Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
New episodes on Thurdays! 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, as he invites small business leaders just like you and industry experts to share their stories, challenges, and tips for finding time to be a marketer!
Today on episode 55, it's another Ask Dave episode, and I'm answering your questions about purchase lists and constant contact. This is the be a marketer podcast.
Kelsi:Be a marketer.
Dave:I'm your host, 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 how to find the time to be a marketer. Remember friend, you can be a marketer. And at Constant Contact, we're here to help. Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining us for another episode of the Be A Marketer podcast.
Dave:That's right. I said us again because who's here with me today? Kelsi.
Kelsi:It is Kelsi. I'm happy to be here again.
Dave:Kelsi, good to see you. We are actually coming at you from the Constant Contact office in Waltham, Massachusetts today.
Kelsi:Yeah. It's nice to actually have the conversation in person in your face.
Dave:It changes this thing completely, doesn't it? Yeah. Because we're so used to looking at people in screens when we do these, and we're using a little bit of a different technical setup to do this as well. And so we don't have, like, the new usual, like, headphones and microphone. And it's like, oh, we're talking to people in front of us.
Dave:So it's it's very fun. So hopefully, this will still work out pretty good for us. I know we have a question today.
Kelsi:Yeah. We do.
Dave:What do we got going on?
Kelsi:We got a question from Sue today. They're a vice president of a professional helicopter appraisal business.
Dave:Oh.
Kelsi:Think like Kelly Blue Book, but for helicopters. So Dave, Sue's question is, can I import purchase contacts into Constant Contact? I do not have their permission.
Dave:Okay. Well, couple of things here. 1st, helicopters. Who would have thunk it? I've, you know, you don't really think about that much, but I I guess, you know, people buy and sell helicopters.
Dave:And so much like any other vehicle, I guess, there is a market for that. So this question is almost answered itself. So I'm gonna say the short answer here is, can I import purchase contact So I'm gonna say the short answer here is can I import purchase contacts into Constant Contact? Short answer is no. At the end of the day, that's typically against our terms and conditions just in terms of doing that.
Dave:Why? Because email marketing is really all about permission. There are laws and regulations involved in terms of, you know, the GDPR and castle and all of these different things depending on where you are. But ultimately, at the end of the day, the reason why email marketing works so well and why we recommend it to so many people is because it's a permission based marketing channel. Right?
Dave:So typically people are raising their hand to say, yes, they wanna hear from you. And so whether that's implied permission or expressed permission, implied means that you have some type of existing business relationship with them. Or express means they're actually like filling out a form and saying, yes, send me emails or raising their hand in that way, as I mentioned. And so if you are collecting email addresses, and particularly we'll talk a little bit about these purchase lists, but basically what'll happen is if we have ways we're monitoring this all the time because ultimately we wanna make sure more of our customers' emails get to where they're supposed to go. And when bad actors are doing things, and I'm not saying that, you know, Sue here is a bad actor, but it ultimately leads to things that look a little weird, right, in your account.
Dave:And so typically, we'll flag that account for review if we're seeing a lot of addresses added that don't look like they're permission based addresses. And so the reason this is important is because if you start sending to people that really don't expect to hear from you so Kelsey, I'll ask you, you know, if you get an email from someone, what is your typical reaction if you're not really sure what it is? It's one thing if it's like a personal email, but it's another if you're getting like these marketing related emails from people. What is your typical what do you do with those emails typically?
Kelsi:If it's something that I'm not familiar with, I most likely would probably just delete it. Yep. My the open rate probably wouldn't be there for me if it's something that I don't identify. I honestly would probably just delete the email without even opening.
Dave:Yeah. So great. Right? So typically, I would say, yes. We either are deleting because we don't recognize it at all, which means we're not opening or engaging with the email at all, which are signals that we wanna have seen that will help us get better open rates and be a better sender in the future.
Dave:The other piece of it is sometimes, and I know I do this sometimes too, particularly when I get, like, why are you adding me to this list? Right? I get all indignant about it. And I'm like, alright, I'm just gonna mark this as spam because you haven't asked for my permission to email these marketing related emails. Right?
Dave:And so you're basically setting up this scenario where you end up ruining your reputation a little bit, both in terms of a sender and just as a business because people are then associating you with someone who is, you know, not asking permission to send things, which is going against the whole purpose of purchasing this list to begin with. Right? And so that's the other thing. I mean, technically, is there anything wrong with purchasing a list? No.
Dave:Right? So you could actually purchase that list and maybe go through it manually and start to email those people through your personal email account and, you know, start to see if they maybe wanna join your marketing list. But, again, the problem here is that most of the time you're gonna find that the people on those lists aren't really that great in terms of the contacts that you're gonna have. So there's really no way for you to verify whether the names on that list or the addresses are accurate for 1. You have really no idea how people have acquired those lists.
Dave:And sometimes you'll have people that will sign up to say like, sure, you can send me these marketing emails from my partners, but they don't really know what they're signing up for. So again, you run this risk of somebody sending those emails out and then maybe they did opt in for that, but they're not actually opting in for your business specifically. Right? So they're not gonna understand that or recognize that as they come through. And so at the end of the day, what this means is that you actually invest money into this thing, which ends up wasting a lot of time and resources on something that's more likely to have this negative impact on your business rather than this positive thing, which is what we want to do.
Dave:So what do we recommend people do? Build their lists organically. Right? So we wanna make sure that people are using the sign up tools included with your Constant Contact account, for example, and grow that list in that way. So you want to, you know, typically when people register for a list or subscribe, they are doing it because they want some type of discount.
Dave:They want access to some content that is specific. So like in this use case, let's say, okay, maybe there's a discount on, an appraisal service that you could offer. Maybe it's access to the top 10 helicopters with the best resale value. I don't know. That seems like a funny sentence to say.
Dave:I don't know anything about the industry, but, like, that's the type of thing. Right? Where you're, oh, somebody might be interested in that because if they're in this world, they would be curious as to find out what that information is. So that's an example of the type of content that you could offer. And then people also just read subscribe to emails because they wanna keep up to date on things that they wanna know about.
Dave:And so if this is something that is changing regularly and those prices are changing on the or there are different factors that people need to know about in order to know, like where they are in terms of a resale or purchasing something used, whatever the case may be. Those are the types of things that you can put forward in order to get people and entice people to sign up for that list. The other thing is to obviously take advantage of the different ways that you can actually collect those email addresses. So on your website, for example, Constant Contact has forms that you can use. This includes popups, fly out.
Dave:So things that, you know, pop up on the screen or things that come out to the side of the screen. Also, banners that pop up from the bottom or the top of your web page. And then also inline forms, which means you're actually embedding the form right within a page on your website. Online, of course, another way to think about using something to help you here would be the signup landing page that you can create. So you can link to that from you can share that on different social channels.
Dave:You can link to that from your email signature, for example, things like that that allow people to then enter their information. And then the other thing is if you're gonna be going to events, trade shows, things like that, or, you know, places where your potential audience members may be, you can, of course, use QR codes today to point people to that landing page as well to get them to sign up for your list. So those are some things I would think through there. It may be tempting. If you own a small business, someone is gonna reach out to you to see if you wanna purchase a list.
Dave:It seems like a shortcut, but at the end of the day, it ends up hurting you as we've mentioned. So the big thing here is 1, remember that those purchase lists are against Constant Contact's terms of service. So you don't wanna be doing anything like that because that will end up, you know, flagging your account and kind of put you on pause for a while, which again, you probably don't wanna do. They can hurt your reputation more than they can help it. And ultimately at the end of the day, you wanna build that list organically with Constant Contact's sign up tools.
Dave:So, Sue, I hope that helps. And, thanks for sending in your question. And I just wanna send a reminder out here for everyone is that really make sure that you're always looking to grow your list so that you have those people that are interested in your business or your organization, and you're able to influence whether or not they're gonna come back or or help you do the things that you need to do to build your organization of business. So I'm gonna make sure that we include some of those resources in the show notes for you so you can do that. Kelsi, if someone has a marketing question for me, how do they send that in?
Kelsi:Well, I'm so glad you asked. If you're a Constant Contact customer you can head right on over to the constant contact community to post your question for an upcoming ask Dave episode. We'll also include the link in the show notes as well.
Dave:Awesome. Kelsi, thank you, and thank you listeners.
Kelsi:Thank you so much.
Dave:We'll see you next time. I hope you've 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.
Dave:Your honest feedback will 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.