Take control of your business right now, keep showing up for your customers, plus two secret tips for priority inbox email delivery AND social share (for free) that rivals boosted posts

Did you know that you can deploy a super fast online store using Constant Contact marketing platform with shoppable landing pages? Yep. If you’re currently trying to figure out how to get online with courses, with products or even with services, this is probably one of the fastest ways you can do this. It integrates with existing websites or stands on its own.

Some clients don’t have good e-mail lists built, in part because they either have focused on social media marketing OR they have not done a lot with the email addresses they have collected from in store purchases or collected from online events (purchases, lead generation activities). It’s time to change this!

Further, we’ve noticed that using the social share features in Constant Contact yields some crazy-good results, with engagement than rivals or beats social media boosted posts and paid ads!

Let’s first talk about the priority inbox and deliverability with various email services:

Most email clients have a priority inbox (such as Google’s Primary inbox), a promotions, a social and an updates inbox. WHERE your email lands is as important as landing it in the first place. If you end up in promotions or social, you’re not likely to engage that many of your clients, because they don’t check there very often. What if you could get more of your email to the primary inbox?

  1. You can create an all-text email and send it out (this works, no logos, no photos)
  2. You can use an email provider with a better score for getting in the primary inbox. Of the data we’ve seen, Constant Contact has greater deliverability to the primary inbox, versus MailChimp’s. So if you are choosing which one to use, it makes sense to use the one that has a primary inbox score greater than others.

There are pros and cons of a text-only email. If you are driving business to your website for more information, the text only email is a great way to get around your current provider’s (lack of) primary inbox deliverability. This is especially good for those of you on MailChimp.

If your customer is looking for visual inspiration, and you want to keep using images, you could test out another provider with the same email in an A/B test to a random sort of your list to see if you can improve rates with similar headlines and content, just using different email service providers.

If you have not yet done a lot with email marketing, it’s still the killer app, with good to excellent conversion rates. And for reaching most business users, it’s probably your best option.

There’s one other major thing that we’ve noted on our client accounts (and tested on our own), and that is the “share to social” email-to-social  post. The early guidance we received (from email experts) was that you shouldn’t use this feature. However, we tested it! We actually see crazy amazing engagement using this – even HIGHER THAN paid boosted posts! So go ahead, social share that promo from Constant Contact’s (or MailChimp’s) email social share tools.  

Constant Contact is a great way to start up or amp up your existing email services. We have many clients using MailChimp (because it’s free to start), but we are seeing far more effective results from clients who pay for Constant Contact. And what about Hubspot (which we love for CRM and marketing tools!) versus Constant Contact? Testing using our own account yields the same result – CC opens/engagement are higher than Hubspot’s own. So we sync our forms in Hubspot with CC’s mail lists using features built into Hubspot and we can tweak them using Zapier zaps if we need to send additional fields (more than first, last and email address.)

If you want to get started use our special link here:

http://www.constantcontact.com/signup.jsp?pn=marketingacuity and the code FREEWEBSITE2 to add on your shoppable landing pages included with your email marketing services. If you need help importing your list, or creating your store, let us know! We use these tools every day. We can set up a personal web training or just help if you get into a jam. These tools are designed to be easy to use and pretty much self-service.

Create your online store instructions: https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/articles/KnowledgeBase/36256

Step-by-step instructions for creating your own landing page: https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/articles/KnowledgeBase/32416

While this is a great way to get started quickly and inexpensively, if you’re looking to make online sales a future-proof revenue stream for your business, we encourage you to explore several options before getting started.

Go, get your online store and email marketing up and running. Show up for your clients on social media even if you’re shut down, and hang in there. If you need to think about a pivot or additional revenue streams, our FREE strategic session is just that. Schedule yours.