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As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the 2x Webby Award Honoree Be A Marketer podcast! New episodes coming in July!
Hey, friend. It's Dave. Just wanted to let you know that you're about to listen to the first
Dave Charest:of two episodes dedicated to celebrating Constant Contact's thirtieth anniversary. In these episodes, we're gonna cover a bit of history. We'll talk about what's the same in small business marketing, what's changed, and what's in store for the future. Today, you'll hear from Constant Contact's first CEO, Gale Goodman. And in the next episode, you'll hear from Constant Contact's current CEO, Frank Vella, two leaders focused on providing small businesses with the tools and resources they need to compete against their larger competitors.
Dave Charest:I can't wait for you to hear these episodes, friend. And as always, thanks for being here. Enjoy the episode. On today's episode, you'll hear from someone who helped shape the early days of email marketing and built a business by staying obsessively close to her customers. Plus, what it really takes to build something that lasts.
Dave Charest:This is the Be A Marketer podcast.
Dave Charest:My name is Dave Charest, director of small business success at Constant Contact, and I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing. And on this podcast, we'll explore what it really takes to market your business, even if marketing's not your thing. No jargon, no hype, just real stories to inspire you and practical advice you can act on. So remember, friend, you can be a marketer. And at Constant Contact, we're here to help.
Dave Charest:Oh, well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining us for another episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. That's right. I said us because guess who's here? The person always keeping me honest, the one and only Kelsi Carter joins me again. Hi, Kelsey.
Kelsi Carter:Hi, Dave. How are you?
Dave Charest:Good. I like you're very bubbly today. I like it.
Kelsi Carter:I'm very excited to be here.
Dave Charest:I love it. I love it. There's a good reason for excitement, I think. We have a a special episode today. Something we've been excited about kinda getting on the books.
Dave Charest:One, not only because of the guests that we're talking to, but because can you believe that here we are in the year 2025? And since January, we have been celebrating thirty years of Constant Contact.
Kelsi Carter:Thirty years. Wow. Older than me.
Dave Charest:Well, okay. Well, there you go. That puts some things into perspective. Right? Isn't that wild?
Dave Charest:Can you imagine?
Kelsi Carter:Crazy to think that the company I work for is older than myself.
Dave Charest:Pretty amazing when you start to think about just how how crazy that is, especially when you start to think about just the lifespan if you think of, let's say, small businesses. Right? I think we're somewhere in the in the ballpark of, like, eight and a half years, let's say, is the average lifespan. So when you think about just among large corporations, you know, you think the average tenure in the S and P 500, for example, has decreased dramatically from, you know, sixty seven years, and this is in, like, the nineteen twenties to just fifteen years to is where we are today. It makes you think a bit, doesn't it?
Dave Charest:Right? It's wild.
Kelsi Carter:Yeah. Definitely. Because, I mean, what really does it take for a business to not just survive but actually thrive for three decades? Is it about resilience, adaptability, strong connections to customers, or honestly, it's probably a combination of all of them?
Dave Charest:Yeah. Well, I was gonna say, I mean, like, right? Like, how do all these elements really play into just even when you think about how we approach marketing today? Right? So much has changed and and there's so many elements that do come into play with that.
Dave Charest:And so, you know, as we try to explore some of the answers to these questions and particularly into, you know, how this has impacted Constant Contact over the years, we decided to go to the source. So what can you tell us about our guest today, Kelsi?
Kelsi Carter:Today's guest is a good one. It is Gail Goodman, the former CEO of Constant Contact and current mentor, board member, and chair of Entrepreneurship For All, a nonprofit dedicated to helping underrepresented entrepreneurs grow their businesses. So Gail has done it all from working with hardware at IBM to consulting at Bain and Company to leading the way in software as a service and small business marketing. For years, she's helped small businesses succeed, and her love for mission driven work and building strong teams has really made a big impact in the industry.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Really big impact. Just, you know, I think of myself alone just having worked with her, and it was really great to reconnect with Gail. You know, I remember I don't know if I've told you this story or not, but one of the first big projects that I worked on was helping Gail write her book, engagement marketing, how small businesses win in a socially connected world as a developmental editor. Really cool to kinda work on it, and it was during my really my first year Constant Contact.
Dave Charest:So we're talking back in 2011 to 2012 time frame here. And again, I started as a content developer at that point. And, you know, as someone who really had no formal marketing experience really other than what I was learning from, you know, learning on my own and doing some of my own stuff. It was really a bit of a trip to be commenting on kind of draft copies of things and then seeing comments from Gail saying, I agree with Dave. Right?
Dave Charest:That's why I was like, wow. Right? Like, that was that was really cool. So I love Gail, and I'm I'm forever grateful for the opportunity to work with her and, you know, build a, really, a thirteen plus year career at this point as as I'm sure you know. Right?
Dave Charest:I wake up every day really excited to do the work that we get to do, the fantastic people that we get to do it with, and the amazingly resilient people we get to do it for. I've learned a lot from Gail over the years. And, well, you know, here's what you're gonna learn, dear listener, by hearing some of this conversation here today. Gail talks about how to build a business that truly lasts. Right?
Dave Charest:She really breaks down the the power of something that, you know, we're still talking about thirty years later, but really the power of focusing on repeat business and word-of-mouth and why most businesses actually overlook their best source of revenue. We talk about why resilience is the real secret to growth. You're gonna hear how really to push through plateaus, adapt to market changes, and really just keep moving even when the odds aren't in your favor. And then the art of staying close to your customer. Really, you've gotta discover practical ways to stay relevant by continually understanding and adapting to the changing needs of your customer even as your business scales.
Dave Charest:So, Kelsey, are you ready? Are you ready to go to this conversation?
Kelsi Carter:I'm so ready. Ready as I'll ever be.
Dave Charest:Oh, good. Perfect. Well, let's go to Gail as she explains the journey to her love affair with small businesses.
Gail Goodman:One of the very unique opportunities I got at IBM was to work directly with customers. It really made me curious about their objectives. What, you know, what were they doing with our systems? Why was that important? And it just made me realize how little perspective I had on the business world.
Gail Goodman:And so I went to get an MBA to figure all that out. I laughed because I literally went into business school not knowing that revenue minus expense equals profit. It's not a complicated gossip, but I just hadn't I'd been technical heads down Yeah. Very focused. And so for me, those two years were like, open up the world to me.
Dave Charest:Oh.
Gail Goodman:And really powerful influencing kind of where I went from there.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Well, I mean, you spent some time at at Bain and Company. Correct? Like, after that, like, doing consulting and those types of things. Like, what stuck with you from that experience and and even that you kinda took into yourself as your future, like, being a leader and that type of thing?
Gail Goodman:Bain was a wonderful, I'll call it MBA finishing school, because you got to look at a lot of different business models and see how different companies thought about their industry and their customer in their business. And the things I really learned at Bain was about, how to analyze and understand markets. Who's the customer? What's the problem you're trying to solve for them? And how do you make money solving that?
Gail Goodman:And how do you do that in the context of the other players? So Bain had, some real fundamental research. It's it's not confidential. It's been well published about how, you know, the number one and two player in an industry get differentially better profit margins. And so you don't wanna be the fifth or sixth player.
Gail Goodman:You wanna be a one or two, and you wanna try to create markets and own the market. And that that definitely stuck with me and influenced me through the Constant Contact journey.
Dave Charest:Mhmm. Yeah. So it's interesting. Right? Because you're picking up a lot of different experiences along the way.
Dave Charest:I mean, you've had product roles. You had marketing roles before coming into Constant Contact. So or there's anything else coming out of all of those other lessons you're learning along the way?
Gail Goodman:Well, you know, I definitely when I left Bain, I I ended up in the software industry, and I definitely ended up on the product side of the house. Right? As a prod you know, first a partner manager, then a product manager, then a head of marketing, then a general manager, and then ultimately, constant contact with my I was a first time CEO.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Gail Goodman:So there were lots of things I didn't know about how to how to do that job. We can go there. But I think what I kept from all of it was this stay close to your customer. If you really understand the problem you're solving for your customer and you stay focused on what they need to successfully use your product, We used to say in the mainframe days, it's so antiquated. You know, it it's not about the sell.
Gail Goodman:It's about the install. Right? It's not about getting them to say yes. It's getting them to use and love. And that is what, you know, my experience in Constant Contact was all about.
Gail Goodman:Because once you get into a monthly subscription service, if they don't love it and use it, they leave. That really permeated to stay close to the customer, understand how they're using your service, understand their value, make sure they understand the value they're getting. That kind of really permeated everything.
Dave Charest:Yeah. You know, it's funny you say that. I mean, I think oftentimes when we're talking to folks, right, and just thinking about beyond the marketing piece is that don't forget to continue to communicate after they buy. Right? Because to your point, yeah, you gotta get them the more they feel good about that decision to purchase and then using it and getting value, that's gonna help you in the long run.
Dave Charest:Right? I'm curious as to and this might have been the inciting moment to kinda lead you down this path that you went on, but you were part of a business called Open Market, which was kind of a bit of a a wild ride in the early Internet days of stuff. Right? So I guess tell us maybe a little bit about that and then what that experience taught you and then how it really maybe led you to wanting to build something from scratch.
Gail Goodman:You know, it helps for your listeners to put a time frame on it. So the year is 1996.
Dave Charest:Okay.
Gail Goodman:And browsers have just come out.
Dave Charest:It's so wild. We
Gail Goodman:do not we're not carrying cell phones yet.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Yeah.
Gail Goodman:And we're getting to the Internet through dial up. Like that little and everybody can see how it's gonna change the world. Yeah. And so I joined a company in Boston called Open Market, which was really trying to create the initial platform for commerce on the Internet. In fact, we had the we had the patent for secure credit card transactions over the Internet.
Gail Goodman:Absorb that for a minute. But it was just early. Like, all the other pieces weren't there yet. You know, it's you know, today, I sit on the board of Shopify who is doing what open market had hoped to do, but it, you know, took twenty years for the Internet and all of the capability you know, and bandwidth and all of that to get to the point where a shopping experience was truly delightful. It just takes a long time for markets to develop.
Gail Goodman:But one of the things we did at Open Market in a partnership with AT and T, we did was called Secure Buy, and it was a small business build a store platform. And I was one of the product managers, and I spent a bunch of time talking to small businesses. And that is the start of my love affair with small business. And so I I really credit open market with that amongst all things. But it also made me hyperaware of, you know, there's what you wanna do, and then there's the art of the possible from the technology world.
Gail Goodman:Right? And there've been leaps and and changes in that. Again, when we even when we started Constant Contact, a graphical user interface didn't exist in a browser. Right now, you drag and drop stuff in your email newsletter. Originally, it was like forms based.
Gail Goodman:Because we just the art of impossible didn't include a what you see is what you get interface. We couldn't do live HTML on a screen and show you what it was gonna look like. You had to put stuff in and then hit preview and go to a different window. And, anyway, the art of the possible evolves. And we'll I think you're gonna we're gonna talk later about what's happening next.
Gail Goodman:We're about to do just another giant leapfrog Yeah. On the art of the possible with AI.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're gonna get to that stuff, which I think
Gail Goodman:is downside.
Dave Charest:Yeah. So amazing stuff there because, yeah, I think that we're coming up on, like, a huge just change. I agree with you a 100% there. But when you think about, I guess, coming from that, you you start to build this love affair with small business. And, I mean, even just the timing of that when you start thinking about, okay, the timing was probably off on what you're trying to do with with open market.
Dave Charest:But now, okay, you wanna transition to, you know, starting something from and building something. Talk to me about, I guess, the timing there and how did the opportunity with what would have been at that time, I guess, roving software. Right? Like, how did that come up?
Gail Goodman:I was out looking for a new startup. Things had gotten challenging in open market, and I was ready for something new. And I got introduced to Randy Parker who had the original idea for Constant Contact. It was then called Roving Software. And that was, like, the first conversation with Randy.
Gail Goodman:I was like, oh, we are seeing eye to eye on how the Internet is gonna change the world for small business. And we began a series of conversations, and eventually, I I joined the company as CEO. And our very first deck had, you know, this picture of a dog in front of a computer screen.
Dave Charest:I don't
Gail Goodman:know if you remember this cartoon. There was a cartoon that said on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
Dave Charest:Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Gail Goodman:But under under it, put on the Internet, nobody knows you're a small business. And our first tagline was big e marketing for small e business. And the idea was we saw the potential for the Internet to let small businesses look so much bigger. Right? To get beyond the constraints of their physical location and reach customers anywhere and have an experience with those customers that was just as good, if not better, because of its intimacy than the big companies were gonna be able to do.
Gail Goodman:And that was, like, the guiding vision of of roving software that we then kind of renamed to match the product Constant Contact.
Dave Charest:How did you even end
Gail Goodman:up meeting Randy? I'll do reintroduce through a venture capitalist.
Dave Charest:I mean, you so you guys hit it off, of course. That sounds right. But you you were kind of pre product, pre revenue, pre funding, all of that pre stuff was going on. So what was it that really made you say, yes. This is this is what I'm gonna do?
Gail Goodman:So knowing me, y'all, this will not surprise you. But I met Randy and the small team, Alex Stern, Michelle Keegan, Margaret Olsen. And, like, the next week, they were going to a conference. And I said, oh, can I go to the conference and just, like, stand in the booth and listen to customers? And in classic Gale fashion, I go to the conference.
Gail Goodman:I am, like, standing behind them. And in, like, I don't know, maybe three minutes, I'm, like, pushing through pigeon directly. And I am seeing how, like, compelling what we were thinking about, you know, how much it was resonating with the audience. And so it was really just conviction that what we were doing was badly needed and that we had believe it or not, at that point, there was nobody doing it, that we had, you know, empty space to work in.
Dave Charest:Okay. So there's nobody doing it.
Gail Goodman:That will change dramatically over time.
Dave Charest:Of course. Right? But but I think that's one of the interesting things. I mean and you still even see this today. And I guess so my question to you is that everyone seems to be, you know, chasing the enterprise market, for example.
Dave Charest:Right? Because there's more money there and there all of this type of stuff. So I guess why the why this focus on small business? Or maybe that is the reason why. I don't know.
Dave Charest:You tell me. But, like, why the smoke the focus on small business when everybody else is trying to focus on enterprise?
Gail Goodman:It was just what we were drawn to. It was the people we wanted to help. So let's tell you, I have loved working with small and medium business, small and medium nonprofits for a variety of reasons. One is they're just generally mission driven and really nice people. Two, they are so grateful when you help them.
Gail Goodman:They just truly are sincerely appreciative. And what we saw, and I think it's still true, is that they usually get the short end of the stick from most vendors. Right? You go to a bank. They've got a great consumer business.
Gail Goodman:They've got a great enterprise business, and the small businesses are kind of lost in the middle. And same same is true for Internet providers and other folks. Like, normally, they get horrible service. And so we truly believe they were worthy of, deserved, and we could create a business model where we put them first. It just spoke to us.
Gail Goodman:It was just our passion. I mean, trust me, the board wanted us to go upmarket, like, a 100 times. And that just wasn't what we built the company for. It doesn't mean upmarket wasn't a good market. It just wasn't our market.
Gail Goodman:We knew who our people were, and we knew who we wanted to work with.
Dave Charest:I have to say, I mean, I'm over my thirteenth year now at Constant Contact, and, you know, and it was my first big corporate job, that whole thing. Right? And, like, that's one of the things that to this day still sticks with sticks with me is that the people in the company, how focused and passionate everyone is about helping small businesses. And we'll probably talk a little bit more about that too just in terms of, like, building the company and things like that. But just so people get a sense of this too, I mean, I don't think Constant Contact didn't necessarily start as a software or service product either, did it?
Gail Goodman:No. But we pivoted there pretty fast.
Dave Charest:Really quickly. Yeah.
Gail Goodman:I in April '99, And by October 2000, we were SaaS. So we pivoted there pretty fast. Again, it was just how the market was evolving and the art of impossible and, yeah, our it just went we went there pretty fast.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Yeah. So we obviously talked about the focus on small business and then even just the the business model itself. I mean, when you would you were doing this, I mean, a lot of people thought it wouldn't work.
Gail Goodman:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the biggest challenge with the market, and it's it's still a challenge I'm sure you live with every day, is that you can't spend a lot of sales and marketing dollars reaching a customer who's gonna pay you $30 a month. You can't you can't put a sales force out on the street that costs thousands and thousands of dollars. Right?
Gail Goodman:You have to find a super efficient set of channels to market that make your math work for for you know? In the SaaS world, we talk about the cost to acquire a customer. Sometimes you hear that abbreviated as CAC, cost of acquisition, and then the lifetime value of the customer. And it's just the simple math. Right?
Gail Goodman:You can't you know, if you lose money on a customer, you can't make it up with volume. You have each customer you have to have a profitable model, and that was the, I think, the most challenging thing about building this business is figuring out that some of the, you know, the sales and marketing funnel that yielded a profitable business.
Dave Charest:Well, so then to talk us through, like, what were some of the things that, you know, you did, I guess, in those early days to get the word out? And was there anything maybe scrappy or creative that actually you found really worked?
Gail Goodman:Well, I laugh when they say, like, our first 20 customers were people we sat next to in planes, trains, and
Dave Charest:all of this. Yeah. Yeah.
Gail Goodman:Right? So, you know, we just kept telling the story. We kept talking to people. And, again, context is so interesting. Right?
Gail Goodman:At this time, our biggest objection from people was, I don't have an email address, and I don't think my customers do either. It's so hard to imagine now.
Dave Charest:It really is.
Gail Goodman:Right? Right. And then we went through the email as dead face, and turns out we all still have email, and we all still check-in every day.
Dave Charest:Yep. Yep.
Gail Goodman:We're still good. But, you know, it was really learning how to tell the story more succinctly. Because if it took you twenty minutes sitting next to somebody and you got to yes, that's great, but you can't do that and charge $30. And so for us, it was a lot about learning how to where and how to tell the story. So we used partners a lot.
Gail Goodman:People who already had large bases of small business. We did partnerships with Intuit. We did partnerships with AOL. We did partnerships with Yahoo Small Business. We did partnerships with American Express Small Business.
Gail Goodman:So, you know, see our best partnerships at the the time were the domain name registrars, register.com and Network Solutions, businesses that don't really even exist anymore. And we went to them and threw them to their customers because they already had a customer base they could reach in some effective way. And then we piggybacked on their reach to get to their customers. Then as we got bigger, we started to be able to use more traditional channels like pay per click advertising and other things. And then when we really got to some scale, we were able to use mass media and other things because we understood our economics and how to make our economics work.
Dave Charest:Talk to me a little bit about you know, one of the things that has always attracted me about Constant Contact was, like, the education piece. Right? The idea of really being involved and and helping people and teaching people. And I come from a content background where, you know, that's what content marketing is. Right?
Dave Charest:You're using education. You use I think it's shifted a bit now, but and I would even argue that, you know, content marketing is marketing these days. But talk to me just about, like, was there, like, a light bulb moment with, yeah, we need to be out locally reaching these people where they are and teaching them what they need to know to to even get to the point where they're saying, yeah, I wanna do that. Yeah.
Gail Goodman:So there were a lot of data points that came together. But I would say the biggest and I don't think it I just don't think it went off like a light bulb. It was like Right. It kinda took a long time to penetrate it.
Dave Charest:Then you'd like, oh, duh.
Gail Goodman:Our fixed calls. Was that we really had two problems. You know, we had to convince people to use email marketing. But before that, we had to convince people that taking the time to market to people who already knew you versus new customer acquisition. I'm gonna spend a minute on this because I think it's still something that many small businesses don't understand.
Gail Goodman:And I like to use I you know, you've you've seen me do the circle, but I like to use the eighty twenty rule. Right?
Dave Charest:Sure.
Gail Goodman:If I when I talk to a small business and I say, how much of your business is repeat business? They always say something like ninety ten or eighty twenty. And I'm like, so 80% is repeat business. And then I say, so what do you do to get that? And this, like, what are you talking about?
Gail Goodman:Look. Crosses their face. What do you mean they just come back? And what we understood deeply was that, sure, some will come back, but if you remind people, they'll come back more frequently. And I used to do a pitch to small businesses, and I would say, just right now, think of a restaurant you love that you haven't been to in over a year.
Gail Goodman:Every one of us can do it. And then you say, why haven't you been there? And it's usually kind of an out of sight, out of mind problem. I just hadn't really thought about that. I would love to go back there.
Gail Goodman:And then I'd say, well, imagine if they sent you their new spring menu in email, might that have inspired you to go back and the light bulb goes off? Yes. I love them. Yes. I'm a repeat customer.
Gail Goodman:No. I wasn't thinking about them five minutes ago, and now I see their email and Diane. And so when you say, hey, guys, in that eighty twenty rule, you can get more of that 80. And by the way, you can get it for pennies versus the hundreds and to thousands of dollars you're spending on marketing trying to grow the 20%. So that is concept number one, more repeat business.
Gail Goodman:And then concept number two was and, oh, by the way, let's break down that 20% for a minute. How much do you think is word-of-mouth from your existing customers? And they're like, oh, I don't know. Half of my new customers? And I'm like, well, now we are at 90% of your business being driven by people who already know you, and you're spending all your act all your marketing time thinking about the last 10%.
Gail Goodman:It's a big idea. It's simple when you say it. It takes a little bit of explanation. Like, I and that's why I, like, wrote the book engagement marketing, was just to get that simple idea across. I still meet small businesses for whom that is an moment.
Dave Charest:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Gail Goodman:And I hope your audience is listening and having an moment. Right? Because the big knock on email marketing was it doesn't get any new customers. I already have you know, I have to have their email. And you're right.
Gail Goodman:It doesn't. It just drives more but it gets you more business. And isn't really that what you're after? More revenue? If you can get it less expensively, hallelujah.
Dave Charest:Yeah. I I always kinda say too that it it allows you to have the footing with which to do the other things that you wanna do. Right? Because you're you're bringing in the revenue. Right?
Dave Charest:So you're not like, oh my god. What am I gonna do? You're like, okay. What can I do? Right?
Dave Charest:Now that you have this. It's just a simple shift.
Gail Goodman:Now that I know my current customer base is gonna bring me, you know
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Gail Goodman:This much business, I know how much I can afford to spend to try to grow the business. And so getting that steady business is really the heart of success for a small business. And, anyway, so we're back to the point you made, which is why did you start doing education? The answer was because we needed first to convince people to do email marketing. And why to bother talking to your existing customers.
Gail Goodman:And then we had to teach them how to do the email marketing because they hadn't done that yet. And so everything I said just took me, you know, three or four minutes to get across. We weren't gonna do that in a pay per click ad.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Gail Goodman:Doesn't work. Right? We needed a place where we had some time to lay these foundational concepts out. They aren't hard. They aren't they aren't even brilliant, but they aren't often talked about.
Gail Goodman:And so that's how we started saying, well, gosh. That means we need twenty minutes. We need an hour. Maybe we can do webinars. Maybe we can do seminars.
Gail Goodman:And that's where we slowly evolved to, you know, partnering with chambers and being out in community doing in person seminars. And now there's just much you know, there are other there's podcasts and, you know, all all sorts of other mechanisms to do it. But at the time, those were the tools available to tell a story that was a little longer.
Dave Charest:To the point of the simplicity piece of it too, it's really interesting how because of its simplicity, gets dismissed a little bit sometimes, right, until you can lay it out and be like, but why wouldn't you do this? Right? You're like, oh, okay. But is it really that easy? Yes.
Dave Charest:The the trouble comes with, okay, like, how do I actually, like, apply it to your point? Like, okay. Now how do I actually do it, right, from a technical standpoint, or what do I gotta put in the email? What do I gotta say? And, like, those types of things.
Gail Goodman:And if I haven't started yet, I have to build my email list.
Dave Charest:Of course. Right? Yeah.
Gail Goodman:I have to learn how to ask for emails, and that's a little uncomfortable and all that. Although we've all gotten much better, much much it's now more of a common expectation and people understand
Dave Charest:extreme type of idea. Right? Yeah.
Gail Goodman:At the time, we literally had to teach people how to have a nice conversation and ask for an email and all this stuff. Yeah. Just really, really early market stuff.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Well, I'll tell you this. I mean, to this day, I still talk about, like, the engagement marketing cycle in presentations just to give people a
Gail Goodman:Thank you.
Dave Charest:This is ultimately what you're trying to do, and this is how it works. So if you understand that, like, now just use these tools to feed into this. Right? And so it's like, oh, yeah. Okay.
Gail Goodman:I have literally done the engagement marketing circle and then the cycle Yeah. In every boardroom I'm in. Yeah. Because ultimately, you know, you don't get that repeat business. You don't get that word-of-mouth if you haven't started with a wow experience.
Gail Goodman:And, you know, I think we've lived this ourselves. So with the you know, at our viral peak at Constant Contact, we estimated that for every customer we paid to acquire, we got 1.9 word-of-mouth referrals. That's insane. It it, you know, it slowed down as there were more competitors and more noise in the market, etcetera. But at the beginning, we lived that ourselves.
Gail Goodman:Our revenue came from repeat business and word-of-mouth. So we were living our own proof point. We were our own living, walking, talking proof point of the idea that the first marketing you should do is repeat sales and word-of-mouth. If you have a leaky bucket, don't spend a lot of money on acquisition marketing. You have to close-up the leaks in your bucket before you do that.
Dave Charest:That's a great point too. That's one of the things like we got, like, here's how to think about it. Here are the tools we're gonna focus on. And then once you've got this piece figured out, then you can add some paid stuff to it because you've got something that you know will work and support it. Right?
Dave Charest:And and oftentimes, people, even today, try to jump to the, oh, I'm gonna pay. I'm gonna pay. And then you've got nothing to back that up. Right? You're just kinda throwing money away a little bit.
Dave Charest:Right? So
Gail Goodman:And I still see people do things where they don't capture contact information. They pay, they get an audience, and they let them walk away without any call to action to capture contact information so they can stay in touch. So if they wanna see them again, they're gonna have to pay again.
Dave Charest:Pay again. Right. Right. Obviously, through these different phases that Constant Contact has gone through and and and getting to the growth that it got to, you know, can you highlight maybe what some of the maybe the roadblocks or the biggest challenges kind of you hit along the way, and then what helped you kinda overcome them at those particular moments?
Gail Goodman:So, you know, clearly, we we had a a variety of different roadblocks. Certainly, getting venture capital was a major roadblock, probably not the topic of this podcast, so I'll just kinda push push that one aside. Figuring out our reach to market was a big roadblock. Right? And we kept hitting you know, we would get a step function of growth, and then we would hit a plateau, and then we'd get another step function, and then we did a plateau.
Gail Goodman:And every time we asked ourselves, will we ever find more growth? Right? It was just like a we would always have this existential dread about our ability to continue to grow. Then the other thing I would say, and it's just always evolving the team to match the moment. Right?
Gail Goodman:Because, you know, when you're small and everybody does everything, it's great. And then you have to have functions, and then some people scale and some people don't. And so there was always kinda team growth challenges. And then there were a couple of, you know, I will just call existential threats to the business. One was the advent of spam.
Gail Goodman:Sounds ridiculous now. But when we started the business, there was no spam. The only people who sent inner emails were sincere. Yep. And we had no spam prevention, and the, you know, email providers had no spam filtering, and then spam happened.
Gail Goodman:And bad actors entered our market quickly and at volumes that were almost indescribably breathtaking. And we ended up with threats from both the legal and regulatory side. So the government was gonna make at one point, there was draft legislation in congress that would have made mass emails illegal for everybody. And the second was that the people receiving the emails, the Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etcetera, were starting to block all mass email. So if if our emails can't get through, we're out of business.
Gail Goodman:And if the government makes it illegal, we're out of business. And suddenly, we were immersed in an we literally me and two other CEOs in, like, a month founded an industry coalition where we could, you know, go together to both these, you know, Internet service providers and to Washington and make the case for good email.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Yeah.
Gail Goodman:It was strange, bedfellows, because it was all competitors.
Dave Charest:Sure. Yeah.
Gail Goodman:So it's really interesting. I had never done anything like it before. That was quite an undertaking. And that was literally a threat to, you know, a threat to the business model that we would not have overcome if we hadn't been able to do that.
Dave Charest:Yeah. You know, it's interesting when you because you kinda take these things for granted, particularly now. Right? Because everything just kinda happens. Right?
Dave Charest:But, I mean, you know, we've had on the show, you know, Tara Natenson who you know, industry relations. Right? Making sure that we have those close connections and continuing those conversations with the Yahoos and the Gmails. Right? All that stuff and just other folks in the industry so that the industry survives.
Dave Charest:Right? And and and can still be a a viable tool, again, for the audience that we serve here, right, in small businesses. Right? Because think about if that wasn't. I mean, can't I even imagine if that wasn't an option for you know, you'd be in this place where you're just dumping tons of money, I guess.
Dave Charest:And then, I mean, we can have conversations about social, and maybe that will lead me to this next question. Right? Because, I mean, they think it's it's interesting to me. Like, you know, what we're seeing now is that people are over indexing on social. Right?
Dave Charest:And I'm often saying, like, just think if you spent, you know, just a quarter of the time you're spending on social and you flip that to email, what that could do for your business, right, in many instances. Right?
Gail Goodman:That's
Dave Charest:right. So, obviously, the core was email. Why did you start to expand beyond email? What like, were you hearing things from customers or just seeing where the industry was going? Like, what led you there?
Gail Goodman:Well, we had always said, you know, our mission was, you know, to help literally, you know, change the success model for small business.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Gail Goodman:Those words probably sound familiar. I must have said it a thousand times. So we were always in conversations about where, you know, where else are you having troubles? What else do you need help with? And there were just emerged these natural adjacencies.
Gail Goodman:You know? And some of it was just, like, observing what people were using our email marketing for. Right? They were sending event announcements, and they wanted to attach an RSVP, or they wanted to have a landing page that described the event in more detail. They were sending out surveys.
Gail Goodman:They were doing things through the email that had another step. And if we could do that step for them, that was a natural extension. So it really just became about building a more complete solution, and then social was also just a real natural extension to how small businesses reach you know, we wanted to be their their marketing partner, and this was just the kinda complete suite of marketing that they were looking at.
Dave Charest:Yeah. It made a lot of sense to me too. Like, just thinking, like, okay. Yeah. What are the avenues or the channels that you have with which to stay connected to these people that are these audiences, whatever we wanna call them, that are so important to your business.
Dave Charest:Right? And it's like, oh, yeah. These are all the different ways that you can do that. So it makes complete sense to me there. You talked about team growth can be a challenge, and I think any any business growing, of course, that is a challenge.
Dave Charest:Culture is often something that's hard to maintain during that growth, of course. I guess so two questions. Why is culture so important to you? And I will say as someone who has lived it and is still here, again, you know, thank you for staying firm on that because it's it's great to work with the people that I work with on a day to day basis. But why is it important to you, and and how do you keep that intact?
Gail Goodman:So there are a couple couple things I'll I'll focus on. I won't name names, but I will say in organizations past
Dave Charest:No. We want the name no.
Gail Goodman:I'm kidding. Yeah. I experienced a lot of cross functional dysfunction Mhmm. And saw how inherently wasteful that was. I was at a company in a marketing role, and we were redoing all of the sales materials.
Gail Goodman:Right? We were, like, doing a new sales methodology and a new set of materials, and the head of sale wasn't a good team player. And so after we would go to each region and do the training, he would call the regional manager and tell him to tell the guys to throw the stuff out. Then the regional manager would call me and say, what should we do? Like, what?
Gail Goodman:Well, I just was determined that we were all gonna row together. Like, if he didn't think that was the right methodology, we should've had that conversation long before we were in market training his team. It's okay to disagree. In fact, disagreement comes up with better solutions, but you want to disagree early
Dave Charest:Right.
Gail Goodman:And respectfully.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Of course. Yeah.
Gail Goodman:And so it was really important to me. Executive one of the cultural norms that maybe wasn't as visible down in the organization, but created cohesion down in the organization was alignment at the executive team. And so we learned how to be good peers to each other, and this is where the giving and receiving the feedback was important. Like, we learned that, you know, we got to the point where if someone did something that annoyed you, you actually said it in a nice way, but we got to this point where we were just great at working together and that we knew each other and each other's weaknesses well enough that we would actually ask for help. You remember that?
Gail Goodman:This is long before the vulnerability craze. Right? But we were probably doing that. We were practicing vulnerability. We were asking for help.
Gail Goodman:So I think culture is really important because without that kind of cohesive alignment, it starts with mission. Right? You need culture starts with mission. You can't get aligned if you aren't agreeing with the point of the whole thing is.
Dave Charest:Right. Yeah.
Gail Goodman:So mission at the top and then tight alignment on priorities. There will always be more to do in a company than you have time to do. So you've gotta pick the three most important things. And if your list of the most important things for me to do in the next quarter is 10, it's too long. Get to the top three and get alignment from your top team on what those top three are.
Gail Goodman:And if you get through them, then you can go to the fourth, fifth, and sixth. It's okay to have a running list. But if you try to do 10 at once, you get nothing done, and you don't wind up enough resources to get to escape velocity on whatever it is you're trying to fix. So these things from my past said, I just don't you know, it's like the way we parent. We parent the way we, like Yeah.
Gail Goodman:We don't wanna do what our parents did that we didn't like.
Dave Charest:We know we don't wanna be like that. Yeah. Exactly.
Gail Goodman:We know we don't wanna be like that. So I brought a lot of, know we all don't wanna be like that. Yeah. I don't wanna be that CEO. And that really influenced culture.
Gail Goodman:That was part of the no jerks. I don't know if you swear in your show. We used a stronger word inside. I just didn't wanna work with people I didn't enjoy being around.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Gail Goodman:Easy peasy. Right? But the more you did that, the more, you know, you became a magnet for good people who wanted to work hard. Right? And people used to say, oh, this is all touchy feely, and, you know, you don't wanna win.
Gail Goodman:It was like, oh, have you seen my numbers? I wanna win. So none of that was actually about not playing hard
Dave Charest:Yeah. Of course. To win.
Gail Goodman:Yeah. It was about playing hard and playing to win as a team. You go you can do a bunch of
Dave Charest:Yep. And doing it with people that you enjoy doing it with.
Gail Goodman:Right. You can do a bunch of sports metaphors here. Like, that it doesn't really work. Right?
Dave Charest:It's more meaningful at that point. Right?
Gail Goodman:Yeah. Often, the best teams don't necessarily have all of the best players, but they work together as a team.
Dave Charest:Yeah. You know? And, yeah, to your point of, like, attracting those people. Because I'm like, yeah. I don't know if it was more like, obviously, yes, there were things that I learned in the process of like, oh, this is what that looks like.
Dave Charest:But then I'm also like, well, I'm inclined to do that as well. But, I mean, I even think of, you know, teams that I've led at Constant Contact. It's always been like, look. Here's the vision. Here's the mission.
Dave Charest:Here's what we're trying to do. Being very clear about that. But then giving people or having people feel comfortable enough to say, like, what they're feeling and and how they're thinking about it so that you can be on the same page. I think the biggest mistake that and what would drive me crazy if, like, if you're shaking your head yes, but then you leave this room and you're going no, well, we can't fix this. Like, we're never gonna get to where we need to go, so we have to be honest with each other in the in the room, right, in order to to move forward.
Dave Charest:Right?
Gail Goodman:Yeah. Well and so I came up with a lot of these concepts on my own, but then I read a book. I'd like to give people a book recommendation.
Dave Charest:There you go.
Gail Goodman:That was the, like, the book that wrote down everything I was already thinking, and it's called the advantage. And it's all about using culture as, you know, the competitive advantage. And one of the things it says is, you know, if you didn't agree in the, you know, in the argument and you lost, you have to leave the room and be fully supportive. And so that was a key operating principle for us. If you left the room and then said, we're doing this, but I don't agree, like, you didn't stay in constant contact.
Gail Goodman:Yes. And we were not afraid to fire on culture. Happened all the time. It happened all the time. By the way, we also then that led to living back to this repeat business word-of-mouth thing.
Gail Goodman:Like, 40% of our new hires were referrals.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Yeah.
Gail Goodman:People loved working there enough that they brought in the best people that they worked with in the past. Well, they were gonna be held accountable by the quality of the people they brought in, so they didn't bring in the done. So it just success begets success.
Dave Charest:Yeah. For sure. You've done a a great job, obviously, kind of bringing this together. And then, you you know, I don't know how much we need to go in this, but just to understand kind of, like, the the different phases within Constant Contact and doing something again that people thought you weren't gonna be able to do just mathematically. It wasn't gonna work.
Dave Charest:Right? I know you talk about this low slung SaaS ramp of death. Right? Maybe we we talk a little bit about that. But, like, how did you navigate that period of time?
Dave Charest:And then when did the things start to really click from a growth perspective?
Gail Goodman:Yeah. It's interesting. You know, one of the problems with the business model was just, you know, this like, again, I'll use round numbers. We're charging $30 a month.
Dave Charest:Yep.
Gail Goodman:You know, you need a lot of customers to pay anybody.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Gail Goodman:Right? A thousand customers. Woo hoo. Right? That's $30,000 a month.
Gail Goodman:That pays three humans. Right? Like, that's just not you know? So we knew we needed to get to tens of thousands, and that's why we had to raise venture capital. That's just you know?
Gail Goodman:Oh. If I could do, you know, if I could do it again, you know, I'd love to find a way to bootstrap and not need the venture money. I just don't think for this model that was gonna be possible. Particularly at that time where because we had to there was no Amazon AWS. You had to buy servers and put them in hosting, and it just was a minimum expense to run a SaaS business.
Gail Goodman:So I just don't think it was possible to do without venture. So how did I navigate that? And, you know, it was interesting. People ask why I you know, it was yeah. I like to say it was an overnight success that only took ten years to happen.
Gail Goodman:I wanted those first, and it really was 99, I would say, to 2,004. It was five really rough years. And that was very much a dedicate you know, a a mission driven team that kept finding we were getting lots of proof points that what we were doing was working for our customers. We got our energy from our customers. We would talk to customers, and they'd be like, oh my god.
Gail Goodman:You've changed my business. Right? And we used to read these emails we get at company meetings. Right? I was stuck in a dead end corporate job I thought I would never get out of, and then I found Constant Contact, and now my side hustle is a full time business.
Gail Goodman:You saved my life. Like, we read these. You know, we there would be letter after letter that said we're on we know we're doing the right thing. We've gotta just we've gotta figure it out. And honestly, we were stubborn as hell.
Gail Goodman:We were not giving up. Right? This was a very committed early team, and we were just not gonna we were not gonna fail. And so I think it was really just a lot of persistence and stick to it ness. You know what they sell?
Gail Goodman:Grit. You know? All the stuff you need to be a founder, the stuff you need to be a small business. Right? There's gotta be all you know, you just gotta sort of know in your heart that what you're doing is right.
Gail Goodman:And it doesn't mean you don't listen to the critics. It doesn't mean you don't learn from mistakes. All of that has to come in. But in the end, you're you have to know what your north star is and what your core is and what you believe in, and that was enough to get us to the growth. And then we hit, like, a tipping point and things started to grow really fast.
Gail Goodman:And it was it was a combination of stuff we did in the evolution of the market and the art of the possible that I talked about earlier. Product became radically easier to use when you could do a drag drag and drop interface. Like, it changed that changed a lot of things. Everybody now had an email. Like and then cell phones changed another.
Gail Goodman:There was another round of change, and then social was another round. I mean, there are multiple rounds of change we navigated. Some we were ahead, some we were behind, some we were just right. Never got it perfect.
Dave Charest:Obviously, you move on from CEO of Constant Contact. You know, what are you doing with your time? What are you focusing on next? What's important to you? What keeps you what keeps you engaged?
Gail Goodman:So having left, right, the two things I missed most of all was mission and tea. Not shocking. I get that today as the board chair of an organization called Entrepreneurship for All. We go into economically challenged communities and help underrepresented entrepreneurs create and grow small business. So it's right up my alley.
Gail Goodman:Everyone who's listening understands the power of owning a small business to change your economic outlook, right, to give you financial freedom, to create a legacy, a wealth legacy to pass on to your children. Right? Black business owners have 10 times the wealth of black, you know, of black nonbusiness owners. Right? Small business is one of the powerful levers in changing the income inequality equation in our country, which is very real.
Gail Goodman:And so I found a way to take my love of small business and my desire to give back and bring it and with an existing organization. I didn't I didn't start e for all. It had already existed. But I got involved first as a mentor, then as a board member, now as board chair, and now we're building a national scaling plan. It is the, you know, it is the main focus of my time and energy now.
Gail Goodman:And then I also spend time working with other software and service companies that focus on small businesses as a board member. And that's a desire to take all the lessons I learned in Constant Contact and not have them, you know, die with me. Right? And so, it is amazing how similar the paths are.
Dave Charest:Mhmm.
Gail Goodman:Slightly different markets, definitely different teams, but the lessons learned are the lessons learned. And I can be really valuable as a coach mentor to CEOs who are following who are following that path, and I enjoy it.
Dave Charest:I'm often surprised at how much of everything that was old is new again, right, in many ways, and and how much of this is still the same. And we we've talked about this idea of just building those customer relationships, staying focused on repeat business and your existing customers and all of that. From your perspective, where should businesses be focusing today to really think about creating something that's sustainable and allows them to grow?
Gail Goodman:It goes back to these fundamentals, which is who is your customer? Do you really understand how their lives are evolving and how their challenges are evolving, particularly as it relates to whatever you do for them? Right? Not you don't have to worry about things that are totally disconnected from your space. But in your space, are you staying close?
Gail Goodman:Because when you started your business, but I'll just say it was a decade ago, you probably did a lot of talking to customers. But now that you're running the business, you might be a little further away, and everything changes. And I'm just stopped watching my son and then watching kinda even younger people. The way they consume the world is different. They just it's different.
Gail Goodman:The way they get their information is different. Right? The way they see the world is different. And so if you are not staying up with an evolving, changing customer demographic, that's gonna be a problem eventually. And so biggest advice is always stay close to your customer and notice how they're how whatever they do is that is related to you is changing, and then try to get ahead of it.
Gail Goodman:And whether that's technological or just habits. Right? Our tastes change all the time. Right? I watch ecommerce brands come and go.
Gail Goodman:It's like, oh, that was the taste of the month, and now it's gone. Right? Like, tastes change. Trends change. And so don't stay the same.
Gail Goodman:You have to stay relevant or you become a dinosaur.
Dave Charest:Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number one, prioritize repeat business and word-of-mouth. Gail's philosophy for constant contact customers was simple. Don't overlook the customers you already have. She shared how the majority of small business revenue comes from people who already know you, and that by intentionally reaching out and reminding them to come back, you drive more sales for pennies on the dollar.
Dave Charest:So before you go chasing new customers, map out how you're currently engaging your existing customers. Are you consistently reminding them of new offers, updates, or just saying thanks? If not, start with a simple regular email campaign focused on reengagement. Number two, stay close to your customers always. Throughout her career, Gail emphasized the importance of understanding your customers' evolving needs, whether it was talking to small business owners at conferences or iterating the Constant Contact product based on real feedback, she made it a habit to stay in the trenches.
Dave Charest:Now to me, this is the simple secret to success for businesses of any size. Set up regular check ins through surveys, interviews, or even casual conversations to get real feedback from your audience. Use those insights to guide your marketing, content, and product or service decisions. And number three, resilience is a team sport. Gail shared that building a great company culture wasn't just about being nice.
Dave Charest:It was about creating a team that could work through disagreements, adapt together, and stay focused on the mission. She saw that mission driven culture led to better alignment and ultimately business success. So as your business grows or you try to grow your business to the next stages, take a look at how your team communicates and collaborates. Are you clear on your mission and top priorities? If not, get everyone together and realign and clarify what matters most for the business to focus on next to reach your goals.
Dave Charest:So here's your action item for today. Start building stronger customer relationships today. Look. Don't overthink it. Use your constant contact account to reach out to your existing customers.
Dave Charest:Remind them why they chose you, and invite them back. Even a single email can spark repeat business and keep your brand top of mind. If you're not sure where to start, I'll include some educational resources for you in the show notes. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Be a Marketer podcast. Please take a moment to leave us a review.
Dave Charest:Just go to ratethispodcast.com/bam. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. That's ratethispodcast.com/bam. Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.