Dave Charest: Today on episode twelve of the Be a Marketer podcast, we're talking with members of the Constant Contact team about the new sms or text marketing features available within your constant contact account. And I've got a personal text marketing experience to share, thanks to Paul McCartney. This is the Be a Marketer podcast. B a Marketer my name is Dave Charost, director of small business success at Constant Contact, and I've been helping small business owners like you make sense of online marketing for over 16 years. You can be a marketer, and I'm here to help. Hello. Hello, friend, and welcome to another episode of the Be a Marketer podcast. As always, I'm grateful to have you here, grateful for your attention. And today I am really excited to talk to you about sms or text marketing. We've got some pretty cool guests from constant contact here joining us today. And before we get into that conversation, I wanted to share a personal story with you. Last summer, my family and I were lucky enough to go see Paul McCartney of Beatles fame at Fenway park. And while we were waiting for the show to begin, Paul had these big signs on the sides of the stage that said, text me. And he had a number for us to send a text message to. So, of course, putting on my marketing brain, I was like, and my fanboy brain, if I'm being honest, I said, all right, yeah, let's text Paul McCartney. Let's see what's going on here. So I sent a little message over to Paul McCartney through that little text channel, and I got a little thing back and it was written as if it was coming directly from Paul. And he was like, hey, you know, you must have seen my, my number at the show. Glad, you know, do this thing to confirm that you want to start receiving text messages and yada, yada. So I go through this whole process. I got this nice little text message back. It's got a little link for me to go, and I can actually add some more stuff and send a message directly to Paul or, you know, so they want you to think. And, you know, so I did that. I didn't go through the whole process of sending him a personal message or anything like that. But as we were sitting there in our seats and we were waiting for the show to start, I was watching a woman in front of us. We were all kind of watching her, you know, it was a Paul McCartney show, so everyone's a little older, and she had the giant writing on her, her phone. And so we were watching her as she was sending this message to Paul McCartney that was like, hi, Paul. We're at the concert. My kids were supposed to come. My daughter couldn't be here because her and her husband got Covid. And, you know, we're really excited to be here. You know, I'm a vegan. You're a vegan. And she was going on in this, like, very, like, personal conversation. Like she was sending a text to a friend. And it was really funny as we were watching it, just because, like, obviously we know she's not actually texting directly to Paul McCartney. But I thought what was interesting, and the reason I'm telling you this story is because it really highlights the way that people are looking to engage with the text or SMS channel. And it's really this personal channel and the things that you do with it when you're using it and you're thinking about maybe applying it to your marketing, it really should feel timely, it should feel exclusive, and it should feel, you know, conversational when you use it so that you can get those best possible results. Now, look, I know you may not be Paul McCartney, but you do have this really great opportunity to reach people in the SMS or text channel, and that's going to really allow you to compete and have the same technology that the big box stores have. Well, friend, today we have two guests from constant contact joining us to talk SMS. We have product marketing manager Hannah Corey and product manager Zachary Robinson. Now, as you might imagine, we're all pretty excited to bring SMS marketing to our customers. And I asked Hannah, you know, what's the opportunity for constant contact customers with SMS now that it's available to them? Well, let's pick up the conversation there.
Hannah: I think the main reason that we really dove into this space was knowing that our small business owners were curious about it. They've been asking us about it for a while and they wanted to understand how they could leverage it and what it means for them, which really gave us the opportunity to think into. Okay, great. First and foremost, what is SMS marketing, but what does it actually mean for small business owners and how can they leverage this to be successful? Right. So I think what we've been to seeing is because our small business owners already have a little bit more of a personal connection with their audience and with the people who are buying from them or with folks as part of their organization. SMS fits really naturally into the way that they can communicate because they already have that more intimate relationship with the folks that will be receiving their texts. When you think about who you're getting text messages from, it's your friends, it's your family, it's people that you already know. So I think it's really interesting because in this particular case, I think with marketing, our small business owners actually have an advantage over some of those larger, more established brands. So there's a huge opportunity for our customers with this. We know that folks are going to be opening text messages. Just think about it. Naturally you see a text come through, you're going to open it, you're more likely to engage with it, you're more likely to click on links within those than you would within an email. So if you've got something short, sweet, a little bit more personal to say and to drive folks to, I think it's just such a great additional channel to maybe some of the other things that you're already doing, like sending emails or posting on social. Right. It just gives you that additional touch point.
Dave Charest: Now I know you guys do like a lot of research when you're thinking about developing the products and what we're going to provide to our customers and that type of thing. I mean what have you guys seen just in terms of the shift in how consumers are actually wanting to receive text from brands? Because I feel like theres probably been a change in that. Are you both signed up for text these days? Are you both doing that now?
Zack: I cant tell you how many text messages I get from businesses. Probably the most obvious example that hey, this local store is promoting a sale. You dont even think about it. Its become such a part of our culture. If I get a text message, the first thing I do is check my phone because what if its something very important? What if it's a family member? What if it's a friend? Oftentimes it's not. But as I get these notifications, I always look to see what it is because there's, I can't tell you how many things I've bought with a coupon code I've gotten from a text message. It's substantially more than I'm willing to admit.
Dave Charest: Well, so that's the interesting thing, right? You're talking about here is this idea that there's an instantaneous piece to it, right? So, and I think I often talk about this idea of like social of course, is great because I don't think it's necessarily about you using one channel over the other, but it's really about thinking about you're going to have some people that obviously prefer one channel, maybe favor one more over another. But it's really about figuring out how do you use all three of them. And how do you use those in unison to, you know, I kind of talk about it in this idea of owning the smartphone, right. Where on social you can kind of reach people that are new to your business because you're engaging with people and that's kind of the goal when you're using those channels. But, right. You're kind of limited in what you can do because algorithms are going to kind of control whether or not that gets seen or whatever the case may be. When you think about both email and text, what's beneficial, and I think we've been talking about a lot, is that idea that you own that list, right. You control how often and when and what you're going to do to contact those people and like an algorithm isn't going to mess that up for you. Right. Of course, with email these days, sure, its an overcrowded space. And so youre competing. Theres lots of competition in there, but its still a really valuable channel in terms of driving ROI for your business or the return on investment. But then whats exciting about the text piece, particularly right now, is because there are fewer people doing it. And to this point that youre saying is that you get a ding on your phone and you look at it right away is that as long as you dont abuse the channel and you use it in a way to provide some value, youve really got this direct line to a customer. And so I dont know, Hannah, do you have any examples of things where youre like, oh, this has been or have you received anything from a business or have you seen a small business in particular do something that has really caught your attention?
Hannah: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I am a sucker for deals. Im one of those girls, if I get a 15% off discount, you better believe Im buying something. And for me, its even more important with small businesses. I think we saw this a lot during the pandemic where a lot of folks transitioned to shopping small because we wanted to protect our communities and the important businesses within our communities. And as we've been transitioning out of kind of a state of having to think about that all the time and having that be all consuming, I think it actually has really changed our habits in general of how we purchase from folks and who we purchase from. So out here, the town that I live in actually has a fairly large small business community and they're very involved with how our community functions and what we do on a regular basis in terms of making sure that we have like festivals and things like that happening. And so I've noticed a lot of the times, if I have some of my favorite restaurants, if they've got some new menu items coming out, they'll shoot me a text about it. And I'm more likely to ping one of my friends and say, hey, what are you doing tonight? Do you want to go grab dinner and catch up? Or if I get kind of a ping from a small business that's doing a flash sale, I'm more likely to go in there and then be interacting with my community in general. So I've noticed that it's a way that I'm more likely to fit in with my community and with my lifestyle based on some of the text messages that I'm receiving, which I think is really interesting, right. I'm more likely to be going out and interacting with people because I'm getting a text message that reminds me that I should be doing those things, which is one of those things that I hadn't really even thought about for a small business owner until I started interacting with text messages a lot more in my daily life.
Zack: What's interesting, and if I can tag onto that, you mentioned something that has kind of gotten more traction. One of the more difficult things that I've found when interacting with text in general is making it sound personable. So if I get a text message from a business and it sounds very robotic like some of the larger ones do, very generic, very robotic, im less likely to engage than if, for example, luigis up the street from me. Its really cool little italian spot. Been there 70 years. People are incredible. Its been in the family for 70 years. And when they send me a message there are typos in it. Sometimes its pretty clear that someone is just typing it on the other side of the screen and sending it to me. Its not coming through corporate comms, its coming from John who works at Luigi's. He's sending this out and stuff like that is so important. It gives you that really personal touch. We all know that content's hard. It's hard to write content, it's hard to write stuff in there. And shameless. Plug here. We just released our own AI content generator for sms to make things a little bit more personable sounding, less corporate comms sounding and to help people generate that level personal touch in an sms that you can use within your campaigns. It's incredible. It's a really useful tool. We've gotten amazing feedback. I've looked at our feedback list and of the 78 different ones, 77 of them have the word wow in them. That's awesome. I'll take that all day. Things like that. The little advancements that we can make, the little additional items that we can add as value really are designed to kind of live by our companys motto, which is to help the small stand tall. Right. So we want to help our communities succeed and be successful.
Hannah: And Zach, I think one piece that was really interesting to me about our new content generator for folks, in one of the interviews that we were listening to, one of our customers was hesitant to use it because she was worried that it wasnt going to sound like her. She didnt want to use AI content and have it not sound like her voice and sound personal. And she used it and was so surprised by how real it sounded for her. So I think it really speaks to how far the AI field has come in general, but it also speaks to how we can actually build out content for our customers, making their marketing as easy as possible. So they don't have to worry about their marketing. They can just leverage us to do a lot of it for them and still feel like they're having that great connection with their customers.
Zack: And SMS is first. But it's not only we have it across the board now. We're going to be rolling it out to email. We're going to be rolling it out to social. It's just starting.
Dave Charest: Yeah, I want to talk about this a little bit because I know obviously AI is the big conversation if you're paying attention to what's happening out there. And so for folks that may not be aware, we're talking about artificial intelligence. We're talking about this ability to, I guess generative AI is kind of what were talking about here in particular, as youre mentioning, were adding it within constant contact to help people create content in SMS. This is a whole other conversation. Of course we can get in with AI and things like that. But I did want to point out just basically what this means is that when you get into SMS, you want to send something out. You can just give it some, hey, this is what I want to talk about. And then you hit a button and then it spits out some texts that you can send that are within the text limits and all of that and then makes it really easy for you. You can make some edits if you need to, but it really does the hard work for you, the heavy lifting, so that you can kind of get something out, which I think is really important. Zach, the other thing that you kind of touched on there was this idea of being, I guess, conversational is probably the way to think about it. And I think this is important to mention because if you're thinking about using text messaging, as with anything, it's really about leaning into the strengths of the channels. Right. And understanding how those channels work. I think to Hannah's point earlier, this is where a lot of small businesses do have that advantage, because, one, you have those more personal relationships with your customers, and you can lean into that, but then also make it feel like you're having a conversation with someone and you should be thinking a bit like that. And I think sometimes you can get into, like, a marketing mode almost where you try to kind of talk differently to people, and it's like that's actually the exact opposite of what you want to do. And so I think that's interesting as you're thinking about that. Hannah, I have a question for you. What would you say to someone, maybe a small business owner out there, that may be hesitant to try text marketing?
Hannah: Yeah, absolutely. I hear that all the time from folks, and I totally understand where it's coming from, because, frankly, to my point earlier, a lot of folks see text messaging as a way that they communicate with people that they are super close to, and they may feel a little nervous to be sending texts and have that feel like they're intruding on somebody's and phone personal space. Right. Their personal phone bubble, if you will. But from what we've been finding, that's not really how customers take it or how audiences are taking text messaging anymore. There was a study done fairly recently, I believe they said about 70% of customers are interested in receiving text messages from businesses, specifically more interested in receiving them from small businesses. So I think there's a huge market out there of folks who want to be receiving communications in this channel. Not just they want to receive comms from folks, they want to receive them on their phone via text because it's easier for them, and that's where they'll see it. So I understand the hesitancy from some folks that may view their phone in that way, but that doesn't mean that your customers or the people that you interact with will view it negatively. Right. I think there's a tendency in general, for us to kind of project our personal views onto our customer base, and there's just been so much research done that shows that that's not always true. Yeah.
Dave Charest: Because I was there, right. For a long time, I was like, look, I'm not going to sign up for a text message. That's my thing. And I feel as though people were probably like that about email at a certain point too, right? Where it was like, no, you can't send things to my. Because it's that personal space. And I think, to your point, that has shifted. Yeah, I think it's like 91% or something like that of people are now, like, open to receiving text messages. We did some research that emails and sms are actually from small businesses, the two most helpful communications to consumers when they're making a purchase decision. It really is changing. And even now, as the younger generation is coming up, text is their main mode of communication. We often talk about this idea of, these younger kids don't use email. And I was like, well, yes and no. They're not using email because they don't have a job yet. You do work in email. So they will be using email at a certain point. Like, you just can't escape that. But because they are so used to communicating in this kind of text style, that doesn't seem awkward to them, or it doesn't seem like, whoa, what do you mean? No, I don't want to get like, they're ready to kind of do that thing. So I want to talk a little bit about just constant contact sms in general. Right. I like to spend some time there and I start thinking about, like, what's unique about our offering. Is there anything else that's kind of unique from our offering that people might be interested in?
Zack: It's not very common for people to have local numbers. It's far more common to see toll free numbers or shortcodes. And both of those have their pros. Both of those have their cons. I mean, everything has its pro and con, right? The one thing that we kind of have going for us is we're not trying to really gouge pricing on people. We tend to be very, we want our people to be successful because when our customers are successful, communities are successful, we are successful, and it's the right way to do things. Things like shortcodes are very, very prohibitively expensive. We focus on ten digit long codes, which is just a really fancy way of saying a local number. The reason that it's called a ten digit long code is because there's ten digits and there's a bunch of different types of SMS marketing out there. There's your shortcodes, which are your five to six characters, and then there's your toll free numbers, which are, you know, your 1800s, your 833s. We focus here at constant contact on the ten digit long code. And the reason that we care is local numbers for our customers tend to be the highest hit rates everybody recognizes a 1800 number coming through on your text message and does have a reasonably lower open rate because it looks like spam and it just does. But messages coming from someone's local area code, especially businesses like ours and our customers who are tend to be smaller local shops. It gives you that homey touch, that feeling of being part of the community, and it really matters. It makes a big difference. And it's important because SMS has a substantially higher open rate than emails. From a marketing perspective, the bang for your buck is just there. Everything that we do is inclusive in our packages and that's transparency. That's something that you don't get a lot of in marketing cost in general, that's something that constant contact does very well, not just with SMS but with all of our packages. We're very transparent in the way that we do things because you don't want to surprise at the end. That's not cool. The AI content generator is another really big feature. We're actually the only people on the market right now that have AI content generator built into the text message send. Now people are advertising AI. You have some of our competitors talking about we have a subject AI generator and that's not really the same thing. That's a very light version of what we have. What we have will actually do the content for you in a way that sounds similar to you. Our differentiator is we have this local number that you can send to or send from. Rather, we have AI content generation, which is only one in the field as far as I'm aware. There may be some that come out soon, but we're definitely on the bleeding edge of that and really just transparency, making sure that our customers are getting the send rates that they're looking for with the promotions that they have. And frankly, this goes to one of your earlier points about owning the three different channels. If I can go back to that for just a second. I don't have social media really. I don't use it. So the only way to get a hold of me is for text and emails. So recognizing that that's how I'm going to get it. Text works really well for me. So what we have is we're going to be launching extended features with our automated path builder and Hannah can speak a little more to this, I'm sure, but we have the ability to automate different text message promotions. We have the ability to automate text message sending in general and different scheduling for different conditions. We have conditional splitting with SMS. There's all sorts of stuff that we have now and coming down the pipe, thatll dramatically improve quality of life around SMS.
Dave Charest: Gotcha. So maybe actually we can talk a little bit about that. Hannah. So what does that mean? Conditional splits. Okay. What does that mean?
Hannah: Yeah, totally. So it took me a while to get all of the terminology down too. So im sure a lot of folks out there, if theyre not super familiar with automation and how to build automation, probably need to wrap their heads around it as well. So I think what's really interesting about how we're reconceptualizing automation and what that means for our customer base is we're really thinking into how do we make it as simple as possible to make sure that our customers are able to provide the right message at the right time via the right channel to their customer base. Right. So when you're setting up a new automation, we'll have different ways that you can trigger the comms to start. So is that because somebody clicked on a link or did they sign up for a list? Right, and then we can make sure that based on what information you have from them, they're getting the right channel of communication. So let's just think into a welcome series. Let's say you've been collecting contact information from folks, but you know that this person is particularly interested in receiving information from the text message channel. Right. From SMS you can actually have a yes no split. Do I have their phone number or do I not? And if you don't have their phone number, then you can send them a regular welcome email, just like you've probably been doing for a really long time. You have their phone number and you know that they want to receive text messages. Go ahead and send them a text again, or instead. And then you can kind of continue to build things out. Maybe you want to make sure that after they receive that initial welcome and learn about you a week, you want to send them out an initial promo code to get them to purchase from you. You can do the same thing. If you want to send it via email, you can. If you want to send it via SMS, you can. So we're really making sure that it's easy for you to target people in the right timeline via the channel that they're most likely to interact back with you on. What's really cool too, is I think, based on the way that we built our system, we have a lot of learnings from how we built out email that we've been able to really think into when we're building out SMS as a platform or social as a platform and because they're all in one place, you can really connect how you're learning about these things together. So you can check out your reporting and see who's interacting with what and why they're interacting with those things and learn into those spaces so you can continue to optimize your marketing based on what your customer base is most likely to do rather than just kind of guessing.
Dave Charest: Yeah, gotcha. When you start to think about what are people going to have available to them, just in terms of when you think of what reporting is available for the text channel itself, what types of things are we looking at there?
Hannah: I always recommend people are looking at things like clicks. So I always recommend adding links into your text messages where you can. It's a great way to make sure that folks are interacting with you, but you can also start to see over time what types of links they're most likely to interact with so you can provide them the content that they need. You also always want to be looking at things like unsubscribes and bounces. So who is bouncing and why is always good to know. But who's unsubscribing from channels? So are there. Maybe you're sending out too many text messages in a month. Maybe you're not sending out enough and they kind of forget who you are, right? So those are really the main reporting metrics that I always recommend folks really pay attention to to make sure that they're connecting with people in the right cadence.
Dave Charest: I want to talk a little bit about maybe some things for people who might not know. But if you start thinking about just some best practices around text marketing and sms and all of that, and what do people need to know just from a compliance standpoint, what's different? What's the same as we think about email versus text marketing? Hannah, any thoughts there?
Hannah: I think there are so many different ways that you can get people to sign up. Just because we have a sign up form that already exists within constant contact doesn't mean that you're automatically just going to have people sign up. I like to think about any signup tools that we have. Think about the different places that people will be seeing about you. So I love leveraging social media. Putting a link on social is a great way to get new folks to sign up for any list. Right? You have people on Instagram and Facebook. Those are all great channels to be able to reach out to folks and say, hey, just so you know, we've got a new sms outreach program. Here's what you can expect from us go ahead and sign up now. But we can also do it via things like on your website. I'm sure you're seeing it all over the place now unlock an additional 15% off by signing up for text messages. We're seeing it across the board. So I always recommend folks leverage those types of signup tools too, to get people to sign up. But I also think that there's, for small business owners, you can kind of get creative with it. My hairdresser has a little plaque at her station that says, hey, are you interested in getting texts? When I have a new appointment available, sign up here. So I can actually just like, put my number in, make sure that if she's got an availability that just opened up on Wednesday and it's working perfectly for me, I can just get that text message and sign up for it right away. So there's just so many different ways that you can do it and be creative about it, especially from a small business perspective, because you have all of the options outside of just the online channels.
Dave Charest: You know, it's interesting. I love that example that you just gave because I think it's, the reality is this is a relatively new channel, particularly in the small business space. And so it's really thinking about getting a little bit creative. Right. Like, what are the ways that you can use it? And I love what you said there about like, each of these things that you let you mentioned. Right. It wasn't necessarily, and this is similar to email where it wasn't about receiving the text message as much as it was like, find out about when I have an open availability, get 15% off. Right. Really focused on what is the benefit someone is going to get from somebody in order to kind of add that to get people on their list. Right. And so thinking about that, are there any other kind of like, immediate, like, use cases for people that we can maybe give some examples of in terms of, like, using text?
Zack: Oh, yeah, there's a ton of them. The sale ones are really good examples, obviously, because those are the ones that are, people are most used to getting. But you have your appointment reminders for your dentist, right. It's making sure if you are running a service based business, for example, and you're a plumber or an electrician or you have some kind of business where it is important for people to make an appointment or to be on time for an appointment, letting people know you're coming half an hour ahead of time, or letting them know that they have an appointment tomorrow to be there. That's incredible. I can't tell you how many times I would have missed an appointment if my dentist had not texted me the day before. Or I say that because I had a lot of dental work done last year, unfortunately. But it's things like that. You have things. One of our bigger use cases, or more common use cases, are churches and nonprofits. Hey, we're having a food drive this weekend. Come by, help us out. We're doing a toy donation, we're doing this charity run, this event, and things like that increase engagement, they increase community togetherness. And it really just has a very personal touch that you wouldn't necessarily get from social or email. I mean, there's still a lot of that in there, and hitting all of the channels is absolutely the right way to do it. But knowing that someone sent you that text message directly because you told them you wanted this information, it's just tremendous. It's huge.
Dave Charest: Some of the things I'm hearing, I think, that are important is that think about some exclusivity to what it is that you're sending and what you're doing with it, because there's an instantaneousness with it. It's really important to be timely with the messages and thinking about when you're sending them. And of course, we talked about that idea of being conversational. Zach, I guess I'm curious from you and Hannah. Feel free to jump in here. But when we start thinking about what's coming in the future, kind of like text two join, for example, which I think is going to be an exciting one. I know that's one of those really cool features that I really like. And so what else is kind of coming down the road for some of the things, or what can people expect? As we get deeper into the SMS.
Zack: Tool, one of the big ones that we're looking into is sole proprietorship. So one of the limitations for SMS in general is it requires an EIn, especially for a local number. So you have to have some kind of tax id, you have to be incorporated an LLC, and a lot of our customers and a lot of just the market in general, they don't have that. If I'm running a small mom and pop Etsy shop, for example, well, I'm not going to incorporate. I'm just going to sell my goods on Etsy. If I'm doing something in a local swap meet, there's not really a reason for me to be a corporation. I don't really need to be a limited liability company. It's a lot of hassle for nothing that does limit you into what you have access to. And so we're actually exploring an option to look into being allowed to send sole proprietor messages, having our sole proprietors and having just the sole proprietors in general both new to the franchise or just our existing customers giving them this additional channel that they wouldnt have access to otherwise, thats a big one for us.
Dave Charest: Cool. And I think thats just to point out when were talking about compliance and legalities of it. It is a little bit different from the SMS channel because youre working with mobile carriers and all of that type of thing. Thats one of those things that you might not even think about. Thats like oh, thats a thing that I need to have or do and as youre saying a lot of people dont have that. Hannah, anything else you wanted to add as we're closing up here?
Hannah: Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing that I'm always looking for is I want to hear from people what they want. I'm always happy to be the person to advocate for something being prioritized or built out. If it's something that our customers really need and want and we have a good use case behind it and we're able to do it. So I know we're planning on linking a few form in here so that we can learn more from the folks who are listening, but I always encourage folks like call us up. We're one of the companies that have a support team for a reason. We want to hear from you. We want to make sure that we're building out what you guys need and what you guys want. So that's always my, my shameless plug. Tell me what you want and I will do everything I can to get it for you.
Dave Charest: Awesome. Thank you both for being here today. I'll include a link to that feedback form. Feel free to like, yeah, reach out as Hannah said and check that form out if that's the way you want to do it or pick up the phone and call us. But let us know if you have questions. We'll include some other resources for you in the show notes as well. If you're thinking about it, I should say it's an add on to your constant contact package. And so it's a small monthly fee to be able to do this and it's a great opportunity to try some new things and see how you can reach your customers. So be sure to check that out. And Zach, Hannah, thank you so much for being here today.
Hannah: Thanks, Dave.
Zack: Hey, thanks so much, Dave.
Dave Charest: Well, friend, time to recap some items for you as you may be thinking about how to make SMS work for you. Number one, get permission. Just like email, you don't want to just add people to your text marketing list even if you already have their mobile numbers. It's all about getting people to opt in. Give them a good reason to sign up. Number two, get creative. You don't just have to use text marketing for discounts. Hannah's example of the salon that offers to let people know when there's been a cancellation in the schedule is brilliant. What can you offer that feels helpful and something people would want to get via SMS? And lastly, be timely and exclusive. This is where the text channel really shines. You've got almost instant access to someone on a device that they have with them at all times. Take advantage of that. Give those people access to something you dont offer anywhere else. Think of something like a flash sale for example. Alright, so heres your action item for today. If youre not already, give text marketing a try. Plans start at $10 a month. Get started and then send an email to your existing email contacts and ask them to join your SMS program. Then make a plan to try something new at least once a month. Not sure what to do? You can give us a call. We're here to help. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Be a Marketer podcast. If you have questions or feedback I'd love to hear from you. You can email me directly at dave.charest@constantcontact.com. If you did enjoy today's episode, please take a moment to leave us a review. Your honest feedback will help help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. Well friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.