As the year draws to a close, it's the prime time to lock in your strategies for 2025. This is when most small businesses are looking for answers about the right things to do in their marketing and how to improve from this year to the next-- so we're here to answer those questions.
We're taking the most popular questions from our latest webinar and expanding upon them so you can boost your visibility, drive sales or donations, and create meaningful connections with your audience during the festive season.
You can view the webinar directly through Wistia or right here on the Blog!
Table of Contents
Marketing Planning
How do you market a new business during the busy holiday season?
If you have one, now’s the time to utilize your website. Drive people back to it from all of your other channels. Your website serves as the main place people will go to learn more about what your business offers. In addition, make sure you’re reaching out to your existing customers to put your holiday offerings back in front of them via email. Use a sign-up form to make it easy for them to opt in!
How much time should one take, who is a novice at digital marketing, to launch a marketing campaign for a small business? How much time should I set aside moving forward to continue these efforts?
Plan for 4 hours which you can spread it over a few weeks if you need to. You want to spend plenty of time planning out your campaign, the visuals, the message, the length your campaign will run, and the metrics you will track to determine the success of it. As you do more campaigns, the time will shorten or you will determine other ways you want to spend that time modifying your campaigns. You can also save time in the future with reusable templates you can copy and add content to.
I am a one-person marketing department with other responsibilities. I don't know where to start and what is realistic to start a campaign. I would love some ideas of where to start first - social media, emails, newsletters?
Ideally, you’ll want to have a website and that you can be found on Google. This serves as a steady state for your business.
Then you can focus on a simple campaign, maybe an offer you can push out to your email subscribers and followers on social media. Depending on your business, you may choose to do more of a newsletter style, where you include multiple topics of information. But for a campaign, we recommend keeping it to one topic.
What are the current digital marketing trends that should be incorporated into long-term strategy?
In today’s world, consumers are expecting more personalized messaging across the board. This goes beyond just including their name in the subject line or in the email body. Segmentation and dynamic content are taking personalization to a whole new level to cater content to subscribers.
Don’t forget about the use of AI and machine learning. From helping you write more effective subject lines and marketing copy, this tool is a great way to gather ideas for your content and message.
Email design
What’s the best layout and length for an email?
This depends on the type of information you’re sending out. If you have a campaign or something you want people to do, keep it simple with an inverted pyramid layout consisting of an image and headline at the top, a couple of sentences to explain the offer or campaign, and then a button below that features your call-to-action.
If you’re sending a newsletter that features multiple topics, you can go with a couple of different layouts, like a Z-pattern or an F-pattern. You can even test the different layouts to see if one works better for your audience.
When it comes to the length of the email, shorter is usually better. In a newsletter-style email, it’s best to add a short blurb of one or two sentences and then provide a Read More link that allows people to read the rest of the article on your website or in a PDF. The best part is that you’ll gain data on where people are clicking and it will help to improve your strategy moving forward.
Contacts and Segmentation
If we already have an email list in the system, can we delete it and start over with a new list? How do we stay compliant with Constant Contact and any laws by doing so?
In most cases, you don’t want to delete a list and start over, unless someone before you did not follow any rules and regulations for building your list, ie. obtaining permission before adding someone to your list. Review our email permission policy article for details.
If you haven’t sent an email to a list in a while, edit or delete your bounced email addresses. You’ll want to remove these categories: non-existent, suspended, and undeliverable.
You’ll want to keep on top of your list in other ways as well to keep your list clean. Check out this article for more information.
How does A/B testing work?
A/B testing your emails allows you to make impactful changes to your emails by finding elements and strategies that catch the attention of your audience and impact your business results.
Here are the steps for how it works:
Determine your goal for the test. (What do you want to learn or what metric are you looking to improve?)
Pick one variable that you’re going to test in your email (Example: A personalized subject line vs. a general subject line headlining your email)
Determine how you’ll be splitting your list. (Most people start with a 50/50 split - Half will get your traditional email, the control and the other half will get the email with your changed variable)
Look at your metrics to determine whether the variable had an impact, positive or negative on your results. (You might look at clicks, conversions, etc. depending on the overall goal of your email.)
In Constant Contact, the easiest A/B test is for subject lines allowing you to find which kinds are most effective for your audience.
In the case of a subject line A/B test, this is how it works:
An email with subject line A is sent to up to 50% of your selected contacts, while a second email with subject line B is sent to an equal portion.
After a specified amount of time, the subject line with the most opens is declared the winner.
The winning subject line is automatically sent to the remaining contacts who weren't part of the A/B test population.
We are a broker that sends a newsletter to grocery retailers each month. We sell many brands and these sales aren't placed directly through our website. I have trouble determining how to implement a call to action. Any tips?
For this, you might segment your list to focus on locations or typical product categories these stores order from you. The more personalized, the better.
This will help you better formulate calls to action. This could revolve around pricing assuming they are changing each week or month. Clicks are a great way to set up your call to action. It could be to view this week’s pricing or even when you want to encourage orders, it could be to “Order now” which prompts them to call however they need to place their order with you (phone, email, etc)
Do you have QR code I can incorporate?
There are several ways you can create and use a QR code depending on what you want to use a QR code for.
If you’re using a Sign-Up-Landing Page in Constant Contact, this is something that is already created and ready to use when you publish your page. This article will show you how it works.
If you want to use a QR for other things in relation to your marketing, check out this article.
Social Media
How do algorithms work in different social media channels? Can I use them to have my posts seen by more followers?
Each platform uses different algorithms and prioritizes post visibility based on various factors, including the size of your audience, previous post engagement, and audience interest in the post topic. Unfortunately, no one knows all the secrets and the algorithms can change frequently.
At the moment, these are the types of things that help you compete with the algorithm on the major platforms:
Focus on high-quality content that aligns with your followers’ interests
Pay attention to your metrics to understand what’s working and your audience demographics, and when they are online
Video also performs well, so get comfortable being in front of the camera. This is also a great way to show your personality.
Engagement and interaction - the more engagement you get, the better off you will be.
Focus on natural engagement vs. forced engagement such as “like this post to keep seeing us in your feed.”
Use polls, ask questions, ask opinions, and ask for their feedback
Use the various features of each social platform like stories, reels, and even live videos to reach more people.
It's helpful for small business owners to be a constant student of social media - post regularly and learn what works for YOUR audiences. No social media audience will ever be more important than an email list that you own.
How do I use hashtags in social media posts to optimize engagement and reach new viewers?
Hashtags tag metadata and can help to make content more discoverable. So if your post includes shopping small, you could use #shopsmall.
They’re not the strongest way to grow but if you stick to creating a list of 3-5 niche hashtags, there’s a chance that your posts will be more easily found using the keywords in that hashtag.
What are the best strategies to grow your following on social media?
A good place to start is with an existing email list, if you have one. Create an email that invites your subscribers to follow you on social media. Share some details on what value you provide on your channels and how they can interact with your content. Ensure you insert a social follow block in all of your email campaigns as well so it’s easy for your contacts to find your channels.
Great content that is helpful to your audience is a great way to get them to share your posts, Reels and videos.
You can also utilize relevant hashtags to make your content be found easier.
How do I send messages that go to the primary Inbox in Gmail and not Promotions?
It’s important to know that the Promotions tab is not the Junk folder.
Gmail introduced different inbox tabs, including the Promotions tab, to help improve deliverability and open rates, and to decrease spam complaints from their users. Gmail delivers emails to these tabs based on constantly changing algorithms that take variable data into account, including sender information, email content, and recipient engagement. There’s no need to fear, though! You can think of these tabs as additional inboxes. And not all Gmail users take advantage of the tabs — many disable them in favor of having a more traditional inbox where all emails are delivered to one place.
Getting your email to land in a contact’s Primary tab is naturally hard to control — it’s all up to the recipient!
Your contacts may decide to move you into their Primary tab by clicking and dragging one of your emails from the Promotions tab. By doing so, they'll have the option to have all future emails from you delivered to the Primary tab.
Here are a few other things you can do to help your emails land in the Primary tab:
Ask subscribers to add your From address to their contacts
Personalize your email and address contacts by name
Engagement
How would you utilize the poll function to promote engagement with your email?
The poll option within your email campaign is a great way to ask a quick question and get direct feedback. It could be a fun quiz or opinion question, or a question related to the information in your email to see how many people seemed to read your email.
Check out this article for the steps on how to set it up.
How do I get more people to take our survey?
To increase the completion rate of your surveys, here are a few things we recommend:
Ensure survey is concise and focused
Explain the purpose, let them know how completing this will benefit your customer
Think about offering an incentive for completing the survey. It could be a raffle, discount, or a giveaway.
Encourage people in all your channels to complete your survey (Social, email, and text)
Test your survey on different devices and if you can from people who haven’t seen the information
Reporting
Does Constant Contact have a way to filter out bot clicks?
To make sure your email reporting is as accurate as possible, we attempt to prevent these “false opens/clicks” from being recorded in your engagement data. We’ve developed a list of known non-human user agents (security programs and bots), and when one of these agents scans a link in your email, we don’t record the open or click. We make a best-guess effort, but due to the nature of the activity, it’s impossible to say we catch 100% of these. We’re continuing to improve and update this list of known non-human user agents, and we’re actively investigating other ways to determine which clicks are real or from a security program. This work is ongoing as security vendors are constantly changing their tactics so they can catch the elusive scammers and phishers.
Bot opens and clicks traditionally would occur immediately after an email was sent. This, however, may not always be the case. We have also seen them happen as a spike several hours after the send. This can sometimes mean that the security filter noticed something later that caused them to be suspicious of the message. If you notice a higher than-average level of engagement on one of your campaigns, there’s a good chance these are bot opens and clicks. For more information, check out this article.
What are the most important KPIs for digital marketing campaigns?
The good news is that there are a lot of analytics you can access to understand your digital marketing efforts.
Conversions are one of the most important metrics to understand whether people are taking the actions you want them to take (making a purchase, donating, registering, etc.).
Here are a few other metrics for different channels to consider:
Email marketing: Clicks track whether people are clicking to start to take the action you want. You can then start to calculate your conversion rate from there.
Unsubscribes
Bounce rate
Spam reports
List growth
Social media: Reach, impressions, engagement rate, and click rate are the most important
SMS: Delivered, click rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate
Check out this on-demand webinar for more details on understanding and using your digital metrics to improve your results.
Other
I am new to digital marketing. What resources would you recommend for me to use as I continue to learn?
Constant Contact has many resources to help you continue to learn, especially if you’re new to digital marketing.
Check out these resources:
On-demand webinar library on various marketing topics and strategies
Upcoming live webinars, including webinars on how to use tools and features in Constant Contact
Some other resources to think about:
Google News
Search engine newsletters
Pay attention to your competitors and what they are doing
What are the core features of operating Constant Contact?
Constant Contact offers a suite of digital marketing tools: email marketing, social media marketing, SMS, event marketing, surveys, and more.
I need to get more familiar with how Constant Contact can benefit our small business. I also want to explore what tools are available to help me with design.
Whether you’re just starting out or you're opening your newest location, we have tools to help you attract new customers and grow your business, from email marketing to reach your audience, right in their inbox, to social media to engage your followers, and text messaging to reach your audience with timely, relevant messages.
Choose an email template from hundreds of templates. Then, you’ll edit your email in the drag-and-drop editor to fully brand and customize your design and message.
After you send your email, you’ll gain insights into your results with reporting to see what’s working and who engages with your emails.
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