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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 Be a Marketer podcast! New episodes every Thursday!
Today on episode 61, you'll hear from a consultant that has the magic potion for marketing success. This is the Be A Marketer podcast. BA marketer. 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.
Dave: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:Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining us for another episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. That's right. I said us because Kelsey Carter is here with me. Hello, Kelsi. How are you?
Kelsi:Hi, Dave. I'm good. How are you?
Dave:I'm fantastic. Thank you. I'm excited about the conversation that we're gonna be sharing with folks today. I was wondering if maybe you can tell us a little bit about our guest.
Kelsi:Yeah. Of course. We have a very exciting guest. His name is Rich Cruz. He's the president of Greater Chicago Consulting, where he focuses on websites, marketing, management, and organizational development.
Kelsi:So essentially Rich works with internal business teams to increase their ability to do what they do best. Now interesting thing that we learned when we met Rich, we found out that he was actually working with multiple constant contact clients, which is great, but he wasn't enrolled in our partner program. He actually didn't even know what it was. So, Dave, I actually in case there's anyone out there that might not know either, would you mind telling us a little bit
Dave:about that program? Yeah. Absolutely. So I think there's 2 things really that I'd like people to know about the program. 1, if you're a marketing agency or a freelancer or any other type of, like, solution provider, you actually may wanna check out the free program because our certified partners actually gain access to a bunch of, like, marketing materials.
Dave:There's an agency directory. There's seminar content that you can use. You can promote the events that you're doing as well. You can also get speaking leads, all sorts of things like that. And that all comes along with a client dashboard and, of course, revenue share for clients that you actually end up bringing the Constant Contact.
Dave:And so that's why I was excited we were able to to tell Rich about that. The second thing is that if you're really looking for someone for, you know, helping you with your marketing, you actually may have a partner in your local area. And these are people that have the necessary knowledge, the skills, and the competencies to really help you make the most of marketing your business with constant contact. So I'm sure we'll include some details in the show notes for all of that information so people can find out more. And what I loved is that since we did let Rich know about the program, he has become a certified partner.
Dave:So congratulations.
Kelsi:I know. I was very impressed to see that.
Dave:Yeah. Congratulations to you, Rich. I love it when, you know, something happens and and people take action on that right away. So that was really great. And, thank you again, Rich, for partnering with us.
Kelsi:Yes. Thank you, Rich.
Dave:So we talked to Rich in relation to one of our customers. He's worked closely with the team over at the LuxeShop, and they're the largest and most comprehensive Mojo store in the Midwest. So as Rich tells it, the mail order and ecommerce business is America's favorite, spiritual goods supplier. So this is a business that it's with over 3 generations of ownership so far. It's been around for almost a 100 years in business, and The Luck Shop really caters to all those types of metaphysical practitioners and their respective specialties.
Dave:And so I don't know. Kelsey, what do you think? Maybe we can get into where Rich kind of explains his journey that, led him to the Luck Shop.
Kelsi:Yeah. Let's dive right in.
Rich:I was the internet marketing manager for a vitamin and nutritional supplement company. Right. And this was after owning my own business. So I used to own a sign company before that pesky recession thing happened. And so I went into doing consulting work and that led to, it's a weird way that things work in life.
Rich:Right? I worked for a recruiter. The recruiter said, Hey, I have a client who's looking for an internet person. And they hear I go to this vitamin company. Well, the vitamin company does wholesale work.
Rich:And one of the clients was LuxeShop. And they said, well, LuxeShop needs some help with their marketing. You seem to know what you're doing here. Let me introduce you. So I met Ted over the phone with, a little bit of, back and forth talking.
Rich:I started helping them out with first their SEO. That was probably the main thing was working with their website. And then after that, looking at their constant contact, help them to clean that stuff up, you know, getting good data in there, making sure people are opted in properly, you know, and then, using some of the new templates that had come out from Constant Contact to have something that was, you know, this was like just prior to where everybody was worried about mobile. Yeah. And I was really, really thankful when Constant Contact was like, Hey, we have all these new mobile templates.
Rich:You know, that was a game changer for us.
Dave:Tell me a little bit about the business then. So Lux Shop, if I'm not mistaken, is it's a brick and mortar store. You also have an online component and, mail order. Is that correct?
Rich:Actually, we're not a brick and mortar.
Dave:Store. There is no brick
Rich:and mortar. Okay. No, no. We're, started off with mail order now.
Dave:Oh,
Rich:okay. You know, internet and e commerce. We are the largest and most comprehensive Mojo store in the Midwest. And we like to say we're America's favorite spiritual goods supplier, master spiritual goods supplier. And, this is, we're at 3 generations so far of ownership right now.
Rich:It's been almost a 100 years. So the company's been going strong for a long while.
Dave:What is your process like? Where do you I guess the first thing you're gonna do is come in and review from a marketing and what's going on. So like, what does that process look like for
Rich:you? So whenever I work with a client and Luxoft is no exception, you know, when they first came in, it's looking at all the data, what's done, what has happened historically. Right. And it's, you know, from Google analytics through the commerce system itself, they used to use a different commerce system. This is like their 3rd or 4th iteration, but we're looking at what are those best selling products?
Rich:What's not moving? What do our best customers look like? So we were taking a trying to take a customer centric approach. We know that our customers really appreciate the quality of the goods that we have, but they also appreciate a good deal. So every month we get together and flesh out a content calendar.
Rich:So usually we have, 2 emails that go out a month or actually 3 emails that go out a month. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but we will have a specials email in the beginning of the month. So those are some featured custom curated items that are in 4 different categories. So, our customers really appreciate when they have those kind of spotlight products in front of them. Then later on, we'll, we'll offer a, at all, by the way, all those are pretty deep discount on their, on their own there.
Rich:And then we have another sale that happens later on in the month. This coming month, we're doing a big 25% off. That's kind of a big deal for us. And, you know, that we do that. We do a reminder email, but sometimes we split these lists, you know, and we also have a spiritual bulletin every month that we put together.
Rich:It has a prayer and then it has a horoscope section and some featured products that we put in there. And we send that with our specials, but we also use in constant contact SMS. So we do the SMS service to our list, that in the beginning of the month and then also for our discount per option.
Dave:How do you define marketing?
Rich:Oh, thank you. I actually teach marketing over at Trinity Christian College over here. So thanks for asking that. My students, when I talk to them, it's always about a it hasn't always been this way, but I've learned that it's really a people first approach. Right?
Rich:So get to know the person that you're going after, create those personas based on that. So what would your ideal customer look like? What's their communication style? Where are they hanging out? What do they like?
Rich:What do they not like? You know, so getting into those interests, the more that we can learn about them, the better, and that allows us to tailor content. It's really we are solving a problem for our customers. We're enabling them. We're not selling to them, but we're enabling them to get what they're looking for.
Rich:Mhmm. If that makes sense.
Dave:No, that does. That does. So how do you start to apply then that to your approach when you think about what you're doing at Lux Shop?
Rich:Yeah. There's where some of the like change in the way that we create the content happens, right? So we're less focused on features and benefits and more focused on what does this do for them. So they're like, what are their desires? And we literally have like a shop by desire section now on the website that you can go to.
Rich:So it's really about what issues do they have and what are they trying to solve. And, I think that was a really good step in the right direction. So every new product that comes out, we're looking at that a little bit more than historically, right, is speaking to the customer. People like to, they like to see what they're gonna be getting. Right?
Rich:So the image quality has gotten a lot better since we started. You know, it used to be at a like low lighting and all that. Not that, you know, we have a nice photo booth. Everything gets taken very well there. So we integrate with Constant Contact.
Rich:So to grow our list, we have a couple of lead gens that are there. We have a survey and you get a gift with the survey, a discount there. Then we have a 25% off coupon that we've been giving away for a while that has worked very well. You know, being able to integrate and have people sign up and it goes right into our constant contact into a list that we can segment out is just super fantastic.
Dave:Are there any specific things that you've been doing to, well, I guess how important is the list? Let me start there.
Rich:Oh, the list is critical. I mean, that's literally what drives a lot of our commerce. Right? Because we just get a lot of direct hits from the email. People look forward to it and boom, they go right into it.
Rich:So so that is one thing. And we, you know, we've also segmented out to like some of our best customers and also some people who haven't bought for a while and and try to, you know, regenerate, sales from them. So being able to understand where people are because we can run reports off of, WooCommerce and then segment our list that way. Yeah. The list is, that's the gold mine, right?
Dave:That's,
Rich:that's the main thing.
Dave:So are there any particular things that you do to make sure that you're constantly growing that list?
Rich:We use forms for sure. You know, forms are we have several landing pages where you can go and fill out these forms and, it goes right into our system.
Dave:When you think about the marketing efforts that you're using, what would you say has been the most effective for you?
Rich:From an awareness standpoint, acquisition standpoint, the, our work on social media, and then going to the landing pages for signing up for our list, that's probably the number one channel for us for acquisition there. For the consideration and decision stages, right, We plan on doing more blogging. We have some blogs and we have some very helpful tips with colors and the use of, of colors. We have a, like a colored candle chart and some other, some other really handy tips that people glom onto. The spiritual bulletin has been, very handy for us for that, you know, just keeping people coming back.
Rich:But those emails that are focused on the products and the discounts are certainly the biggest drivers of of revenue on that decision side.
Dave:You do some segmentation and breaking out of the lists and things like that. Like, walk me through that process. Like, how do you think through that and where do you make decisions on where to make those kind of, different lists?
Rich:Yeah. Well, like I said, some of it is where they came in from. So that's one way. Like what form do they actually use? Like, Adam, we have our SMS lists that are very specific to our, you know, our SMS campaigns.
Dave:So talk me through the workflow then a little bit in in terms of, like, Luxoft. Right? So you said you meet monthly to figure out the content calendar and those types of things. And so Mhmm. Is there, like, at the beginning of the year, do you meet with Ted, the owner, and and leadership and things like that to say, okay.
Dave:Here are our goals for the year, and then are you developing a plan from there based on those goals from marketing perspective? Like, walk me through what that process looks like and then how you then get to that point of executing on particular campaigns.
Rich:Yeah. We usually meet in, towards the end of the year for that overall, like here's what we're gonna be doing for like, you know, this 2024, we would've got it, or late 2023. There are certain objectives that they want to meet. And then my job is to help them to take that vision and make that a reality on the web and set up all those systems. So we'll come up with some of those overall objectives.
Rich:We'll figure out what has been working. And I always say that it's going to be like status quo or business as usual, because it's never that.
Dave:Sure. Yeah.
Rich:But we do try to figure out what has worked in the past. Let's replicate what's worked in the past. Let's change those things that weren't so hot. You know, there are certain, certain sales that like at certain times a year where we've tried like a 24 hour sale or something like that, that may not have worked so well just based on the on the timing. So instead of that, we might lengthen that and change that to something else.
Rich:But at the same time, we've done a 72 hour sale that just blew the doors off the place. You know? So we try to let the data, you know, speak for it. So we'll look at some of those analytics reports from the prior year. And then we even try to measure that against the previous year to that.
Rich:We're also look at like right now, we're gonna be auditing our SEO. I'm gonna run an audit. We're gonna take a look at which products are missing anything, alt tags, page titles, or meta descriptions, or any of the other metadata that we need to put in there. And so we do that periodically as well. So there's always something to plan.
Rich:And then if there are any new initiatives, right? Because we relaunched the website, like I said, in WooCommerce, not too long ago, a couple of years ago. But if we ever wanna make any of those bigger changes or if we wanna add something else to it, like we added SMS last year, we try to plan ahead on that too.
Dave:Well, what do you like most about working with Constant Contact?
Rich:First of all, it is accessible to my clients. They really appreciate that they can come in here, get things set up fairly quickly. There's not this big long onboarding process. Although there's, there's some that of course needs to happen, but it's just very easy to work with. I like that they've thought ahead on some of the demark situation that happened earlier this year.
Rich:That was all very helpful for us to get through that. But the templates are great. And the fact that you can actually, sometimes they have specials on ordering custom templates, which is kind of nice. The new SMS campaigns, because everything is now under that that umbrella. And the integration points from Constant Contact are really, really good.
Rich:I've been able to plug Constant Contact into other CRM systems. I've been able to plug it into different form builders. And of course, then it has, you know, those code snippets that you can use if you, if your client doesn't have any of that stuff. Yes.
Dave:Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about, you know, obviously it sounds like SEO is a big portion of Luck Shop, right? Just in terms of business. And so how important and what is the role of SEO in driving business for, for Luck Shop?
Rich:It's amazingly important. I think the biggest, I always start with the Google SEO starter guide, and then we, we take a look at that every year or or whenever we know that there's been a change made to it, you know, because that's, you know, if Google's telling you this is what you need to do, then you need to do it. Alright. So we wanna make sure that we have enough content on the page. We're not keyword stuffing.
Rich:We're we're using the appropriate tags. All the images have alt tags that make sense and aren't just file names and that type of stuff. Mobile, you know, we we need to make sure mobile and, site security are, you know, paramount, frankly. You know? Yeah.
Rich:So we really, again, start with the basics and just, you know, continue on with that.
Dave:When you think of just marketing, online marketing, is there anything that has been consistently working for you?
Rich:2 things, I think. 1, intentionality, right? Being intentional about what your goals are and what you're trying to do here and making sure that your campaign demonstrates that intentionality all the way through. Right. That's one thing.
Rich:Personally, things that have worked for me that we haven't done at the luck shop yet have been when we are, when we host events, which is, you know, whenever there's an opportunity, cause they work with a lot of B2B clients. Yeah. It really works well for them. When you host an event and you have some kind of training, you're getting people on your list. They're generally receptive to receiving your newsletter and that type of thing.
Rich:So it's been helpful. Here at LuxeShop, some of our blogs have been great and those products have been really good. We are looking at expanding into some other things. So some other spiritual type of services that will be coming out soon that I think will help with driving that where it's, it's a little more interactive. I think it's the interactivity that really, you know, it's, it's that human approach that really I think is going to be the differentiator for a lot of businesses.
Dave:What would it be like doing the things that you do if you didn't have constant contact?
Rich:Oh, if I didn't have constant contact, that'd be sad. No. I mean, frankly, it's a pain to shop around and find something. And I've worked with 15, 16 16 different email and marketing automation systems. Right?
Rich:So for certain companies, Constant Contact isn't the right fit. Right? And, we need something that has some different features in it. But when I look at the at the ones that are, you know, within my client's price point, When I look at what their, you know, what their features are, the integration points, it's just a really it's been a stellar rock solid product for us. So, yeah.
Rich:So yeah, it'd be sad.
Dave:How would you say You're gonna
Rich:be doing a lot of shopping around.
Dave:Yeah. How would you say Constant Contact, saves you time?
Rich:Well, one of the nice parts is that when I have a campaign that's worked, I can simply duplicate that campaign. It doesn't mess up the code, which other platforms have historically had a problem with. You know, so it's really nice to be able to literally replicate that campaign and then put in new content into there. So that's, that's really one way to save time. I like that the color palette keeps your latest colors and all that together so I don't have to go and, you know, put in those custom colors all over again.
Rich:So that's really helpful. Some of the boilerplate options with logos and your your unsubscribe area and all that stuff is helpful as well. The tutorials are nice. When I go and, you know, there's some new new way of handling a new template or, you know, even some of the, things about Demark and all that were really helpful as well. Yeah.
Rich:DKIM and SPF records and all that.
Dave:Yeah. If you had to offer a tip to someone just getting started with constant contact, what would that be?
Rich:Doctor. Make sure that the people on your list are opted in. That is a big one. Right? Don't just put cold people into there.
Rich:Shaking my finger at the people who do that.
Dave:Why is that so
Rich:important for you? Well, it's not good for you, and it's certainly not good for the reputation of the ESP of of Constant Contact. Right? So you do that and you get people who are marking you as spam or opting out and all that. You're gonna get flagged and then you're not gonna be in a good place.
Rich:So build those relationships, get people to actually opt in. If they're not opted in or if you're you have a question about it, get them to double opt in, you know, when you add them to a list. But make sure your list is, before you bring anybody in, if you are importing, do the data cleansing. Make sure that your, your, you know, your first name, last name are separated. You have good email addresses.
Rich:Think intentionally about what tags you're gonna put in there, what lists that you may wanna create for your segmentation. I think all of that's important. And also take a look at your entire tech stack and then take a look at Constant Contact's integration points and see, you know, I actually like when I'm helping clients put together a tech stack, looking at what products work together, because trying to do Zaps and stuff like that with Zapier or whatever is not as smooth and reliable as having something that has native integrations.
Dave:Got it. If you were to offer just some general marketing advice to someone, what would be your best piece of marketing advice?
Rich:Oh, be ethical. Be ethical. It's all about the people that you're serving. Right? So I think, you know, making sure that you're not only doing no harm, you're providing benefit.
Rich:You're being honest and truthful that you're doing things in a kind and trustworthy manner.
Dave:Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number 1, adopt a people first approach. When Rich teaches students, he mentions that marketing is all about getting to know the person that you're going after. What does your ideal customer look like? What's their communication style?
Dave:Where are they hanging out? What are they like, and what are they not like? The more you can learn about them, the better. Applying this approach to his work at Luckshop allows the business to tailor its content to better communicate the value its products provide. And with every new product that comes out, the team is asking, is this speaking to the customer?
Dave:Number 2, use social media to point people to your list. Now the Luck Shop uses social media to point people to landing pages for signing up for its email list. Rich mentions that this is the number one channel for acquisition of new email sign ups. So don't forget to put a plan in place to periodically try to move social followers to your own channels such as email and SMS. Oftentimes, a simple discount can be a good enticement to get people to give you their contact information.
Dave:Number 3, replicate and adjust. Rich mentioned setting up time to review what's working, make a plan, and then execute that plan. Well, that means replicating what's worked in the past, dropping things that, well, weren't so hot, and making adjustments to get better results. Then let the data speak for itself. So set time to do this work for your business.
Dave:Look at your analytics reports from the prior year and then measure against that to track your growth. Here's your action item for today. Be intentional. As Rich has learned from experience, you must be intentional about what your goals are and what you're trying to do. This way, you can make a marketing plan that supports you.
Dave:This approach allows you to make sure that your campaign demonstrates that intentionality all the way through. So book some time on your calendar to review your goals and be intentional about your marketing next steps. And, of course, check out the resources available to 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:Just go to rate this podcast.com/bam. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. That's rate this podcast.com/bam. Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.