Get Advice: Spring Cleaning Sweepstakes

[Nick_S]

The sweepstakes is now closed! Thank you to all who participated and we are working on selecting the winner now!

And we’re back! The Community is trying something new and our lovely user base reaps the rewards! Every month we plan to keep the Get Advice Sweepstakes rolling, providing different themes to focus the feedback efforts around. With Spring in full swing, we thought we would encourage everyone to review their Contacts and solicit their peers for advice and/or if you happen to be having a successful streak with managing your contacts, then drop us a line and share your insights!

 

It works like this: First, for your fearless contributions you will be entered for a chance to win a $100 credit on your Constant Contact account!

The sweepstakes will run from April 14, 2021 through May 5, 2021. Once completed we will select one winner at random and notify them!

How to Enter: Visit the thread you are currently in and perform one or more of the following, up to two times maximum:

1. Sharing advice related to contacts management, either independently or in response to another user's request.

1. Requesting assistance with your contacts management, by providing some insight into your current contacts situation. ‘Insight’ is defined by providing the audience details on your current or historical Open Rates and other contacts reporting, examples of your subject lines, and/or short URL to an email campaign, so potential advice givers can assess and give appropriate feedback. Please note: Do not provide account sensitive information, such as number of contacts in the account, specific email addresses, or list names.

Additionally, one participant each week of the contest has the chance to win one bonus entry by having their advice chosen by a panel of moderators (i.e. the Community Team) as exceeding expectations. 'Exceeding expectations' is defined by the subjective standards of the moderators, but is judged by clear instruction, attention to detail, and lengthier than one or two sentences.

The bonus entry will be chosen on the Friday of each week during the course of the Sweepstakes by 4:00 P.M. EST. If there are no entries posted in a given week then we will skip the bonus entry selection for that week.

Here is an ‘exceeding expectations’: “Your Open rate has historically been above 20% but dipped to 8% around November and has stayed there. I looked at the short URL of the email campaign you shared for your November campaign and it looks like your template is a single image containing all the information. Generally, you want to have a balanced image-to-text ratio as a single image email is more likely to end up getting caught in spam filters. Constant Contact actually has an article on this. Have you always been using a single image for your emails?” 

If you are the winner we will notify you by the contact email address listed on your Constant Contact account, so make sure it is up-to-date! Thank you.

Questions? Let us know below!

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*No Purchase Necessary. The Constant Contact Community Get Advice Sweepstakes: Spring Cleaning is open to legal residents of the 50 United States (and D.C), 18 years or older. For Official Rules, visit here. Promotion ends on May 5, 2021 at 11:59 PM ET. The Sweepstakes is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Khoros, Pinterest, or Twitter.

[PlymouthChurch]

Hi, ChantelB38.

One way to get them to come would be to offer a discount if they bring the email to your truck - either a printout or hold up their phone.  People LOVE to save money, even if it's only $1.

Something to think about for your open rate is to make the subject appealing and/or clever. "Haven't seen you in a Blue Moon" (ice cream cone emoji)

What would they click on in your email - upcoming locations? new flavors? rental for parties? link to your website?  Don't have too many in one email.  Also, make it obvious WHERE they should click - buttons are better for mobile devices than trying to touch highlighted text.

Good luck!

[debbies8621]

You have a fun subject to work with...so make your emails fun. Maybe add in coloring pages that the kids can bring for a free treat. Or recipes using your treats, ice cream sandwich cake. Definitely, need to engage throughout the year so they don't forget you

[DeniseI25]

Hi, I just started a contract with a financial publisher and they are using the same disclaimer at the top and bottom of their emails. Do you have samples of top disclaimers that I can look at for 3rd party advertisers? Thank you.

[debbies8621]

What kind of disclaimer? Is it the legal notice they have to have or something else. 

[KN67]

I have to update my contacts list monthly. What seems to help me organize, is to create with clear labeling each month and merge contacts.

[KN67]

Need advice: I have several contacts list but at times I just want to send specific email blasts or marketing to a small specific group or individuals made up within the several lists I have. How can I do that without creating arbitrary list with 2 or 3 peoples names?

[DaveR7]

This sounds like a candidate for creating a list using segmentation. If you are not familiar check in with a CC support person for help.

[VicenteC0]

We divide our contacts into product categories. Some contacts get emailed multiple times a year while others maybe once. When we haven't sent to a category in a long time or have a major announcement we will send our contact list to our regional sales managers. We instruct them to tell us if they think we are missing a customer/company or a specific contact at a company. This helps us add contacts we weren't told about for various reasons (mostly, the salesmen forget to tell us.)

End of the year we usually send a Thanksgiving email and Xmas/New years email to all our contacts. This is a great time to see what contacts are still valid and clean up from there.

Throughout the year, I will wait 3-6 months to delete "Suspended" contacts; or see if the next 2-3 emails sent to them still come back as "Suspended". 

[Nick_S]

Hey @VicenteC0,

Thank you so much for your response. You touch on a few different tactics for managing your contacts that I think a lot of people would find helpful. I, personally, never thought of utilizing a holiday missive as a contact cleansing opportunity. I reward you this week's bonus entry into the sweepstakes. Thank you for participating!

Honorary mention to @PlymouthChurch. Your advice to @debbie8621 is something that I feel like can easily fall through the cracks during a transitory phase for a business so I appreciate you pointing that out!

And thank you again to everyone that is asking questions or offering their advice!

[DeniseI25]

I have been a Constant Contact partner for more than 10 years. I have worked with very large financial subscriber lists and many of them started out with Constant Contact. At that time, CC didn't offer many of the resources and add-ins they have today.  Once I saw a publisher was working with CC, I knew that I didn't need to worry about spam or delivery issues. 

On a personal level, I do a lot of social media volunteering. One volunteer role I have had is volunteer firefighter. Since I joined when I was 46, and am now almost 60, the role I have now within the fire department is social media manager and secretary. What that means is I created and manage our Facebook page, and use Constant Contact for our emails to our members. Our town uses CC. Our fire department list is small (under 150) but our township list is much larger. But delivery has never been an issue. I missed the new template update because I was ill for a long-time. When I contacted CC in a panic because a member had passed away and I needed to send an email, customer service was RIGHT there to help me and I was able to send an email out that evening. 

When people ask for the name of a email provider, I always mention CC. It's not for the referral. It's because the application is well-respected, well-received, and there are many people working behind the scenes to make sure the emails are in compliance and there are no delivery issues. 

An additional resource for those of you that have issues that can't easily be addressed is a new company called Listworker.  The owner of this company has more than 30 years experience and has helped me many times with delivery questions, customized product links (i.e., inbound splits), and handling website reputation issues which is very important for financial publishers. The analysis and monitoring this company performs is not found anywhere else in the industry (that’s true, they are kind of crazy with the level of depth they go into with monitoring). 

I just tried to email customer support to give this company name out instead of posting it on this community forum but the email box is not monitored according to the email. I am hoping someone from Constant Contact reaches out to this company to add it as a resource or add-in for CC clients.  

Denise Gaylord

Email Marketing Analyst

[Nick_S]

Hi @DeniseI25,

Thank you for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at your history and career and sharing a third-party tool that you have found beneficial. We can pass your feedback about Listworker to the right people here!

As for the theme of this sweepstakes being contact management, do you have any hints and tips you can share about how you've kept your contacts clean and organized within the Constant Contact ecosystem? 

[PatriciaAndTonyB]

One way we've found to get people to open our emails and double check our list is by sending out a congratulations type of email. The easiest one is "Happy Birthday"! Those that have a birthday in the month will open, those that don't will open it thinking you have the wrong information. Then we ask them to update their birthday with us so we can be sure to send a birthday greeting and a small token (small gift card, discount, or a small piece of our business swag, even just their name in the weekly newsletter). Those that don't respond we double check to see if they are still attending our if we need to move them on our win-back list. 

We always get a great response each year with this.

[C.Rhalena_Renee]

HI,

I was ill for a long time and am now getting back to marketing my business. Any advice on how to clean up my contacts to what/who is now relevant? So much has changed in the last year. I was thinking of sending out several emails over a couple weeks and then looking at opens and culling my contacts from there.  Am I "spring cleaning" myself out of business with that? Should I give it more time? 

[HCo-op]

I manage the emails for our entire company - 6 divisions and over 7,000 contacts. I keep track of all bounced addresses and send updates to the sales reps and field marketers whose name is associated with that email. By politely hounding them, I get updated contacts from their customers and work to keep the contact list updated. There are several great tools in Constant Contact to use - search for unsubscribed names, reports and so forth. It is a task that requires time and effort so a block of time is worked into my schedule to stay on top of this. Our open rates are consistent and our bounce rate is below 2%. 

[CherylR155]

I find I have a higher open rate when I share information in my header to bring customers up to date.  And, they engage more when I include lots of photos.  I also change up the layout a bit with each e mail so it's not always the same format.

[DeniseI25]

We make sure to download the list periodically and remove people no longer affiliated with the fire department. We don’t remove the non-openers because oftentimes people will say they didn’t get your email and we can say they did receive it successfully. 

I would encourage you to add first and last names whenever possible. There are some email addresses where you can either figure out a name or do a little research and find the name. I would add in the company if the sender has a domain that is recognized as a company. Lastly, remove any obvious test email addresses so they don’t skew results. You can even add an additional field if you know the domain is a certain business type. 

[Nick_S]

First, I just want to say that selecting a post to receive the bonus entry is hard. I didn't think it would be easy, but I am loving all the responses I'm seeing from people and it is difficult to pick just one. But pick just one I did and this week it goes to @DeniseI25! Thank you for your contribution. 

What I liked about the response is that you advocate for doing the extra detective work and filling out the identity of your contact as best as possible. The more you know (within healthy boundaries, of course) the more you can provide a unique and targeted experience for your audience. 

But like I said, I enjoyed everyone's responses this week! The sweepstakes wraps up on May 5, next Wednesday, so there's still some time to enter!

And don't despair! While this sweepstakes is coming to a close soon, we will be back next month with a new sweepstakes!

[BettyS1010]

I work at a church. We send out a weekly ENews including a video devotional to members and prospects who have requested it. We also send out a shorter version of the ENews including the sermon video each week to the same group of people. The pastor who was responsible for this task retired this year and I became responsible for the maintenance and execution of the job with very limited training. When I took over, the open percentage was between 30-40%. It is now over 50%. The contact list was heavily laden with invalid email addresses, inactive accounts and more when I got it. I printed the entire list. Then I printed the list of inactive accounts. I proceeded to check our membership database and updated addresses that had changed. I called some people to ask if they had a new address. I still do not understand fully the difference in delete and unsubscribe. Our church is mostly senior citizens. Some understand how to use their devices. Some do not. Lots of times our people accidentally click unsubscribe. I have a standard letter I send to them recognizing they have clicked unsubscribe by accident. If it was accidental, I try to help  them resubscribe. If it was intentional I delete them. The cleanup has been long and arduous. Since we don't have a "product" we are selling, many of your helpful hints do not pertain to us. 

[BettyS1010]

HELP! I just sent a reply and when it popped up the identity attached was a pastor who has not been on the account for MANY years. I don't know how to fix that. This one is going to come under the same identity because I cannot figure out how to fix it.

[KellyD93]

Our open rate is pretty good for most of our email as we are a membership organization, and use member emails.  We get really good response by promising to only send one email a month max (except during our 8 week event festival - then we send one per week) and we look at our insights, and unsubscribes to make sure we don't bounce back people who have requested being removed.  Hope it helps!

[KellyD93]

So my question is - I entered contacts and it was too many at the same time so those were all quarantined.  None of those people are going to do the opt in instead or opt out.  Can we clear them from the quarantined list (this was like in 2014) so that we can re-enter them again properly.  I didn't know what I was doing when I first started.  And, I know not to enter them that way.  But some of my valuable sponsors and corporate contacts are blocked because of my entry error.