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Showing posts from July, 2019

5 Foolproof Ways to Generate Leads for Your Business

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  As a small business, generating leads is a top priority.  Luckily, there are many ways get more leads quickly and effectively. The following five ideas can be used by businesses of all sizes and most industries. The key is to test and modify to make them work for your customer base. Here are five foolproof ways to generate leads for your business: 1. Facebook Ads Facebook ads are one of the best ways to drive leads. If you’re willing to “pay to play,” you have access to specific targeting options , including age, location, interests, and more. To make your ads successful, and drive qualified leads, use best practices and follow your data. Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you create your first Facebook ad: The ad should be closely related to the content people are clicking through to. If there’s any confusion, people are more likely to click away, assuming there was a mistake. Use eye-catching, bright colors, rather than blues or whit

What Is SEO and Why Does It Matter?

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  Wondering what SEO means and how it can help your business? Worried you don’t have the skills or budget needed to get started? SEO is affordable and effective, allowing you to reach new customers and increase sales. Let’s dig deeper into SEO and how it can benefit your business. What is SEO? SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, means setting up your website and content to show up through online search results. While many marketing tactics rely on you reaching out to your audience, SEO gives you the power to reach people when they are actively searching out information related to your products and services. SEO helps you improve your visibility within the  organic  (or natural )  search results, not to be confused with the paid search results. New to Constant Contact?  You can try it out with a free 60-day trial. Why is SEO so important? If you don’t optimize your website for search engines, you risk losing potential customers to your competitors because their

One Mistake You Don’t Want to Make When Running a Facebook Ad

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  If you use Facebook , then you know that not everything that shows up in your feed is always relevant or interesting to you. In fact, some of the updates you see will be the complete opposite of anything you’d ever be interested in seeing. As a Facebook user, it’s no big deal. You can tune those posts out, and focus on the stuff you actually care about. But when you’re paying to promote your content on Facebook , the last thing you want is to be ignored by the people you’re paying to reach. That’s why targeting is so important. Facebook has a number of features to help advertisers target the right audience. This will improve your chances of connecting with people who are actually interested in your business, and avoid spending ad dollars on reaching the wrong people. If you’re not taking advantage of these powerful features, you’re making one of the biggest Facebook Ad mistakes you can make. Let’s a look at some ways you can use Facebook Ads t

[Worksheet] How to Measure the Business Impact of Your Email Marketing

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Research from the Direct Marketing Association has shown that email marketing returns $38 for every $1 spent. Do you know if this return on investment rings true for your small business? If you don’t know the answer, it’s okay, you’re not alone. Many small business owners we talk to just aren’t that excited about digging into email marketing reports . But when they see the connection between their email marketing activities and real business results , things start to get a lot more exciting. Use these worksheets to tie your email marketing activities to business results. Download your worksheets: 1.  How to Measure the Business Impact of Your Email Marketing — Time-Based Promotions 2.  How to Measure the Business Impact of Your Email Marketing — Nonpromotional emails  If you’re using Constant Contact for email marketing , you’ll be able to look at the performance of your individual emails, see how well your emails perform on average, benchmark your email results to indus

How Email Tracking Can Introduce New Opportunities for Your Business

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  You can admit it. Tracking your emails and monitoring things like opens and clicks doesn’t exactly sound like the most exciting part of marketing your business. You work hard on your emails. You rack your brain to find the right words, and create a message you think your subscribers will enjoy. So once you hit send, you’re happy give yourself a pat on the back and call it a day. Email marketing doesn’t end with a send. One of the biggest benefits of using an email marketing service to do your email marketing is the ability to track key metrics like opens, clicks, bounce rates, and unsubscribes. But to really use email tracking effectively you need to go beyond vanity metrics — you need to take the information in your reports do something with it. Let’s look at five examples of how email tracking can create new opportunities for your business. 1. Reward your most engaged subscribers Where to look: Your clicks. Why: Seeing which subscribers are actively engag

A Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics

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  You invested time, money, and other resources into setting up a website for your business. It looks great and you’re excited about having a place for people to learn more about your business. But now that it’s setup, are you able to answer these important questions? How many people are visiting your website? What pages are getting the most traffic? How are people finding your website? One of the best tools for answering these questions and tracking the effectiveness of your website is Google Analytics . Google Analytics is a free tool that provides insight into website traffic, visitor demographics, and other activity that takes place on your site. Before you get started Before you get started with Google Analytics, you’ll need to setup a Google Analytics account. When setting up your account, you’ll be asked to give your website URL and will be provided with a tracking code that can be added to any page on your website that you wish to track. Use these instruction

5 Ideas to Reinvigorate Your Email Marketing Strategy

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Everybody loves a comeback story. Whether it’s your favorite celebrity reclaiming the spotlight, a musical act climbing back up the charts, or a sports team staging a come-from-behind victory — we’re all know how inspirational these stories can be. Can you infuse the same inspiration into your email marketing strategy? I recently had the chance to speak with Kolbie Richardson from fashion retailer, No Rest for Bridget . Since getting started with email marketing in 2007, the store has built their contact list to over 15,000 names. Kolbie and her team see email marketing as their most effective tool for driving website traffic, online sales, and brand awareness. One of the keys to Kolbie’s success is that she’s constantly looking for new ways to reimagine her strategy and bring something new to her email audience. With ten years of email marketing experience behind them, the No Rest for Bridget team has learned firsthand how to be marketers. If you’re looking for a way

Periscope Recap: What Your Unsubscribers Can Tell You About Your Email Marketing

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  No one likes to see people unsubscribe from their email list. You work hard to provide a great experience for your email readers and the last thing you want is to see people leave. But do you really know why people are unsubscribing from your emails? This week on Periscope , we wanted to take a closer look at what unsubscribes can mean for your email marketing and what you can learn from the people who choose to opt-out. We covered: Why unsubscribes aren’t always a bad thing The common reasons people unsubscribe How to figuring out why people unsubscribe from your email list How to provide a great experience for new email subscribers Here is the transcript of our talk, if you’d prefer to read. One question we hear all the time is “How can I get people to stop unsubscribing from my emails?” But it’s important to rethink the conversation around unsubscribes. While no one enjoys seeing someone opt-out from receiving their emails, unsubscribes aren’t always a ba

How to Design Emails for Small Screens and Short Attention Spans

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  How do you check your email? If you’re like most people, it’s often on a much smaller screen than the one you were using just a few years ago. Today, more than 65 percent of all emails are opened on a mobile device. When it comes to your email marketing , you need to make sure your messages look great no matter what size screen your audience is using. You also need to think about how people are reading and interacting with your emails in today’s increasingly mobile world. The first step is to create a compelling message that grabs your audience’s attention and gets them to click to open. If you look at your own mobile inbox, you’ll notice three key elements of every message: From Name : Lets people know who the message is coming from Subject Line : Lets people know what the email is about and why they should open Preheader : Gives people a sample of the content in the email Once someone clicks to open your message, you’ll only have a few se

Help, My Contacts Aren’t Opening My Emails!

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  At Constant Contact, we usually say that the average email open rate is about 20%. That range fluctuates anywhere from 15 to 50%, depending on your industry. It can be frustrating to spend so much energy on a campaign that only a fifth of your contacts open. So, every now and again, it can be beneficial to run a reengagement campaign that specifically targets the people who aren’t opening your emails. This can boost your overall open rate and help you clean your contact list. Here’s what you need to do: 1. Find out who’s not opening your emails Let’s say you fit squarely in the 20% range when it comes to open rates. More than likely, you have an engaged, core audience, a few people who occasionally open the email, and then contacts who aren’t opening, but haven’t unsubscribed. Check your email reports in your Constant Contact account then follow these steps to create a list of contacts who haven’t opened your email. If you have online orders, you can check the

6 Reasons Emails Bounce (And What You Can Do to Improve Your Bounce Rate)

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  We’ve all been there. You create an email , send away, and then — when you check your email reports — you see that it “bounced.” Which means your email never actually got to your intended recipient. Even worse, if your account has high bounce rates  it can have a negative impact on your delivery rate. So it makes sense to clean up those bounced email addresses when necessary. There are two types of email bounces — a soft bounce and a hard bounce. A soft bounce means that the email address is valid and was delivered to the recipients inbox, but it still bounced because the mailbox was full, the server was down, or the message was too large for the recipient’s inbox. A hard bounce happens when the email is permanently rejected because the email address is invalid or the email addresses doesn’t exist. 1. A non-existent email address If the bounce is marked as “non-existent email address,” the email address could have a typo or the person with the address may have lef

From Snail Mail to Email: How One Spa Made the Switch to Digital and Saw Great Results

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  Allegria Spa is a business that knows how important adding a personal touch can be. Located in Beaver Creek, Colorado, this luxury day spa offers a wide range of spa, salon, and fitness services to help guests relax, rejuvenate, and live a healthier life. Delivering unique customer experiences has lead Allegria Spa to be recognized by national publications like Forbes, CNN Travel, and Travel & Leisure. Last year, the spa began looking for ways to bring the same personal touch to their marketing efforts. After relying on print mailings for a lot of their marketing communications over the years, the spa decided to bring more of their marketing online. “We had been using print mailings for a while, and there was just so much we wanted to do that we couldn’t,” explains Christine Copertino, spa director for Allegria Spa. “We decided to make a change, and really focus on doing a lot more with our email marketing.” With email marketing, Christine found the tools