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This week we’re seeing double Dave! B2B marketing guru Dave Gerhardt joined the podcast to talk about all things small business – from building a marketing plan based on just a story to fighting off imposter syndrome as your business grows. Listen to the full episode right here!   As you continue to start off the new year strong, try focusing your marketing efforts on a single target audience as a great way to optimize your small business marketing strategy. With your marketing strategy in mind, what are your 2023 marketing goals? ... View more

This week, Dave talks with Pam Roussell of Purrrfectly Holistic about how she’s connected felines and their owners to services and products that provide new ways of approaching cat health care. In the last year, she decided to go full-time with Purrrfectly Holistic and saw significant growth within just 30 days! Listen to the full conversation right here!   Pam also shared advice  on the importance of hitting your customers’ inbox on a consistent basis.. “You have to keep getting in front of people all the time. You can't just send one email a month and expect them to remember you.” Tell us how often you send emails to your customers to remain top-of-mind. ... View more

This week, Chris and Mary Ginder from Gindo’s Spice of Life join Dave to talk about the ups and downs of growing their hot sauce business. Gindo’s experienced a lot of change through a cross-country move and a global pandemic, but connection and community always remained a key to their success.      Mary also expanded on why they value community so much at Gindo’s; “[Community] is a huge part of our business. Our mission statement is we make fresh pepper hot sauces designed to inspire creativity in the kitchen and support local farms and businesses. It’s everything for us”.  How is community important to your business? ... View more

This week, Dave had the opportunity to sit down with serial entrepreneur Ramon Ray to discuss how the lessons he’s learned building 5 different businesses influence the way he does business today. Listen to the full conversation right here.     Ramon mentioned that while it’s important to generate recurring revenue for your business and establish a great team, the real magic happens when you can identify your ideal customer and leverage your tools and your team to curate a customer experience that keeps them coming back.    What is an important lesson you’ve learned since starting your business?  ... View more

Dave had an interesting conversation with Tamika Catchings, the owner of Tea’s Me Cafe in Indianapolis, about how and why she started her own business. Listen in to hear what’s worked for Tamika since she started her business in 2017.   I was inspired to hear why Tamika made the decision to start her business. She said, “I didn't get into it to get rich. I got into it because of the community and to bring people together and build this.” Why did you decide to start your small business? Share your story and hear from other small business owners how they got started. ... View more

We’re excited to announce the ability to reset your multi-factor authentication factors without contacting the Constant Contact support team. This is beneficial in the event you lose or don’t have access to the device you set up as your original authentication method.   Account security is important to us, a constant contact. And we know it's important for you to keep your contacts and who sends to them secure too. Setting up multifactor authentication in your constant contact account is a great way to protect your personal data and give you peace of mind. Multi-factor authentication mfa, also known as two factor authentication, is an extra layer of security for your account.   Mfa ensures that you are the only person who can access your account by requiring another device to confirm even if someone else knows your password. Mfa is an industry standard for online services looking to protect their customers sensitive information. By implementing it, you'll be better protected against unauthorized access to your contacts, emails, billing information and any other data stored in your account. Depending on how you set it up.   You will have a few options to verify your account. You can choose to either receive a push notification to your phone or receive a text message containing a verification code that you input when logging in. Or you can receive a phone call to verify it's really trying to log in. If you choose to verify your identity via push notification, you'll need to download Okta verify, which is the mobile app that constant contact uses to send the push notifications to your mobile device when signing into your constant contact account.   Alternatively, you can also use Google authenticator, which is another mobile application that can be used for multifactor authentication. To learn more about enrolling in MFA in your account, please see our knowledge base article for more information. Keep your account safe and secure with Constant Contact.           We’re always looking for ways to make Constant Contact bigger and better. Make your voice heard and share your ideas in our or let us know what you think in the comments below!   Related articles: Overview: Multi-Factor Authentication Enroll in Multi-Factor Authentication Reset your factors for Multi-Factor Authentication ... View more

The Template Runway Sweepstakes ended awhile ago, but during that time a few of us Community moderators wanted to reflect on some of the email campaigns that were submitted and share our thoughts about them. Email Templates    It was hard to narrow it down to just these twelve campaigns and it is certainly not exhaustive as we received a lot of great entries. Being featured on this list is not a reflection of winning the sweepstakes (the winners were chosen at random).   We are hoping to do more template showcases in 2023, so consider this a test run for future endeavors. The images below are just a snapshot of the full campaigns, please click on the images to view their full glory.     Consensus: Bright, inviting imagery coupled with clear call-to-actions and organized content helps this template shine.   Consensus: The notepad template with the pencil dividers is a fun and unique look to organize the template and the social sharing options make it easy for the audience to share it with their friends. Consensus: Contact information at the top is a nice touch, plus the callout to see last week's email if you missed it. The different banners make each section feel like a mission statement. Consensus: Simple and clean. Short and sweet. Crisp, professional image to draw you in.   Consensus: The use of featured article blocks to break up the content and creating an alternating text-to-image format has a nice feel. The email isn't very long and gives you opportunity to read further elsewhere. Consensus: It's dogs, what's not to love?! The email is short, effective, and also uses video for additional content.     Consensus: The template has a clean aesthetic and the oblong image is unusual, but works really well.   Consensus: The email only focuses on a couple of property listings, as to not overwhelm. The images are the primary focus of the email and we like the tease with "Soon to be listed."   Consensus: A clean newsletter-style template that utilizes multiple columns well. A touch of humor as well with the use of memes, but all the important information is still there.   Consensus: Utilizes the logo colors to brand the rest of the template. The images give it a personal touch. It is a long email, but organized well. Consensus: Warm, pleasant colors and design. Short and sweet content.   Consensus: Professional and organized. The colors are simple, but work. The featured articles give the reader a chance to dig deeper outside of the email. ... View more

It’s a whole new world out there, because SMS Marketing has come to Constant Contact! Email has long held the crown when it came to online marketing communications (and still does), but SMS marketing provides a new avenue for small businesses and nonprofits to stay in touch with their audience. However, SMS is a much more highly regulated communication tool, so it is good to be mindful of how, why, and when you’re contacting your audience   With that in mind, I wanted to provide a few things to keep in mind when setting up SMS marketing with Constant Contact. This list is not exhaustive, but are major call-outs that we don’t want people to overlook.     Qualification In order to use SMS marketing, your business/organization HAS TO have an Employer Identification Number (EIN). If you don’t have one, visit IRS.gov to check for eligibility. Your business/organization and you HAVE TO be based in the United States. Make sure the content you plan to create for SMS does not fall under our prohibited content restrictions.   Your business name is different from your sender name. The business name has to reflect the name listed on your tax forms. If the name does not match, the registration will be rejected. The default sender name is what your contacts will see in your text messages. It CANNOT be changed after registration. No exceptions. Make sure you pick the right name and are satisfied with it before finishing registration.   Each SMS message has a 1950 character limit, but are broken down into 160 character segments. We recommend keeping your marketing messages to 160 characters, because: Each 160 character message counts towards your billing. Longer text messages have a higher chance of being blocked by the SMS provider. Your audience is more likely to engage with shorter messages. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in the U.S. prevents marketing messages from being sent between 8:00 P.M. and 11:00 A.M. ET. The system will automatically prevent you from sending during this time.   Contact Permissions The contacts you have curated for your email marketing communications DO NOT automatically overlap with your SMS marketing communications. Any contacts you have prior to successfully registering for SMS, even if you have their phone numbers listed on their profile, have to be given the choice to opt-in for SMS marketing. New SMS opt-ins must provide an email address, as well. Keep in mind, only U.S. numbers can be collected for SMS opt-in. Make sure to choose the “SMS marketing opt-in” option when setting up a lead generation landing page.    Additionally, make sure your Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policies are linked in your SMS settings. We have templates you can use!   ... View more

Do you know how to make it easier for your audience to self-select which lists they want to be on? @CWF_Communications reached out to the Community asking how to do so and we think this is meaningful content to highlight for others with a similar curiosity!   Community moderator extraordinaire @William_A stepped in with a response, which we’ve edited for the purposes of this article:   The Update Profile link is found in the footer of all your emails by default. It provides email recipients the opportunity to change which lists their email address is associated with for a specific Constant Contact user, instead of unsubscribing completely. Multiple lists can be made visible for contacts to choose from.     It is important to note: The contact will not see the list options until they click on a link in an email they receive that will bring them to the Update Profile form.    When an Update Profile form has multiple lists available, these lists will be visible if a contact were to choose the Unsubscribe link, as well.   Remember, not all lists need to be included in the Update Profile/Unsubscribe set-up. Make sure to select the correct lists and that they are titled appropriately. Whatever the list is called within your Constant Contact account is how it will appear to your audience when they’re making updates.   If you are not seeing the Update Profile link, follow the steps in our tutorial article to activate it.   Additional reading: Unsubscribed contacts overview ... View more

Constant Contact emails, in keeping with government regulations, require all emails to include identifying information about your business in the footer such as the business name, a physical address, and the email address it is being sent from.   Did you know? Not all businesses have a physical storefront and not all users want to provide their personal address. A P.O. Box is an accepted address to use.   While this helps legitimize your business, conform to regulation, and assist with maintaining high delivery, not all businesses operate out of a single physical address. It's possible you're a small business or nonprofit that works from multiple storefronts or offices and caters to different demographics. How do you represent all of your businesses on a single account?   The truth is that Constant Contact is designed with one business/one location in mind. If you review your account settings you’ll see you can add your identifying information so that it will auto-populate every time you create a new template. The information can still be changed manually when working on an individual template, but this would be cumbersome to update every time you start a new campaign.    You might find this helpful: Create a reusable template   Additionally, it can get complicated to support multiple businesses/locations if you’re trying to represent them individually and cater to different contact lists. Regulatory policies such as CAN-SPAM or CASL are pretty clear about giving email recipients the ability to unsubscribe from unwanted emails. If it’s not clear to a contact which email list they are on, when they go to update their contact profile or unsubscribe, they could inadvertently unsubscribe from everything instead of a specific business and now that contact is lost to the whole account, unless they resubscribe.   In short, we do not recommend trying to support multiple businesses and/or locations in a single account.   But we do have a solution. It’s called becoming a Constant Contact Partner!   What is a Constant Contact Partnership?   The Constant Contact Partner Program offers a special suite of tools to help manage your clients or multiple businesses, especially if you plan on expanding. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for Partnerships. We cater to different business and organizational structures; such as marketing agencies, organizations with multiple departments, and franchises. However, organizations such as churches, schools, and non-profits might not be a good fit.    Specifically, starting a partnership with Constant Contact will give you the ability to manage multiple Constant Contact accounts under one umbrella account! When you have five or more accounts under your umbrella, you are given a free Constant Contact account! We recommend getting in touch with our awesome Partner team to learn more about how a Constant Contact Partnership could benefit your business. ... View more

Caught in a bad gateway.    All right, I’ll stop riffin’ on pop songs and get to the point. Were you in the middle of a task and suddenly received an error message such as, “Bad Gateway: The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server?” Annoying, right?    The last thing Constant Contact wants is to interrupt your workflow, so let’s consider some ways to avoid, or at least resolve, these types of issues. Take it away, nondescript-pop-singer-who-I-don’t-know-if-I-can-reference-without-legal-ramifications:   First off, make sure the browser you are using is compatible with Constant Contact. It is? Great! Moving along…   I forget to do this myself sometimes, but double check to make sure you have updated the operating system for your Mac OS or Windows PC.   Now, earlier we recommended you verify you are using a compatible web browser, and yet you’re still experiencing a technical issue. What gives? Hiccups can still arise with compatible browsers and the following troubleshooting steps can help identify them so you can get back to doing what you do best!   Try another browser.  This isn’t to encourage you to give up your preferred browser, it’s just a step in investigating what might be causing you problems. If you find the issue does not persist in the new browser, that indicates the problem is (hopefully) localized to the previous browser.   If it is, consider disabling third party extensions or clearing your cache. Warning: When it comes to clearing cache, make sure you aren’t erasing your browsing history, saved passwords, or other site data! You'd just need to be clearing out the cached images and files on the browser.   @William_A's tip: There are a number of elements that can affect website connectivity and accessibility on an individual basis. The most common culprits are typically incompatible browser extensions, problematic caching or cookies that need to be cleared, or interference from an ad/pop-up blocker, VPN, or other security software erroneously trying to block elements from our site from functioning as intended. Temporarily disabling these tools, and then refreshing our site can help narrow down the source of the issues. Testing to see if the issue occurs on other browsers, in Incognito/Private mode, on other devices, or even other networks can also help narrow down the source of the problem. If you find that an ad/pop-up blocker, VPN, or other security programs you're running on your device / network seem to be blocking some of the site's functionalities, then we recommend safelisting the domains we use in those programs.   See if it's just the email.  It's also worth seeing if a specific section of the site is acting slow. For example, if the rest of the site loads smoothly, but the email builder is particularly laggy, then it may have more to do with the amount of content in your email. Since the builder's drag-and-drop aspects and autosaving can use a significant amount of bandwidth, the more graphics and individually formatted text you have, the more processing will be required for it. Think of it in a similar vein to Photoshop or Blender.   With this in mind, we'd recommend seeing if you're able to work in the email builder as expected when working on a fresh, new, blank template. If so, then that can confirm your normal copied template may be getting a bit too large. Make sure to check out some of the following articles for best practices when it comes to email length, driving contacts to your site(s), and making emails easier to read. Make sure to check out our main article on Connectivity Troubleshooting, to make sure you're checking the most common culprits (especially browser extensions and ad/pop-up blockers) for connectivity issues.   That covers the general troubleshooting advice we have, however it is important to note that unique, isolated incidents do occur where none of these steps will help! There might be a system-wide issue impacting everyone or a problem with your Internet Service Provider, such as a downed connection after a storm, etc. We recommend keeping an eye on status.constantcontact.com for more information.   We hope this article was helpful in case the issue ever arises. If you need assistance with any of the above, feel free to post our on Get Help board. ... View more

Keeping your contact lists clean and up to date is a great way to improve your deliverability rate and also your open rate. One way that we recommend doing this is to look at the bounces for each campaign that you send out. In your Constant Contact account, we give you the reason why a particular contact bounced. Some are self-explanatory, like Vacation/auto-reply or Non-existent.   So what exactly does it mean when a contact is Suspended?   Repeatedly sending emails to Non-existent email addresses can have a negative impact on your deliverability rate. A Suspended contact is an address that has consistently bounced as Non-existent. If this happens, the email address is put on a temporary hold for 15 days. During this time, our system will not attempt to send any campaigns to this address from any Constant Contact account. If an account attempts to send to a Suspended address, it will be included in that campaign's Suspended bounce category under the Reporting        After the temporary hold is lifted, we will attempt to send to this address the next time that an email is scheduled for them to receive. If the address bounces as Non-existent again, the email address will be placed on an indefinite hold. We do not automatically remove these contacts, however, we do list them as Recommended for Removal under your reporting.   What if you've never sent to this contact before and they already show as Suspended when you send your first email to them? Emails addresses can become Suspended from any Constant Contact account sending email to it. So although you haven't sent anything to them, there may have been another account that had tried to send to them in the past and we then note them as Suspended.   If you see an address listed as Suspended that you know is a good email address, you can unsuspend the email address to reset the address. However, this will not prevent it from becoming Suspended again in the future if it does bounce as Non-existent so you want to make sure that you have verified that this address is valid.   Want to know even more about these types of bounces? Check out this article that explores Suspended and Non-Existent bounces a little deeper. ... View more

Here at Constant Contact, we are an industry leader in email delivery.  This is no accident.  All of our Terms and Conditions are designed to ensure the best possible delivery rate.  That being said, it’s expected that most email campaigns will have some level of bounces.  Knowing the cause and reasons behind these bounces can help you as a marketer to ensure you are mailing to the cleanest, most engaged list that you can.     What Are Undeliverable Bounces? When Constant Contact sends an email to a recipient, but the receiving server can not be found or connected to, the email will bounce as Undeliverable.   For Example: If someone were to send an email to my address, let's say it's robbctct@example.com; however, at that time the receiving server, in this case it would be example.com, is not responding. The email will bounce as Undeliverable as a result (usually after multiple automated resend attempts).   Isn’t That The Same As A Non-Existent Bounce?   Not at all! A Non-Existent bounce occurs when we connect to the receiving server, but they can not find the address we are trying to send to.   With Undeliverable bounces, that initial connection can’t even be made.   What Are Blocked Bounces? In the never-ending battle against spam, ISPs do what they can to stay ahead of the curb.  Most often, this involves the use of email filters or blocklists to keep there subscribers’ inboxes clean.  Sometimes those filters and blocklists end up preventing Constant Contact’s mail from getting to the intended recipient, resulting in a Blocked bounce.   Does A Blocked Bounce Mean That Constant Contact Is Blocked? Not necessarily,  While it’s true that Constant Contact (like all ESPs) may occasionally experience blocking issues at a particular domain/filter/blocklist, most often Blocked bounces occur on a smaller scale.  These bounces can occur due to content in the email that a spam filter deems problematic, such as an image, email address, or website.  Some ISPs even have rules based around how much mail they accept at a time from any one source, or even block email from bulk senders altogether.   Where Can I Find My Undeliverable and Blocked Bounces? If you look at the Reporting for a specific campaign, click on the number of bounces you have  Then select “Undeliverable” or “Blocked” from the “All Types” drop down.     What Should I Do With Undeliverable and Blocked Bounces? In the case of Undeliverable bounces, it’s acceptable to try sending to the addresses again after a few hours, just in case it is a temporary issue.  If they continually bounce, then we recommend moving them to unsubscribe.   Blocked bounces sometimes take a bit of work to diagnose.  First, check the “Email Delivery” row at https://status.constantcontact.com to see if there are any known issues.  If that doesn’t help, then please contact our Support Team to troubleshoot.   We hope this article was helpful in case the issue ever arises. If you need assistance with any of the above, feel free to post our on Questions & Discussions board. ... View more