Ellen Brezniak is Senior Vice President, Product Strategy for Constant Contact. She recently took a few minutes for a Q&A with Bryan Haines.
Bryan: What does Constant Contact do?
Ellen: We help small businesses and organizations succeed by helping them create and build long-lasting relationships with their customers or members through our email marketing, social media marketing, event marketing, and online survey tools combined with our education, coaching, and support.
Bryan: Why should an online business use email marketing?
Ellen: I know that Gail has answered this question, but from my perspective, why wouldn’t you? It’s easy to do, it’s cost-effective, and it keeps you connected with your customers. With no store-front, online businesses need to work even harder to stay connected with customers. Email marketing provides that medium, ensuring your message gets out to your audience.
Bryan: How difficult is it to setup an email campaign? How much technical ability is required?
Ellen: That depends on what service you are using. At Constant Contact, we know that our customers often have limited time or don’t have the technical resources to create an email marketing campaign from scratch. What they do know is their business, and they want to present their business in the most professional way possible. We’ve made sure that our tools do just that. They are super easy to use and let users create a professional look that matches their other marketing assets quickly and easily. They can focus on the content – their expertise – while leaving all the technical “mumbo-jumbo” to the experts here at Constant Contact.
Bryan: How do you help online businesses build their email lists?
Ellen: Oftentimes, businesses just haven’t even had the time to think of asking for email addresses. That’s really step one – making sure you ask for that address at any point during an interaction and get permission to send to it. We provide a number of educational resources and how-to guides with pointers for building a successful list. We also offer features within our tools that help make list-building easy. For instance, we offer a “Join My Mailing List” application that customers can easily place on their website or Facebook page to collect email addresses.
Bryan: Should a premium (ie. free report, an ebook, video access) be offered as an incentive for subscribing to a newsletter? If so, what type of subscriber increase is typical? What type of premium/incentive works best?
Ellen: Incentives can definitely help attract list subscribers, but it’s very important to make sure that the incentive is closely connected to your business. If you offer, for instance, a free iPad, people are going to sign up to get the iPad, not because they are interested in your business. As soon as they get their iPad, they’ll unsubscribe. Instead, try offering a free report related to your business or a discount good toward the subscriber’s next purchase. The bump in subscribers will likely vary depending on your industry and incentive you select, but if you provide the right incentive, you may be able to both increase your subscribers and drive purchase. And don’t forget to invite recipients to share your email with their networks on Facebook or Twitter to expand your audience at the same time.
Bryan: Is there really a difference in deliverability between the different email marketers? Please explain.
Ellen: We’re very proud that we have 98% deliverability at Constant Contact. We work hard to maintain that high rate, primarily by having very high standards regarding spam. We require all customers to get permission from everyone they email. Why does it matter? Because if Constant Contact – or any other vendor for that matter – gets marked as a spammer, it can ripple across the entire customer base, impacting everyone’s ability to get email delivered to the inbox and not stuck in a spam filter. We use Return Path, an industry-leading email scoring and certification company, to measure our deliverability. We use an expert to measure our service.
Ellen Brezniak is Senior Vice President, Product Strategy for Constant Contact. She recently took a few minutes for a Q&A with Bryan Haines.
