You know what? My wife was right.
Eight months ago my family and I renovated the first floor of our house.
As part of this renovation, we moved our clothes washer and dryer up from the basement and onto our main floor.
Even though I regarded this as small, and even insignificant move, my wife insisted it was going to have a major impact on our household.
What type of impact? [Read more...]
You’re thinking about hosting an event, maybe for educational, networking, or fundraising purposes.
You don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to it, but you want to look professional and minimize the time spent managing all the event details.
You decide to promote your event via emails and phone calls. Maybe you even create a registration form using Microsoft Word. You post the registration form on your website to be filled out and sent back via fax.
At first, you receive a few phone calls for additional information. Then the email responses start to arrive. Now you’re spending time on the phone answering those calls, returning messages, and playing telephone tag.
You start to receive faxes with the registration details filled out, but you can’t read the handwriting on the pages. You need to pull together all of this information into a spreadsheet, but these tasks are becoming very labor intensive. You think to yourself, “There has to be a better way to manage these event details!”
So, what’s the solution? Don’t pull your hair out; you need an online event management tool! [Read more...]
My family and I recently went on a vacation.
We rented a house in a coastal town, and on Wednesday of that week, we ended up having lunch in town at a restaurant right on the harbor. The lunch was great and went off without a hitch (which is a rarity, as we have three very active sons).
We here at Constant Contact have always done things a little differently because we’re focused on helping small businesses and nonprofit organizations be as successful as possible.
That’s why, when we first released our Email Marketing product 13 years ago, we chose a pricing model that was based on the size of your contact list rather than the number of emails sent in a month.
We understood from the beginning that our customers appreciated the predictability of a contact-based model, as opposed to a per-email-based model, which could vary greatly from month to month. Additionally, we chose our pricing model because we understood that our customers would know how to best use our email marketing product — and we didn’t want to limit that usage based on the price.
It’s with this same focus on helping small businesses and organizations that we again do things a little differently when it comes to pricing our Event Marketing product. We once again are doing something against the norm because we feel the norm doesn’t have the best interest of small businesses at heart.
Many event marketing vendors have a pricing model that’s called a per registrant model. That is, they charge you a percentage fee for each charged registrant or a flat per-registrant processing fee (in some instances, they actually charge you both). [Read more...]
Recently, my wife and I were looking for something fun to do with our kids.
We decided on a sure thing, a trip to the movies. We went ahead and bought our tickets online, then headed to the movie theater.
When we got to the theater, we picked up our tickets, bought the popcorn and drinks, went in, and chose our seats. It’s a ritual that’s repeated by millions of people every day. Not surprisingly, the experience made me think about the “ritual” that comes into play for our customers when they host an event.
I came to the same conclusion I did about going to the movies: Every single aspect related to putting on the event contributes to its success. If just one aspect of this ecosystem — the location, the time, the registration process, the promotion of the event, the ticketing process, etc. — didn’t work, the success of the event would come into question.
After the movie ended, and we returned home, I just couldn’t shake the idea that something was out of place about the movie theater event “ecosystem.” It wasn’t until I was emptying my pockets and held our used movie tickets in my hands that I realized what was nagging at me.
I was looking down at these tickets and realized how misdirected and shortsighted it is that other companies in the event marketing space have recently started giving more significance to a ticket than to other aspects within the event ecosystem. Instead of focusing on the idea of helping a small business or organization to manage the most successful event possible, many other vendors are trying to make the ticket the main focus. [Read more...]
