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How to Maintain Your Business Database

The Power of Relationship Susan Wilson Solovic: Hello and welcome to SBTV.com, I’m Susan Wilson Solovic. This is the third program in our series The Power of Relationships with our guest expert Eric Groves who is the Senior Vice President of Constant Contact welcome again Eric. Eric Groves: It’s great to be back, Susan. Susan Wilson Solovic: And of course, I want to tell everybody, if who don’t know already, Constant Contact is the leading online email marketing and online survey company helping all sorts of small businesses around the country so we really appreciate you being here and sharing this information with us. Eric Groves: Oh, it’s been a lot of fun. Susan Wilson Solovic: Now we’ve talked about in our first program, we talked about in general the power of relationships. Then we talked about how to build and maintain a customer database or an email-marketing database. Ok, so let’s assume now we’ve gotten that far, but I want to start my email marketing campaign. How do I know that it’s actually going to be read by people in my database and not just deleted? Eric Groves: Well, first of all, when you send that in email campaign, a lot of what happens can be tracked. So unlike direct mail where you send out a postcard and you just hope for the best, email has some tracking capabilities that go along with it. So as soon as you send out your campaign, you’re going to be able to see how many of those messages bounced. Why they bounced, how many were delivered, how many people opened it, who opened it, how many people clicked on the link in it, and what they clicked on, so what information you sent is really interesting to them. So a lot of great information will flow back to you immediately after you sent that campaign. Susan Wilson Solovic: And you can use that going forward to improve on your success. Eric Groves: Exactly, now when you send out your first campaign, the recipients are going to ask themselves two questions when your message hits their inbox if you will. The first question they’re going to ask themselves is, “Do I know you?” and that’s what you’re going to cover in the “from” line. So it’s important that that “from” line be very specific has a brand in there that they’re going to recognize. It is something that you keep consistent message after message. Once you get them past that “from” line and double click to the survey which I think there’s a bit 60 percent of the people determine whether or not they’re going to delete the campaign based on that “from” address, so it’s important to make sure that that’s someone that they’re going to recognize. Then they move to the subject. And if the subject is, captivates their attention then they’ll likely to open it and read on. So you really got two different opportunities, one to say, “Do I know you?” and the other that answers the question “Why should I care to open it up?” Susan Wilson Solovic: Now, the subject’s line, that is key, I know, but it’s something that I struggle with and I think a lot of small businesses too. Do you have any advice on creating a subject line that really works? Eric Groves: I sure do and it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Everybody has the same challenge Susan Wilson Solovic: Good, I’m glad to know that. Eric Groves: It’s not just you and it’s really all about having that personality come out a little bit. Whether you’re an accountant, who’s having some tips about how to get audited, or how not to get audited, who coop in their subject line? Two tips, forgetting audited by the IRS, well that’s sure to captivate people’s attention. Or if you’re a landscaper, you could be writing about, “Oh here are two plants that deer won’t eat”, because you know your clientele’s in an area where deer are munching on all of the plants around the neighborhood. So just using that subject line to capture someone’s attention tell them hey here’s a little snipping of knowledge, and it’s going to be fun to read. We’ll get people opening it time after time. Susan Wilson Solovic: I want the one that says “How to get rid of the rabbits from eating everything in my yard”. That’s what I like. What about spam, because you know I used to get a lot of emails in my inbox and they’re labeled spam? How can you prevent that from happening from your email campaign? Eric Groves: Well, there’s a couple of things that you can do. First of all, recognize that spam is in the eyes of the recipient, not the sender. So really generating some great content, which we’re going to talk about in the next session, really will help you in making sure that your message is being well received by the reader. The other things that you can do to maximize your delivery is to work with a service provider such as us who has reputation established with the major ISP’s so when we send out email, we get about 97 percent of our mail delivered into the inbox in the United States. And we use a third party to keep track of that for us. The industry average is, you know, in the high 70’s, low 80’s so it really is important to make sure that you’re using someone that’s going to not only send your mail but get it delivered. And you know the last thing, when it comes to, you know being identified as spam, is going back to the question of “Do they know me?” and “Why should they care?” and odds are you’re going to do fine if you can handle all of those, you know, questions well with the recipient. Susan Wilson Solovic: Now here’s something else, I’m really curios about because I actually signed up; opted in for an email newsletter, and then I kept getting like, all the time and I was like, enough already! So how do you gauge and know when it’s too much or when it’s enough or too much, and how do you know? Eric Groves: Well one of the most important things you should do as a sender is really set the expectations of the recipient. So if you’re going to send a monthly newsletter, tell the people “Hey, join up to receive my monthly news letter.” But then the key is, deliver on that promise. If you say your; going to deliver something on a monthly basis and you start sending on a weekly or daily basis, these people are just going to unsubscribe. Now there are those businesses where a daily alert is of interest to folks. We also have a Day Spa client that sends out something every Friday. And it’s of an interesting case study in it. They realize that on Wednesday, all of their slots were filled the following weekend, but by Friday, they have a bunch of cancellations. So they started using their weekly alert on Friday at around noon to send out to their clients and say, “Hey we’ve got three openings this weekend. The first three people that call get them in a 20 percent discount”. Well within a matter of minutes, those slots were filled. And now people expect and wit for that message to come out every Friday. And in fact one weekend they didn’t have any cancellations and they didn’t send it and people called anyway saying, “Where is the news letter?” so you know, you can set expectations but just deliver them. You’ll be fine. Susan Wilson Solovic: Absolutely, I can imagine too. You’re sitting there and spend a tough week to get that in your inbox, yeah absolutely that worked. Eric Groves: Yeah I’m waiting for the message. Susan Wilson Solovic: Totally, what about the image of your email campaign, sure they really reflect the same image of your company; I mean how do you balance that? Eric Groves: Well first of all, when you think of image, you think about the layout of the campaign itself, and looking professional is really important. Think of it just like any other marketing collateral that you have for your business. You want to look as professional as possible. You want to use the same colors that you use on your website and on your logo and match all that. And one of the cool things about Constant Contact is we have over 300 templates that you can use and customize and change the color on, so the look of your campaign can look incredibly professional without ever having to know any html. And then there’s you know how much image do you insert into the campaign itself to draw people’s eyes and attention to specific things that you have in there. And one of the things we do on the templates is we give you a guide to, oh here, put a 150 by 100 pixel image in here, because much larger will start to overwhelm the reader. So there’s a lot of checks and balances built right into the templates that make it really simple for you to do. Susan Wilson Solovic: And one thing we were talking about is like on blackberries. You don’t get those images so it should look and be able to be easily read in text as well as in your graphic version I guess. Eric Groves: Exactly, you should always be thinking about your readers not only as the ones that are going to read it with all of the images, and all of the html alive and well but also those people that are going to read in text, and that will happen in a couple of different ways. One is it will be if they’re using their blackberry or their trio and they’re reading on there, that will show up as text, but also recognize a lot of the email clients that are out there now have the images defaulted turned off. So even your nice html newsletter will show up with all the colors and everything but the images like your logo may not show up. So it’s really important as you’re creating your campaign to not put a big logo image at the top of your campaign. You may put a smaller logo, maybe down into the left and use text at the top to tell people who it’s coming from and drive your content up into the preview window rather than having a big red X there if someone’s got those images disabled. Susan Wilson Solovic: And then if they open it up and they want to see the images, they can download the images. Eric Groves: Yeah. If your content’s great, they’re going to turn on those images and see it all. Susan Wilson Solovic: And what a perfect segway because the next time we’re going to be talking about creating compelling content for your audience. Eric Groves: Exactly. Susan Wilson Solovic: Wonderful Eric, thanks for joining us. Eric Groves: My pleasure. Susan Wilson Solovic: And thanks to all of you for joining us and tune in for the fourth program in our series, The Power of Building Relationships”, and once again remember you’re watching SBTV.com where small business is our only business.

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The Power of Relationship
Susan Wilson Solovic: Hello and welcome to SBTV.com, I’m Susan Wilson Solovic. This is the third program in our series The Power of Relationships with our guest expert Eric Groves who is the Senior Vice President of Constant Contact welcome again Eric.
Eric Groves: It’s great to be back, Susan.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And of course, I want to tell everybody, if who don’t know already, Constant Contact is the leading online email marketing and online survey company helping all sorts of small businesses around the country so we really appreciate you being here and sharing this information with us.
Eric Groves: Oh, it’s been a lot of fun.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Now we’ve talked about in our first program, we talked about in general the power of relationships. Then we talked about how to build and maintain a customer database or an email-marketing database. Ok, so let’s assume now we’ve gotten that far, but I want to start my email marketing campaign. How do I know that it’s actually going to be read by people in my database and not just deleted?
Eric Groves: Well, first of all, when you send that in email campaign, a lot of what happens can be tracked. So unlike direct mail where you send out a postcard and you just hope for the best, email has some tracking capabilities that go along with it. So as soon as you send out your campaign, you’re going to be able to see how many of those messages bounced. Why they bounced, how many were delivered, how many people opened it, who opened it, how many people clicked on the link in it, and what they clicked on, so what information you sent is really interesting to them. So a lot of great information will flow back to you immediately after you sent that campaign.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And you can use that going forward to improve on your success.
Eric Groves: Exactly, now when you send out your first campaign, the recipients are going to ask themselves two questions when your message hits their inbox if you will. The first question they’re going to ask themselves is, “Do I know you?” and that’s what you’re going to cover in the “from” line. So it’s important that that “from” line be very specific has a brand in there that they’re going to recognize. It is something that you keep consistent message after message. Once you get them past that “from” line and double click to the survey which I think there’s a bit 60 percent of the people determine whether or not they’re going to delete the campaign based on that “from” address, so it’s important to make sure that that’s someone that they’re going to recognize.
Then they move to the subject. And if the subject is, captivates their attention then they’ll likely to open it and read on. So you really got two different opportunities, one to say, “Do I know you?” and the other that answers the question “Why should I care to open it up?”
Susan Wilson Solovic: Now, the subject’s line, that is key, I know, but it’s something that I struggle with and I think a lot of small businesses too. Do you have any advice on creating a subject line that really works?
Eric Groves: I sure do and it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Everybody has the same challenge
Susan Wilson Solovic: Good, I’m glad to know that.
Eric Groves: It’s not just you and it’s really all about having that personality come out a little bit. Whether you’re an accountant, who’s having some tips about how to get audited, or how not to get audited, who coop in their subject line? Two tips, forgetting audited by the IRS, well that’s sure to captivate people’s attention. Or if you’re a landscaper, you could be writing about, “Oh here are two plants that deer won’t eat”, because you know your clientele’s in an area where deer are munching on all of the plants around the neighborhood. So just using that subject line to capture someone’s attention tell them hey here’s a little snipping of knowledge, and it’s going to be fun to read. We’ll get people opening it time after time.
Susan Wilson Solovic: I want the one that says “How to get rid of the rabbits from eating everything in my yard”. That’s what I like. What about spam, because you know I used to get a lot of emails in my inbox and they’re labeled spam? How can you prevent that from happening from your email campaign?
Eric Groves: Well, there’s a couple of things that you can do. First of all, recognize that spam is in the eyes of the recipient, not the sender. So really generating some great content, which we’re going to talk about in the next session, really will help you in making sure that your message is being well received by the reader. The other things that you can do to maximize your delivery is to work with a service provider such as us who has reputation established with the major ISP’s so when we send out email, we get about 97 percent of our mail delivered into the inbox in the United States. And we use a third party to keep track of that for us. The industry average is, you know, in the high 70’s, low 80’s so it really is important to make sure that you’re using someone that’s going to not only send your mail but get it delivered. And you know the last thing, when it comes to, you know being identified as spam, is going back to the question of “Do they know me?” and “Why should they care?” and odds are you’re going to do fine if you can handle all of those, you know, questions well with the recipient.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Now here’s something else, I’m really curios about because I actually signed up; opted in for an email newsletter, and then I kept getting like, all the time and I was like, enough already! So how do you gauge and know when it’s too much or when it’s enough or too much, and how do you know?
Eric Groves: Well one of the most important things you should do as a sender is really set the expectations of the recipient. So if you’re going to send a monthly newsletter, tell the people “Hey, join up to receive my monthly news letter.” But then the key is, deliver on that promise. If you say your; going to deliver something on a monthly basis and you start sending on a weekly or daily basis, these people are just going to unsubscribe. Now there are those businesses where a daily alert is of interest to folks. We also have a Day Spa client that sends out something every Friday. And it’s of an interesting case study in it.
They realize that on Wednesday, all of their slots were filled the following weekend, but by Friday, they have a bunch of cancellations. So they started using their weekly alert on Friday at around noon to send out to their clients and say, “Hey we’ve got three openings this weekend. The first three people that call get them in a 20 percent discount”. Well within a matter of minutes, those slots were filled. And now people expect and wit for that message to come out every Friday. And in fact one weekend they didn’t have any cancellations and they didn’t send it and people called anyway saying, “Where is the news letter?” so you know, you can set expectations but just deliver them. You’ll be fine.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Absolutely, I can imagine too. You’re sitting there and spend a tough week to get that in your inbox, yeah absolutely that worked.
Eric Groves: Yeah I’m waiting for the message.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Totally, what about the image of your email campaign, sure they really reflect the same image of your company; I mean how do you balance that?
Eric Groves: Well first of all, when you think of image, you think about the layout of the campaign itself, and looking professional is really important. Think of it just like any other marketing collateral that you have for your business. You want to look as professional as possible. You want to use the same colors that you use on your website and on your logo and match all that. And one of the cool things about Constant Contact is we have over 300 templates that you can use and customize and change the color on, so the look of your campaign can look incredibly professional without ever having to know any html.
And then there’s you know how much image do you insert into the campaign itself to draw people’s eyes and attention to specific things that you have in there. And one of the things we do on the templates is we give you a guide to, oh here, put a 150 by 100 pixel image in here, because much larger will start to overwhelm the reader. So there’s a lot of checks and balances built right into the templates that make it really simple for you to do.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And one thing we were talking about is like on blackberries. You don’t get those images so it should look and be able to be easily read in text as well as in your graphic version I guess.
Eric Groves: Exactly, you should always be thinking about your readers not only as the ones that are going to read it with all of the images, and all of the html alive and well but also those people that are going to read in text, and that will happen in a couple of different ways. One is it will be if they’re using their blackberry or their trio and they’re reading on there, that will show up as text, but also recognize a lot of the email clients that are out there now have the images defaulted turned off. So even your nice html newsletter will show up with all the colors and everything but the images like your logo may not show up. So it’s really important as you’re creating your campaign to not put a big logo image at the top of your campaign. You may put a smaller logo, maybe down into the left and use text at the top to tell people who it’s coming from and drive your content up into the preview window rather than having a big red X there if someone’s got those images disabled.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And then if they open it up and they want to see the images, they can download the images.
Eric Groves: Yeah. If your content’s great, they’re going to turn on those images and see it all.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And what a perfect segway because the next time we’re going to be talking about creating compelling content for your audience.
Eric Groves: Exactly.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Wonderful Eric, thanks for joining us.
Eric Groves: My pleasure.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And thanks to all of you for joining us and tune in for the fourth program in our series, The Power of Building Relationships”, and once again remember you’re watching SBTV.com where small business is our only business.

Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services