Constant Contact Best Practices Blog

In this week's issue of Hints & Tips, Alec Stern discussed some ways for businesses and organizations to grow their mailing lists. His suggestions included giving your employees an incentive for collecting the most email addresses, using social media to promote your newsletter, and partnering with neighboring or complimentary businesses to advertise the availability of each other's mailing lists.

In addition to the great ideas contained in our Hints & Tips archive and on this blog, Constant Contact offers other tools to help you build your mailing list.

According to a recent report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and Retail Forward (a division of Kantar Retail), the "frantic frugalism" that marked the earlier part of the current recession has now been replaced by "frugal fatigue" and, more importantly, "practical consumerism." This means shoppers aren't necessarily cutting back, but they are being much more methodical before they decide to make a purchase.

Also interesting is that we may have Gen Y (and, to a lesser degree, Generation X) to thank for our overall economic recovery — not the Baby Boomer generation. That's because just 25% of Gen Y consumers (those between 18 and 27 years old) report that they've changed their shopping habits as a result of the economy, versus 36% and 37% of Gen Xers and Boomers, respectively.

If you're like me, then you spent your evening last night watching the Oscars. (I enjoyed it, despite the length of the show and predictability of most of the big winners.)

Alright, I know you haven't come to this blog to read about the winners and losers, or to discuss who wore what and how good he or she looked, so in an effort to stay on track, I present to you five quick email marketing lessons that can be learned from this year's Academy Awards ceremony.

When Constant Contact introduced Event Marketing to the public last October, we assumed it would be used exclusively for promoting, well, events, as the name implies. But sometimes, customers have other ideas and they take our products in a whole different direction than originally intended.

For instance, while researching a future Hints & Tips article, we found a trade organization that's using Event Marketing to capture contest entries for a shopping spree sweepstakes it's running to promote its cause and its affiliates. Using Event Marketing for a sweepstakes? It makes perfect sense to me.

While I'm happy you've chosen to read Constant Contact's blog today, I thought I'd take this opportunity to direct you elsewhere, to sites where you can read the thoughts of Constant Contact's leaders on a variety of email marketing and small-business marketing topics.

For example, Gail Goodman, our CEO, contributes a monthly column about email marketing to Entrepreneur.com. She was also recently featured on a segment of the New England Cable News program This Week in Business.

Eric Groves, our senior vice president of Global Market Development (and a contributor to this blog), writes a new blog post every two weeks for FastCompany.com about integrating technology into your marketing efforts and for AllBusiness.com about email marketing. 

I invite you to check out those sites, and if you'd like, bookmark them so you won't miss Gail and Eric's future contributions. And if you have any thoughts on any of their recent postings, please let me know.

Our mission at Constant Contact has always been to make it easy for small businesses and organizations to grow their relationships with customers and members. As such, the centerpiece of our Event Marketing application is focused on communications and promotions, rather than on managing the detailed operational aspects of an event.

Communications is a critical component at every stage of your event, from the planning to the managing to the post-event evaluation. The success of your event depends on your ability to promote it to your target audience. It's just that simple. Accordingly, there may be people outside your contact list that you want to inform about your event, and you need to communicate effectively to them too.

So how does our Event Marketing product help you to achieve a successful event and communicate more effectively with your audience?

I'm starting to feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but ... recent developments in the social media space have me feeling extra confident about my job these days.

Despite the continued growth of social media sites like Facebook (with more than 400 million users and more than 134 million unique users during the month of January, it's now the second-largest U.S. Web property), email remains a central part of all electronic communications.

Last week's introduction of Google Buzz amounted to little more than a lot of hype for an add-on for Gmail. And yesterday, in a similar development, Facebook and MySpace announced an integration with Microsoft 2010 that will result in Outlook Social Connector, an enhanced version of Microsoft's email client. OSC will allow users to view friends' activities, photos, and status updates all within their Outlook inboxes. Users can also grow their networks by adding friends from the same view.

To me, it's as if the social media world is tripping over itself to acknowledge and admit that as big as it gets, as much hype as there is about the growth and use of social media, it will never be able to compete with the drawing power of an email inbox. (Duh. Tell me something I didn't already know.)

We talk a lot about social media these days, and how using sites like Facebook can help you to find and share great content and build your mailing list as well.

Usually, when you use Facebook, you have to direct people back to your own website to see your full articles and sign up for your mailing list. Wouldn’t it be nice if people could join your mailing list without leaving Facebook?

That’s what we thought, too.

The other day, during New England’s "No Storm," I received a visit at my home from two saleswomen. Given the warnings to stay off the roads if possible, my unwanted visitors were probably smart in assuming people would be home. But I wondered: Do they really get much of a response from the door-to-door approach?

After all, I definitely didn't opt-in for their visit and really wasn’t in the mood to hear what they were selling. Their "door open rate" must be terrible. Does anyone enjoy it when salespeople appear on the front steps uninvited?

Using the same approach in your email marketing efforts (i.e.: showing up in your customers' and members' inboxes without being invited) will net the same results: poor open rates and lots of would-be customers jumping off your list.

Yesterday, Google announced its latest twist on social media. Called Buzz, the new service combines the popular features of sites like Twitter, Flickr, Yelp, Foursquare, and Picasa, and allows users to share photos, news, videos, and more right from their Gmail inboxes. Unlike sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, there’s no need to sign up for another account; everything happens right inside the Gmail environment, making it very easy to communicate and share things with people you’re already communicating with. According to this introductory video, Buzz "makes sure you see the stuff that matters most" by sending a message to your inbox every time someone comments on something you shared.

Of course, other social media sites operate in a similar fashion as Buzz, by sending you an email message whenever there’s activity around something you’ve posted. (It's one of the reasons that use of social media increases the use of email.) And Facebook already allows you to customize who you want to share certain information with — one of the features Buzz is touting. So Buzz is hardly a revolutionary advance. Really, the addition of Buzz just makes using Gmail as your email client a more social experience.

Call it one small step for social media, and maybe one larger step for email marketing.