Transcript Below
Hello, everyone. Welcome to this morning's Constant Contact power session, tactics to grow and optimize your contact list. My name's Andrew, the customer marketing manager for APAC here at Constant Contact, and I'll be taking you today's session.
Now if you're new to our power sessions, they're short and sharp. Generally, twenty to thirty minutes max, designed to let you learn something new and then get straight back on with your day.
And before we jump right in, just a little few bits and pieces regarding Constant Contact. We have over five hundred thousand customers been operating for over thirty years, and we help those customers send over one hundred billion emails per year.
And we do more than just email marketing. We also do surveys, social posting, automation, which we'll touch on a little bit today, and social media events, list segmentation, landing pages, and, of course, forms, which we'll also be covering in today's power session.
Now just a couple of quick things as we go through here. Some of the benefits of growing your contact list are, of course, to increase revenue. If you've got a larger audience, a larger database of people to advertise your products and services to, then, of course, generally, you'll have that increased revenue piece there as well available to you. So you've got more people to be able to tell and promote your services to, using email marketing.
The other great thing is unlike social media, you own the audience that your contacts. It's your database that you can own and manage and send to. Just on that social media piece, obviously, you know, a lot of companies and small businesses are on social media. Imagine what happened what would happen one night if you sort of wake up the next morning and suddenly the algorithms changed.
Your, your posts your your account is not being shown to as many people on social media all of a sudden for some reason, or your account gets closed or blocked or something like that because of something happening, you've got then no way to easily contact and engage with that audience. They're gone, potentially, or they'll they'll have, trouble finding you and contacting you and engaging with your content. So the good thing about an email marketing platform is it's your contact database that you can engage with and, send emails to personalized segment and so on. So it's always a good idea that even if you are on social and you should be, to then still drive that audience, drive your customers to then engage with you through email marketing as well by going through a sign up form or something like that now, which is what we'll cover today.
Increasing engagement too is a big one. So if you've actually got that larger database that you can then send content like emails to, it's a great way just to be able to then promote those products and services, but also segment that database as well. Imagine you've got a fictitious bakery like we do here, x y zed doughnuts. And through sending more emails, you start to learn what your contact and your customer is interested in.
Do they like sales emails? Do they like emails where you talk about different recipes that you can make with different things that you might sell? So understanding the relevancy, what your contacts are enjoying from your emails, what they're clicking on, what they're engaging with, That's really important because it then means that future emails that you send and build can be a lot more interesting and relevant because you're looking at the reporting data and seeing what your contacts are actually enjoying from the emails that you send now, and you can use that in future to make those emails even more interesting as time goes on.
So how do we get people to sign up? Because it's it's one of those things where they've gotta go and put in their email address or their name and that kind of thing.
Often, I've seen, if if you incentivize this, that works quite well. So offering an incentive for joining either in store if you have physical stores, or you interact with customers, you know, home or service based business, lawn mowing, plumbing, that kind of thing, get your customers to to sign up on an iPad or something at at the end, when that service has been provided.
Interestingly, just last weekend, I went to a shop and purchased some items items from barbecue, and they said if you sign up to a mailing list, you'll get five percent off this purchase, and every dollar you spend, you get one point. Then when you've got a hundred points or a thousand points, you then get, you know, ten dollars off or something. So just incentivizing the joining of the mailing list works quite well as well, and it did for me. I signed up, so got five percent off my first purchase.
It's also a good idea to make the content that you then send useful and worthwhile. So you're asking someone to sign up, but then make sure that the things you're sending them are not just emails for the sake of sending emails, but they're actually useful. Or if you are promoting that you are going to send a certain style of content, then you actually stick to that and send that content. Again, with the, example we'll use today, which is where we can, we'll build a little sign up form for a recipe club for our donut shop x y zed donuts.
So you want to then send recipes out to the user. Don't necessarily use it for sending out sales emails all the time because that's not what you promised. That's not what you sold it as initially, and you'll just get unsubscribes and complaints, if you do that. So it's important just to make sure that it's useful, relevant, and it is what you promised.
And viral is another way to get people to sign up as well. So you could try running contests and giveaways, particularly on social media, and then get people to sign up to your mailing list in order to join the, the giveaway or to be a part of the competition or whatever it might be. It could be a discount on services. It could be a free product when they spend a certain amount of money in store, that kind of thing.
Now, that's all well and good, but how do we then make it easy for people to sign up? Because we don't want to make it, you know, a huge form with four hundred questions just to get a a newsletter or something like that. We wanna keep it easy. So, when it comes to the online point of view, make it easy to find your subscribe form.
Lately, I've been receiving a lot of, Black Friday, cyber Monday sales emails, and I've noticed that when looking at the website, the only way to sign up to the subscribe form is on some page that's hidden away somewhere deep in the website or at the time of purchase. What if I don't want to purchase something yet? I just want to sign up to the newsletter because they may not have any products I'm interested in right now, but they might do in future. So having that subscribe form in an easy to find place, have it in the sidebar of every page of your website, have it in the footer of your website potentially as well, make it easy for those to subscribe. And you've probably also seen pop ups when someone goes to, or when you visit an online store. You'll see that pop up to sign up for a discount that, I guess, is, is doing both those things. It's an easy to find subscribe form, and it also is providing an incentive.
Another online example there is to use landing pages for your advertising or just to use relevant pages for advertising when people land on your website. So pretend, again, you're running a donut shop and you've and or a bakery, and you've got all these ads running on Facebook and Instagram for donuts. When someone clicks on the ad, if you just take them to your home page where they can see all of your products, it may not work as well or be as effective as taking them to a page that talks about donuts or sells donuts because that's the particular page they were interested in. They saw an ad for donuts, they clicked on it, but then you're taking them somewhere else.
You're taking them to somewhere that doesn't just have donuts. It has other things. So by using landing pages and making them relating to the ads and the campaigns, it's going to be a lot more effective because it it's what the person wanted. It's what they clicked on.
To take them somewhere else just confuses things, and they might just then bounce out, close the ad, close the page, and so on. But you've paid for the click, so you wanna make them perform as well as possible. And landing pages relevant to your ad content works really well and will work best in that regard.
When it comes to signing up in person, having QR codes in store or an iPad that you can, provide to the customer to sign up, have it on your signage, vehicles, etcetera. And, of course, that last piece there, for both online and in person, it's a good idea to promote sign up at the time of sale as well. So, again, like the example there, the person's entering their details in the iPad, when they're doing their order at the cafe, or they might just be online providing their email address, and ticking a box that says they want to receive your mailing list, content as well.
Some other things to think about, a referral program. These can work quite well as well. Cross promoting with other businesses. In a previous life, I was, working in the self storage industry, and self storage is used by a lot of people when they are either renovating, downsizing, moving house, that kind of thing.
And self storage is the act of, you know, where you can rent a rent a storage unit and store your boxes and furniture and things in there. A lot of people who use storage also need removals. So you'll find in a lot of cases that self storage businesses and removalists will work quite closely together to promote each other's businesses to say that, you know, why don't you store your goods at this storage, place? Or the storage place will say, we recommend these two or three removal companies.
That works quite well. It's got a lot of good tie in there. So, again, have a think about how you can prosper your business with others who might, gel quite well with what you offer. And, of course, of course, hosting events and webinars.
It it sounds complicated, but there are so many great free tools you can use to run a webinar. And, again, in the self storage land from a previous business, a previous, life, you I've seen people run, just quick little webinars where they just on their phone or iPad, they were showing their audience, in, again, for self storage facilities how to best pack certain goods, how you should pack glasses in, and crockery and that kind of thing in boxes so they don't get damaged, how you should best pack a TV, pictures, mirrors, you know, these kind of things, wine, books, different sort of things that were quite effective.
And as a result of that webinar, the storage facility that ran this now has a great piece of video content they can use on their website, on social media, in email marketing when they've got new customers interested in signing up for storage. They'll send them this free video, with a download link onto, you know, how to pack your goods. It's something that a lot of people will find useful, but it's a great advertising mechanism and a list building mechanism for the business. So something to think about.
And then, also, when you are then, signing people up to mailing lists and so forth, always, of course, make it easy for the people to unsubscribe. You never wanna make that difficult. And, of course, at Constant Contact, we'll add that unsubscribe link into the bottom of your email footer for you, which makes it nice and easy. And, also, make sure you've got marketing consent and that you are providing any privacy guides and documents on your website as to, you know, how the data is handled. And, of course, then when you've got your list, don't over send to it or spam, but do segment that list. And what I mean by segmenting is again, we'll go back to the donut shop example. Let's say you've got stores all around Australia.
If you have a big sale on but only in New South Wales, don't send that sale email to everyone on your list around Australia. Because if it's only relevant to New South Wales, only New South Wales people should get it. So segment your list and send to the right groups of people. Because if you were to send that email to everyone, you'll probably get unsubscribes because they'll go, why have I got this? This has nothing to do with me. So, again, just making sure that your list is, segmented and set up correctly, and that will make it very much, much more efficient.
So what we'll be building today in Constant Contact, we'll make a sign up form to capture leads or contacts so that you can see how that works and how easy that is. And we'll also build an automation to send these contacts something as soon as they sign up. And you might be wondering why why would I do that? Why don't I just wait till the next newsletter goes out?
And I've got some tips and tricks we'll come back to on automation in a moment as well before we build. But when it comes to that form piece, keep it simple. Again, no one is going to answer ten questions just to sign up to a mailing list to get a newsletter or something like that, so keep it minimum questions, usually just email and first name. But if you do need to ask a couple of others that will help you segment and optimize your list, generally, we'd recommend making those fields nonmandatory.
So people can fill them in if they want to knowing that they'll get more relevant information from you, but don't make it compulsory because if there's too many, they won't fill in the form.
Set the expectations as to what the user or customer can expect once they sign up. So maybe we will send you one email a month until you unsubscribe, or we will send you sales emails. We will send you events emails. Whatever the the thing is you're going to do, make sure that is outlined on the form or on your website around the form so people know what they can expect or going to expect from you.
Again, ask the right questions so your list can be optimized. So if if a state field would be useful to you, have a state field. Again, for the case of a bakery, maybe a dietary requirement, feeling it gluten free, that kind of thing might be useful as well. So have that on your list. And as I said, provide those nonmandatory options as well. So if you do need to ask for more information, make them nonmandatory.
Now one thing I touched on, and we'll cover this as well, is quickly we'll build an automation, though, which will send something to the contacts when they subscribe so that they get something immediately. A couple of benefits to automating here on the screen, we did have another power session on this a couple of weeks ago. You'll be able to find that recording as well on our website. We'll send that through to you, a link to that. But these are some great ways as to why you might or some great reasons as to why you might automate.
And, interestingly, at Constant Contact, we did a small business survey called the current state of SMB marketing, and we surveyed, you know, a whole bunch of businesses and consumers as well. And we found that twenty seven percent of consumers stated that they never heard from a small business again after they made a purchase. And, you know, it's a great sort of missed opportunity, and automations can help you do this because you can automate that process as well, which we'll show you. So having a welcome email, which is an email that sends once someone signs up to your mailing list, is shown to generate a hundred and sixty percent higher open rates and generate six hundred and sixteen percent higher click through rates. So if you've got something in that email that they can click on, download, access, do, buy, sell, whatever, that will get a really good generally, a really good click rate as well.
So let's actually jump into Constant Contact now, and we will start building some, different bits and pieces. So first off, we'll start with a form to capture leads and contacts. So I've just got Constant Contact here open on the screen. We'll go to the marketing section along the top and then jump down to sign up forms, this option here on the drop down menu. Now sign up forms, as the name suggests, a way for contacts and customers, prospects to go to your website, be able to fill in a quick form, and then sign up to your email database that'll come into the Constant Contact system here. Just on the top right there, I'm going to click the button, the blue button, create a sign up form, and it gives me some different options. You've got pop ups, which will come over the top of the screen.
There's different fly outs, banners, which will appear on the website. The one I'm going to do today is called an inline form. I I personally like this one because you can have it appear anywhere on your website. It won't just be a pop up that takes over the whole screen.
You can sort of embed this in the sidebar. You can embed this in the footer. You can sort of choose where it goes and have it just in the right spot. So inline is the type I'm going to choose for this one.
Now it's created our form here, fairly basic form, but what we can now do is start to customize it. So I've got some text, typed up already to save you sitting there watching me do it. So I'll start on the left hand side here with the title. So I'll open that up, and then I'll paste in my little, title that I'm going to use.
Now this form I'm building is for people to sign up to our recipe club. They can just fill in the details on the, presumably, recipe club section of our donut shop website. And when they put their details in here, we'll then start sending them, recipes.
So I've got the title in there. Just going to copy and paste a description as well on the left hand side here. I'll paste that in. And that that again is just highlighting some reasons, why the person might like to join and the things that they'll get as a result of subscribing, from the recipe the donut club recipe there.
Next up on the left hand side here, you can choose we've done title, done description. Next up is contact fields. This is where you can choose which of your constant contact list fields you would like to have appear on the form, and these are the fields that the user must fill in in order to subscribe to your list. So, in this case, the recipe clubs, that kind of thing.
So I probably only want to add in let's go, first name. That will be good to have. So I'll tick that there, and I can toggle that on because I do want that sorry. I can toggle that on to be required, I should say.
Also, having state might be useful because maybe we wanna send them information based on different, parts of Australia, different states, or maybe we want to send them or have the email dynamically changed so that if they're in Queensland, right at the bottom of the email underneath all the recipe club booklets we're sending them, it just have a might have a little section there that appears just for Queensland people showing the latest specials in Queensland. Or in New South Wales, they'll see different specials. So that's sort of like a a dynamic email we can create. So I'll turn that field on.
I won't make that one required, though, because I don't wanna have the barrier to entry to be really difficult. I want people to fill this in and keep it easy. So just email and first name are the only required fields with the little asterisk there, and the other one I'll make, nonrequired, so I'll leave this toggle off. And, of course, the dietary might be useful as well.
As a bakery, it will be useful to have to know if people, might just be, requiring gluten free product and that kind of thing. So having that on, again, is useful, but I won't make it mandatory.
By the way, if you want to make more fields, if you're sort of at this process and now building the form and you go, it'd be really good to have this question on my form. There's a button here on the left where you can just jump in and immediately make a field for your list and form. So it doesn't you don't have to go back out again to do it, which is great. It's right here on the screen to make your own field, which is awesome.
That's looking pretty good, but our donut shop, the colors are actually sort of a bit of a purple color. So I'll just go into this button here, and I'm going to make our button, a purple color. Now I've actually got our exact color code here from our graphic designer. It's a special code we've been given, so I'm just going to pop that in there to make our, button purple. And the text will just go join the club. It's free.
There we go. Nice call to action button there. And that's pretty much our form. It's looking good.
It says to the it tells the user what they're signing up for, the name of it. It says what they'll get. We've got our questions here. Not too many.
We've got a few compulsory, a few not. And then a nice call to action again that says instead of click here, it says join the club. It's free. That's a lot nicer than click here to join or something like that.
So that's all looking good. At the top here, we can give it a name. So there's a little section where you can give it a name. We can then save or publish that form, and that will then be live, for us to then add to our website.
Now, of course, it doesn't add it to the website automatically because there's some special code we need to, provide to the system, which I'll show you shortly as well, but that's all of our thing there. Oh, one thing I've got to actually, set there on the left hand side is this email lists option. This tells Constant Contact when someone fills this in, what list should they go on to? Because in constant contact, of course, you can have multiple lists.
You might have a customer's list, a prospect's list, donut club list, cooking classes list maybe, or an events list, whatever different lists you'd like. So So we need to tell the system that when someone fills this in, what list are they actually going to be a part of? So I'm just going to toggle on my recipe club list because this, of course, is for the donuts recipe club. So I'll just save that, excuse me, and go to publish, and that's then saved the form in the system.
And then there'll be some prompts on screen where we can actually go in and get the form code here, for the website. So There's some universal code you need to put onto every page of your site. And then if you want wherever you want this form you've just made to appear, there's some inline code you need to add as well. If you're not sure too much about how any of that works and and why you need both or where to do it, there is some help you can access through the help center as well that'll show you exactly how it all works.
And if you do run a web, a website on WordPress, which is one of the most popular web, hosting or web creation platforms, there are some special WordPress plugins we have as well where you can easily link and place that form on your website too to make it even better.
The second step we'll do now is we'll now make an automation to send something automatically.
So let's say you've created that form. It's on your website. When someone fills in that form, remember, it's the recipe club, email, subscription form, they would probably expect to receive at least one recipe from you. And, generally, you would send that immediately to say, thanks for joining.
Here's your first recipe. So we'll just go in and create a new automation. So to build an automation which sends that email, again, I was just in the marketing section there, and I've clicked on automations. So before, we were on sign up forms.
Now we're in automations.
And I'll just press the button here, which is an automation for when someone gets added to a specific list. And I guess if you think that through, when someone fills in the recipe club, form that we just made, that adds them to the recipe club list, and then we can send them something. So I'll click on that one there. And, of course, it's already selected there for us, added to specific list. Let me just click through and create that new path.
Now Constant Contact just come up with the automation builder here, and it says, okay. Great. When someone joins your list, this automation will run. And the first thing it's asking you is which list are you monitoring for someone joining it, and it's the recipe club list, of course.
Press save. So what's happening here is it's essentially saying that when someone joins a recipe club list, it's going to wait a day and then send them an email. But we can actually remove this time delay because I don't want them wait a day. I wanna send it to them immediately.
And the next step is just choosing, okay. Great. What do we send them when someone joins the recipe club list? And we simply click into here and select the email that we wish to send.
And, of course, it's going to be the recipe club email number one.
And all we need to do is press continue and then activate on the top right. What that's going to do is now when someone fills in our recipe club form, this automation will run and send them the recipe club ebook. I can also add additional steps in here too. So I could add a time delay of a week, and send them recipe club email number two. Then I could add another time delay of the week and send them ebook number three and four and so on. So we're actually just building a nurture essentially in this particular example here. So, yeah, that's something you can do.
Wonderful. Alright. So we've now built a form which captures a lead. So this is basically called a subscribe form, and this is, I guess, one way to grow your contact list is to have a subscribe form that people can subscribe to, receive your content, your newsletter, and so on. And also step two there, we've just built an automation which then sends them something automatically.
Now you don't have to do step two because remember, if as long as you've got step one, your mailing list will slowly grow over time, and then you can go into constant contact and then send a newsletter as often as you wish. You might send out a weekly newsletter or a monthly specials email, whatever the case. So if that's all you wanna do, that's totally okay. But remember, these three slides here, one, two, three, there is an advantage to building that automation out and having something sent automatically if you want to. And then you can still send your newsletters often or as, regularly if you want to as well. So there are advantages to doing that automation piece, of course, as well.
Wonderful. Just bring my slides back up to full screen.
Excellent. Now, of course, if you need a hand with anything, you can access our customer hub at that link provided there on screen. Heaps of great resources, videos, how to guides on our website, as well as details to contact our support team, which is based right here in Brisbane where I am as well. So if you need a hand, you can definitely jump through the customer hub there and find all that information.
Now if you are interested in that report that I had a couple of statistics from, it's the current state of small business voice and marketing. Fantastic free report you can download, and there's a little QR code you can scan there on the screen to download that. Get some good insights from what small businesses are doing from a marketing point of view. And even if marketing is not sort of your, your forte, you're just doing this because it's something that you wish to do to to email your contacts to keep them engaged with things. There are some great insights in this particular report for small businesses. So definitely worthwhile having a look, and it's free.
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining today's Constant Contact panel session. My name's Andy, the customer marketing manager here for Constant Contact in APAC. Hope you enjoyed the session. We'll see you at the next one. Thanks again.
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