Posts by Dave Berard

Tapping the Power of Images with New Tools for Small Business

March 1, 2012 By Dave Berard 4 Comments

Last weekend, I attended the Photo Hack Day 2 hackathon.

What’s a hackathon? It’s an event where entrepreneurial developers (or “hackers”) gather together to do collaborative computer programming, and hopefully walk away with brand new programs or applications.

The weekend was full of amazing technology and great developers, and it was a lot of fun.

My goal was to learn as much as I could about where the world of online photos is going and how small businesses and nonprofits can benefit from these advances. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Fresh Insights Tagged With: ,

Engaging Content? It’s Not Just Words and Pictures Anymore!

February 6, 2012 By Dave Berard 4 Comments

We hear all the time from small businesses and organizations that engaging content is hard to create.

You focus on writing great newsletter articles and finding just the right pictures. Of course, these are very important parts of an email, but what most marketers really want is to have their readers take an action as a result of reading an email.

This is where Formstack comes in.

Last week, we launched the newest addition to our editor. Now, you have the power to insert links to online forms directly into your email campaigns. These forms are powered by the leader in online form creation, Formstack. Now anyone can create simple, elegant forms that allow you to engage your readers. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Email Marketing Tagged With: ,

App Integrations Became More Popular for Small Businesses in 2011

January 6, 2012 By Dave Berard Leave a Comment

Another year has come and gone, and like many people, I find myself looking back at some of the highlights of 2011.

It was a busy year that saw lots of changes in how small businesses work and market themselves.

Social media became one of the primary tools used by small businesses, and mobile tools were starting to show up more and more.

In addition, the ease of access and low cost of new business applications allowed small businesses to operate in a way that used to be reserved only for the largest companies in the world.

With this in mind, it’s no wonder that when we asked recently, 69% of respondents said they consider app integrations with Constant Contact to be important to their businesses. And in fact, 76% of respondents said that they use integrations at least monthly; 47% use them at least weekly. As a result, it’s safe to say that small businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on additional technology and software tools to develop and promote themselves.

For example, we saw huge adoption of social media integrations last year. In 2010, 27,000 customers used social integration products. A year later, that number shot up to 72,000. That’s an increase of over 160%. Our Facebook Join My Mailing List application alone has generated millions of new email subscribers for small businesses, and there are many other social media applications that are seeing growth and adoption. [Read more...]

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New HootSuite App Makes Monitoring Your Email Marketing Even Easier

December 13, 2011 By Dave Berard Leave a Comment

Small businesses and organizations like yours know better than most how daunting it is to monitor all the available marketing channels. And with the advent of social media marketing, there’s a whole new level of engagement needed to be an effective online marketer.

Thousands of small businesses and organizations use two tools to manage their social media marketing programs: NutshellMail has provided a great way to monitor and digest your social media presence when the day is too busy for real-time monitoring. On the other hand, HootSuite has provided one of the best real-time monitoring solutions. Its dashboard makes responding to and interacting with customers, clients, members, supporters, and prospects on social media simple. But neither of these tools have allowed you to monitor your other online marketing channels … until now.

Enter HootSuite Apps, the newest feature from the leader in social media monitoring. Now, from inside of HootSuite, you can add streams to monitor not only social media channels but many of your other business applications as well. Do you use Tumblr for your blog and want to know who’s commenting? It’s in there. Is Get Satisfaction your platform for an online community? It’s in there too.

And as of today, you can also monitor your Constant Contact Email Marketing campaigns in real-time in HootSuite. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Email Marketing Tagged With: , ,

How to Grow Your Email List Without Doing Anything New

November 29, 2011 By Dave Berard Leave a Comment

Every day, businesses and organizations send out hundreds of millions of emails to customers, clients, supporters, members, prospects, and friends.

Many of these emails are sent from tools like Constant Contact.

We all know how valuable these marketing messages are, and how important it is to have a good email list. The problem is, how do you get more subscribers to keep that list growing?

There are many answers to this question. One that is often overlooked is leveraging what you’re already doing — i.e., sending normal emails to all of your customers, clients, prospects, members, and supporters from Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, YahooMail, etc. Think about how many emails you send every day to people who may not be on your email marketing list. How many of them might be interested in opting in to your mailing list?

You’ll never know until you ask, or give people the opportunity to opt in. Constant Contact has partnered with Wisestamp, an email signature creation tool, to provide our customers with an easy to use and free tool to assist in this effort. Using Wisestamp, you can create a simple email signature that includes a link for your regular email contacts to sign up for your Constant Contact email list. You can also add dozens of other features, such as a link to your Facebook or Twitter accounts to help build your social media following.

Using an option like Wisestamp puts the power in the hands of your customers, clients, supporters, members, prospects, and friends. If you just imported  your entire Gmail address book to your Constant Contact account, you’d end up with many contacts that don’t want to receive your marketing messages, bad addresses, and a risk to your reputation. You could also ask each one of them in a follow up email if they want to join, but that’s a lot of work.

With Wisestamp, any small business or organization can have a professional and powerful email signature that will generate new email list subscribers. I’ve been using a customized email signature for years now, and it’s helped me to grow my LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. It’s great to see a powerful tool for small businesses and organizations that lets them grow their mailing lists in a really simple manner, and even better, to see it available for free.

For more information, or to get Wisestamp, check out their listing in the Constant Contact MarketPlace.

Filed Under: Email Marketing Tagged With: ,