted online.
So we have, you know, getting started with the constant contact community, which is today. We have crafting the right content mix, guide to all of our onboarding webinars, how to create, promote, and manage your events.
Any sort of events that the community is hosting, you could come in here, check out the date and times.
If you wanna register, we have a link to registration here, and it'll give you just a little bit more information about the event.
These are reoccurring monthly, so if you ever miss one, don't worry about missing it. It's we're definitely gonna continue to have more throughout the, the following month, multiple times. Even so, we have past events. So if you miss an event for one reason or another, doesn't matter. Why?
We post all the recordings of our events.
Usually a couple of hours after the event has ended, at the most, a day after the event has ended.
You can come in, take a look. The video embed is hosted Hi, everyone. My name is As well as, any of the main points within the webinar or any questions that came in.
You could see it all right here. So you can watch these on demand at your convenience. You can upvote or like. You can comment just like you did when asking a question, responding.
You can also browse our recorded events by, you know, what feature you're looking for, whether it's apps and integrations, email marketing, fundraising, landing pages, whatever it may be, and this will filter to those specific events for you.
Next is ideas.
So ideas is basically a product enhancement request. This is you wanna see a new feature implemented within Constant Contact's products.
So if you have a really great idea for something you'd like to see implemented, we share these with our product management team and our engineers, to see what's feasible.
So we have statuses for ideas. New obviously means the idea is relatively fresh that somebody created, clarifying and gathering information. We need a little bit more detail, and we're researching it a bit.
Then we go into acknowledged, under consideration, planned, and either closed or implemented.
And with ideas, you could see you can actually give a like or upvote the ideas. The more upvotes an idea receives, the more, traffic it receives and the more attention that's put on it, and we'll pass these along.
Not every idea will be implemented.
Of course, there's a lot that are coming in, but sort of the most popular ones, we definitely at least share with product management and engineering, to see what's feasible.
When you create an idea, we will update the statuses. So you could see this one's acknowledged, looks very similar to a question or discussion.
Our community managers, you know, every time we update the status of an idea, we'll let you know in a comment. Other users can comment. They can like and not vote.
Suggesting an idea. Pretty much similar to asking a question, you'll wanna enter a title for your idea or subject as descriptive as possible in the body. Share as many details as possible of why you think this should be implemented in the product. The more details you can share, the better.
And choose a label. So, again, if this is related to sign up forms, I'm gonna select sign up forms. That way it goes to the right area of the community, and it gets brought to the attention of the right people.
And I would just hit post, or this isn't that great, so I'll click cancel.
We also have groups.
If you wanna connect with like minded individuals, like minded businesses, whether it be retail and ecommerce, nonprofits, this is the place to go.
Come into retail and ecommerce. This is just conversations and discussions related to anything ecommerce wise. So, you know, what strategies do you find are effective in engagement customers and loyalty? How do you stay ahead of the competition? We have some best practices for ecommerce.
You can see here we have links to different resources for you.
Much the same for nonprofits, but entirely different because it's for nonprofits. What's best practices for nonprofits? What role does technology play? And you can see all the members here that are constant contact users that are in nonprofits.
And you might see new groups getting introduced in the future.
So keep an eye out. Feel free to join these, you know, and engage and, you know, share best practices with each other.
You know, we're all looking to get ahead in life. We can all use the help any help we could get, so feel free to take advantage.
And we also have resources.
So we have a blog where we share a lot of information.
You know, we have customer spotlights.
We have seven ways to reignite customer interest, April holidays and newsletters ideas. So you can see this is written by one of our community managers for the month of April. Here's a bunch of great ideas, you know, to sort of, like, pass some marketing ideas for April, newsletters, you know, text messages, emails, whatever it may be. We always have new advice for you.
We have our help center. So if you're looking to, you know, get support, chat with us, call support, ask the community, video tutorials, our knowledge base blog.
We have learn areas. So if you're looking into SMS and you wanna get started with SMS, we have guides for you getting started, SMS video tutorials.
You know, it's not just post that you have to read. We actually have video tutorials to show you contact. That have that have onboard with a bunch of our features and products, which is really great because then I know I'm more of a visual learner when it comes to using new things. That's my preferred method.
We have news and announcements. So anything related to Constant Contact, news, we'll post it here. So you can see one of our newest posts of last week, what's new in Constant Contact for twenty twenty four.
These are all of our new product updates. We have a new brand kit, a save your email as a template, edit the toolbar.
And if I want We know you're knee deep in that modern business owner to do with and, again, you can come in here. You can like it. You can comment. You can add a comment like, hey. This is my latest feature, that I really appreciate. So thank you.
And we have a few other areas. We have our new customer hub. So while this was sort of a community demo intro, you might be new to Constant Contact.
And this is sort of a great first couple of steps for you to get started using it, expanding, you know, your business. You can learn how to set up your account, add contacts, create your first email, be more social, set up integrations.
And there's a lot of great how to guides here as well. You know? We have this is how you set up additional user accounts, set up account security methods, update your business profile. It's all right there for you.
If instead you wanna learn by video, we have quick video tutorials. We have courses.
All this is available to you on the new customer hub.
And we also have community orientation. So I know while I covered a lot today about the community, everything I covered is right here for you. There's a great getting started in the community guide.
So I can see here, I wanna customize my community profile. I forgot how to update my screen name, how to update my profile picture.
Where do I go again to ask a question? How to navigate the constant contact community?
All right here in great blog posts for you.
And finally, we have ranks and gamification in the community.
So you'll see under some users' names while I've been going through the community, it said administrator.
Some said community coach. Some said rookie.
This isn't determined by how long you've been a constant contact member or how long you've been in business. It's determined by how long you've been in the constant contact community and how much you've engaged.
So when you first join, you will be a rookie.
But as you participate more in the community, you will earn points and badges.
And, obviously, the more you earn, your rank will go up. So you'll go from a rookie to a novice to an expert to a marketing guru to a superstar.
And every time you rank up, you'll receive a notification in your messages on the community. So you could see here next to my image. I have a message.
It'll say that you've ranked up.
We also have notifications, which just like social media feeds, if anybody's interacted with anything I participated in, it'll be brought to me here. Somebody liked my post.
I earned a new badge.
I could see all the badges I've earned here.
So that's a little bit of bragging rights to me. You can also see them on my profile.
All my badges are collected in one spot so you can see how active I am in the community.
So we have a great list of all the badges and ranks you can earn, and I recommend checking that out.
So feel free to start where you want in the community.
It's all based on you, your learning style, your participation style, whatever you're most comfortable with. But those are just a few of the methods I suggest starting with is screen name, your profile image, and then diving in, whether it be asking a question, answering other users' questions, submitting ideas, attending more events like this, or learning how to take advantage of the product, connecting with like minded individuals. So, I mean, once you're done with that, come over, introduce yourself in our introduction thread, and you'll get your first badge for your first post.
So thank you for joining everyone today. I greatly appreciate it. I know we covered a lot, but we'll have a recording of this to to send to all of you, and you can see it as well in our community orientation area.
Thank you.
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