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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!
On today's episode, you'll hear from a communications leader who proves that thoughtful, personalized outreach can be just as powerful as any big marketing tactic. This is the Be a Marketer podcast.
Dave Charest:My name is Dave, 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:Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining us for another episode of the Be a Marketer podcast. You know her. You love her. Kelsey Carter's in the studio. Kelsi.
Kelsi Carter:Hi, Dave.
Dave Charest:Kelsi Carter. How are you, Kelsei?
Kelsi Carter:I'm doing great. How are you?
Dave Charest:I'm doing fantastic as well.
Kelsi Carter:Love to hear it.
Dave Charest:It's funny how sometimes somebody captured I think we were sharing this image, and I shared this on LinkedIn recently, but somebody captured an image of me, like, writing on the on the whiteboard. And and a lot of times, I do a lot of our planning for be a marketer on the whiteboard. And we had just kind of had to make some changes. Right? Our best laid plans often get foiled, and we have to kind of move things around and get things going.
Dave Charest:And I feel like we've been in a situation where we had to do this a couple of times, but we get to this place where we're like, there it is. The schedule. It's great. And then we're like, oh, we're gonna move this around. We gotta change that.
Dave Charest:And we kinda even when we kinda bake that in, it becomes a little bit different than what we're expecting. But I think it's through that process of kinda doing that we recognize or or look for a little I wanna call them cheat codes in many ways. Right? Where, oh, you know what? We realized what we can do to kind of account for those types of things happening.
Kelsi Carter:Yeah. We to think of ways to make it a little, like, less stressful for us
Dave Charest:Right.
Kelsi Carter:While still accommodating the change.
Dave Charest:Of course. Yeah. And then one of the things was, oh, let's remove episode numbers from the podcast episodes themself because with them in there, like, because I used on today's episode, you know, on the episode one thirty seven, if we recorded that and then we had to move it, well, I'd have to go back and record that op it became like a whole process. And so this is why we don't have include those numbers in the episodes anymore or on the artwork, for example, because it allows us the flexibility to kind of move things around and and change things around. And and I think it's really right?
Dave Charest:It's all about that. And so I don't know. I I think it happens to all of us in many ways. Right? Like, we particularly, I I guess, when you think about marketing, right, especially with a small team, it's really about how you adjust and still make everything kind of feel cohesive.
Dave Charest:That's that's a lot of kind of, I think, what our conversation about is today. Right? And so, Kelsi, I'll go to you. Tell us about our guest today.
Kelsi Carter:Of course. Today, we're joined by Gloria Hammond. She's the director of communications at the National Golf Course Owners Association or NGCOA Canada based in Ottawa. Gloria's been with the organization since 02/2006. She started in events before moving into her current communications role in 2018.
Kelsi Carter:She leads a small but mighty team focused on connecting with golf course owners and operators across Canada and helping them grow their businesses through advocacy, education, research, and marketing.
Dave Charest:Yeah. So Gloria's story really is is all about aligning people, tools, and the messages. She really balances that strategic planning with responsiveness, tradition with innovation, and national communications with regional relevance. Right? There's a lot of things kinda going on here.
Dave Charest:And it's not just about marketing. It's really about, in that way, bringing everything together to serve the greater mission. And so in our conversation today, you'll hear how Gloria plans and executes national campaigns with a a three person team, the strategic way that NGCOA Canada uses segmentation to communicate with different regions and roles, and how Gloria uses Constant Contact and AI to save time and boost campaign performance. So let's go to Gloria as she shares how unexpected career shift led her to NGCOA Canada let's and eventually into a role where she found her passion.
Gloria Hammond:I hadn't done marketing prior to coming to the NGCOA Canada, I was actually in events. And I was a director of operations for totally different industry music. And a friend of mine, was looking for a change, and a friend of mine was working at NGCOA Canada and brought me in to interview for a completely different role than where I ended up. And I just really the moment I walked in the door at the association, there was just a feeling of coming home. I don't know if you've ever had that feeling, but it felt like it was the fit for me.
Gloria Hammond:And so I did start with them in a very different role. I was in an events role originally in business development role, but my passion really lies where I am right now in the director of communications role. So shortly after joining, I made the pitch. You know, this is where I'd like to be, and it happened. And I've been there for a total of eighteen years now.
Gloria Hammond:And Jeff, starting out as the manager and then moving into the director role, it's really where my passion lies between crafting the right words to get the message across to working with our brand team to make sure graphics and images and messaging and everything all comes together and pieces together to get the message to our membership and resonate with our membership. Anywhere my passion lies.
Dave Charest:Do you have any involvement in golf at all? Are you a golfer yourself? Is that part of the allure of it as well or no?
Gloria Hammond:Well, it's interesting. I'd never played around golf before I started working with the association. And, you know, they were very generous and provided some lessons for me. I remember the first time that I swung a golf club and actually connected with the ball. And it's not typical on a golf course to see someone jump up and down and yell woo hoo, but I did it.
Gloria Hammond:It's not the typical etiquette there, but I do enjoy golf. And am I great at it? Absolutely not. I love getting out with friends, my colleagues, and it's a great way to spend some time outside and have an enjoyable time.
Dave Charest:You mentioned starting in an events role and having an events background and coming into this. So I guess I'm curious about a couple of things. What did you find that you took from that role into this one? And I guess, like I mean, what did you discover? I I gotta feel you did learn some things from a marketing perspective as well, like, in making that transition.
Gloria Hammond:Yeah. So I think from the events side, really, I understand how to get from a to z in terms of whether it's a concert or a trade show, what steps do you need to take to go from A to Z? And then I take that into my marketing role that if someone comes to me with an idea of we're doing a conference. So we do an annual conference. So we're doing a conference and our goal is we need to get registrations.
Gloria Hammond:So to me, that's one facet of the marketing for that particular event. So I just use sort of the same procedures that I would use if I was doing an event. I sit down and I'm at do I need to do to get us from zero registrations to 200 registrations? And I look at it a little bit analytically and a little bit in an event planning process that when you start your event, you're trying to figure out, I'll just use the concerts that I used to work on. Who's gonna be your performers?
Gloria Hammond:So for our conference, who do we have education wise? What are the elements of the conference? How am I going to work that into my marketing plan? Sort of visuals can I use? What really drives it is what is the return for anyone coming to this conference.
Gloria Hammond:And then I figure out how those all fit together and craft a communications plan and work with our brand manager to get some designs and and imagery to go with that.
Dave Charest:So I'm curious then, what do you find most challenging thing about your role today then?
Gloria Hammond:An overall communications role. We're a small team, and we do a lot of things. So we do centralized communication. So if there's something that has to go out in British Columbia and something that has to go out in Atlantic Canada, it's our team working through that and balancing the needs of the association with the needs of the members. Our members don't want to receive 10 communications in one day, right?
Gloria Hammond:Probably get us to send 10 or or even 15. And it's balancing what we need to communicate and and what we need to achieve and what the needs of our members are.
Dave Charest:So you mentioned the small team that you have. So how big is that team and who's involved with helping you with the marketing?
Gloria Hammond:So the team directly in the communications department is myself as director of communications. We have a brand manager, and we have a oh, and she's gonna really knock me for this because we just changed her title. We have a coordinator. I will do it that way. We have a coordinator in the department as well.
Gloria Hammond:So, the three of us work closely together to execute all of our campaigns. And then we have our team across the country as well that I work with. So, right now, we have seven regional directors, and then we have some national directors as well that we work with on different campaigns.
Dave Charest:Gotcha. So talk to me a little bit about, I guess, a marketing standpoint, who is the audience that you're trying to reach? Who are you communicating with? And I guess as it tell me a little bit about I guess there's probably if I'm understanding correctly, there's probably two ways that you have to think of things, right, just in terms of, like, bringing new members in to the organization, but then also then communicating and activating those members. Right?
Gloria Hammond:That's right. Yeah.
Dave Charest:Yeah. So tell me a little bit about that.
Gloria Hammond:Yeah. We actually have a couple of different audiences. So we have our members, as you just mentioned. We also have industry partners that we communicate with. So on the member side, we really focus on communicating with them the return on their membership, making sure they're taking advantage of everything that we offer to them.
Gloria Hammond:On the partnership side, we're communicating with our partners on how to connect with our members. Because that's really what we're trying to do is, from an association standpoint, engage the members and get them involved in everything that we offer, which is to their benefit, but also connecting our partners that we work with to our members. So we'll communicate with our partners about events we have coming up, ways that they can get in front of owners and operators across the country. We do segment as well. So we may send communications that are specific to a particular department at a golf course.
Gloria Hammond:So we have programs that are specifically for turf teams. So we'll send to, like, a superintendent or a greenskeeper or that team, general manager. So we do segment out our communications as well so that we're not sending the chef a program for fertilizers.
Dave Charest:Gotcha.
Gloria Hammond:Because you wouldn't wanna feed fertilizers to your your girlfriend. That wouldn't be a good thing.
Dave Charest:So talk me through a little bit. Like, what does that planning process look like for you that are there goals that come down to you and then you think of, like, how do we activate against those goals? And then you meet with your team and then you start to put a plan. What does that process look like? Walk me through that a little bit.
Gloria Hammond:We do strategic planning sessions, and we meet with each of the individual departments. So we'll have a department business development department. So we will meet with that team and find out what their goals are. Is it member awareness? Is it new programming?
Gloria Hammond:Is it what's their goal? Who do they need to focus on for the year? And we'll try and plan our calendar in advance so that we know every month, you know, we're focusing on two partners in the business development department and what the goal is for the communications. Typically, for a business development department, the goal is always more members using programs and properly communicating with them what their return is, whether it's saving off invoice, whether it's, you know, you'll get a rebate check. Those types of deliverables is really what they're looking for.
Gloria Hammond:On the event side, we do pretty much the same events year over year. So it's meeting with the different members of the team that are running events. What are your dates? When are they gonna be? And it's supporting them in their registration efforts.
Gloria Hammond:So I will have a conversation with a regional director who's running a tournament and I'll say, what's your budget? How many participants do you need in your tournament to consider it a success? So that's one metric that they use. That's their primary metric is meeting their budget. And then from my standpoint, it's conversion.
Gloria Hammond:So when I'm doing a campaign on those tournaments, how many of the recipients are being converted into registered participants?
Dave Charest:Are you reporting back to folks? I mean, obviously, they're getting some piece of it, but I'm sure you're reporting back to folks too in terms of the tracking and and that type of thing.
Gloria Hammond:Absolutely.
Dave Charest:What do you see as challenges or actually, before we get there, I actually wanna come back to, is there a seasonality to how you're planning? Like, is there a particular time of year you start figuring this out, and do you have, like, do you have check ins on along the way? Or, like, what does your calendar look like?
Gloria Hammond:It's a little bit fluid
Dave Charest:Okay.
Gloria Hammond:In the department. So we don't meet, say, January and know where we're gonna be up until December. So January is probably looking at what we need for the spring. And then late spring, early summer, it's okay. What do we need through the summer and into early fall?
Gloria Hammond:And then typically in the fall of the year, our biggest from an event standpoint, our biggest initiative is our conference. So I preplan that every year of what we're gonna do, when we're gonna do it, what's our messaging gonna look like. In January of every year, so you can see how I say we're a little bit fluid. So in January, I know I do a calendar. We do a monthly newsletter.
Gloria Hammond:It's always the first Wednesday of the month that always goes at 07:00. So I do a calendar in January every year and I share it with our entire team. So everything that I know is going to happen, I put in that calendar and I share with the team. So we have monthly newsletter. We have those business development communications I already spoke about.
Gloria Hammond:We have research communications that we send out on a monthly basis. So all of those things are compiled into a communications calendar and delivered out to our team so that they know exactly when things are happening.
Dave Charest:Got it. Well, when you start thinking about particularly where you are right now in the year and what you've kind of set as goals for yourself and the team, what would you say are some of the challenges that you've come up against in terms of just trying to reach those goals?
Gloria Hammond:I think bandwidth is certainly a challenge. We do have a lot of information that we need to get out to our membership or to our partners. And being a small team, sometimes bandwidth becomes a factor. We distribute the work amongst the three of us in the department, but sometimes it's how do we streamline things a little lower or how can we make these communications easier to execute? So developing templates and using those templates to help formulate what the messaging is going to look like between using Constant Contact for our email marketing and websites, being multiple websites that we depending on whether it's an event or if it's overall association business, like multiple websites, we have multiple social media accounts.
Gloria Hammond:So one of our challenges certainly is bandwidth. And I say that, but we never seem to get into a situation where we're not able to execute. I don't know if that makes sense, but I would say one of the challenges is bandwidth. Another challenge is things change. So you have a plan of what's going out, say, for the next thirty days and something happens.
Gloria Hammond:A new initiative has been developed or a new partner has just you know, suddenly been signed and we have a busy calendar already and knowing the importance of sharing that information with our membership, we have to find where that fits in without over communicating with the members.
Dave Charest:Right. I gotcha. Obviously, this is something, I mean, even a constant contact, right, you run into. Do you end up leaving some, for lack of appropriate word, I guess, like, some wiggle room to be able to handle, like, when something like that comes up? Or how do you plan for that?
Gloria Hammond:I try. Yeah. I have we we have I mean, you know what constant conduct. Overcommunication means your recipients toot out. So we've done a lot of looking at ideal time, ideal day, ideal number of communication to consent without losing the interest of the membership.
Gloria Hammond:So my goal is to never do more than three a week. And three might sound like a lot, but that seems to be our threshold. So I make sure when I'm planning that maybe I'm not at that three for each week so that if a surprise comes up, I've got a little wiggle room.
Dave Charest:Gotcha. Gotcha. And I wanna get into a little bit more, but I'm just curious maybe before we get into, like, some specific things about how often you're sending and things like that. But can you just give us a sense of as you're marketing the business, walk us through kind of what items you are doing. So, obviously, you've got Constant Contact.
Dave Charest:You're using the newsletter, and we'll we'll get into more specifics about that in a moment. But, like, what else are you doing to market the business or the organization, I should say?
Gloria Hammond:For marketing, we do use social media quite a bit. We have a trade publication that we send out to all of our members for free. We publish that four times a year. We do consumer I probably shouldn't put that one in there because it's not really marketing our business. It's helping our members market their businesses.
Dave Charest:But I would argue allowing them to see the value in what their membership. Right? So in many ways, still
Gloria Hammond:still marketing. All out of We do consumer golf shows across the country. So we have two in person. And as a result of COVID, we have a virtual one as well, which we didn't have before that happened. We had to pivot and make sure that we still had a presence with those events.
Gloria Hammond:We do take a kid to the course. We do a golfer's bread book. We don't do traditional advertising. Our regional teams or our regional directors will get invited to speak at colleges and universities. We stay connected with other associations in Canada, but we don't do the traditional paid advertising for our association.
Gloria Hammond:We do a lot of feet on the street. So our regional team during the summers, they spend a lot of time in their cars going out and meeting with not just members, but potential members across the country. So that's a big part of our philosophy is we're very personal. When you call our office, you're getting a person. You're not getting, you know, an automated service.
Dave Charest:Gotcha. So I'm curious about the virtual piece of it. So, obviously, right, yeah, 2020 comes around. We all have to kinda make these changes to things. But I also think it's interesting when you find I guess, you still do those.
Dave Charest:And so what was it about doing that that you're like, oh, we need to keep these. Right? Because these are still a valuable tool for us. So so what did you learn through that process?
Gloria Hammond:So with our COVID, I feel like COVID's a bad word.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Gloria Hammond:When COVID hit, we had three in person golf expos across the country. And we switched to virtual out of necessity and realized, well, if we're doing a virtual event, maybe we can do the entire country. So we tried it and it was very successful. Golfers came. Golf courses wanted to exhibit.
Gloria Hammond:So we were like, wonder after COVID if it will still be that way. And we still in in two of our markets, we knew we had to go back to in person. It was just that was the appetite in those markets. They wanted the in person. But the remainder of the country, we still had our members who were interested in participating.
Gloria Hammond:It was very good for them. They could do marketing without having to pack up and do a trade show booth in person. So from their standpoint, they saw the benefit to participating in something like that. And our marketing efforts for that particular initiative, we do a lot of online advertising for that and people were coming back. Our big draw is we do an auction, a golf auction.
Gloria Hammond:So that was drawing the golfers in. So whether they actually had a physical location to go to or not, they were still being drawn to the golf auction and the website, and the marketing benefit that our members were seeing from that connection, that virtual connection continued.
Dave Charest:So I love that you're doing all of these. Basically, those are a lot of channels and a lot of things that you're using that kind of together help you kinda reach what it is that you're trying to accomplish. But if you think about what has been most effective for you from a marketing channel perspective, what would you say has helped you most kinda reach your goals and reach your membership?
Gloria Hammond:From my standpoint, it's and I'm not just saying this because you're with Constant Contact. That is my primary tool for communicating with our membership. Our website as well. But we use Constant Contact to drive traffic to our website. So we don't put everything in the kitchen sink in our messages.
Gloria Hammond:We put links to our website. So for me, reaching the audience that I need to reach with the tools that I have available, that for me has been my biggest success. And behind the scenes, I can go in and I can see immediately after I send a campaign, I can go in and I can see exactly what the engagement is from the membership on that communication. And it's so interesting to be able to go in and see that two minutes after a communication has sent, someone's already opening it and engaging with it. So my goal is to engage the membership, to inform the membership, to get the membership to take action.
Gloria Hammond:And I can clearly see with the behind the scenes tools what's happening. So we gather data for research reports and we do that on a monthly basis. Two minutes after that communication goes out, I have my first survey response. And it's never just one, but I see my very first survey response come in. So for me, it's a very effective way of connecting with the membership.
Dave Charest:When you think about where you are and having the longevity you've had with the organization as well, how have you had to adapt, I wanna say, to things kind of moving more and more online and and being more social media driven? Like, talk me through that a little bit. Have you had to change some of the ways you do things?
Gloria Hammond:Yes. I'll be honest. For myself, I struggled a little bit with the transition to social media when social media really blew up, and and that became an expectation for businesses. I did. I struggled a little bit with that because it wasn't a traditional way of communicating with our membership.
Gloria Hammond:And how you communicate on social media is very different than how you communicate with, say, an email communication. So I did struggle with it and I had to learn how to really make sure that short pieces of text resonated and had the right messaging and was helping me to grow my following on social media. We were lucky. We hired my colleague, Kaylee, and she's very, very good at that world. So we balance each other very well.
Gloria Hammond:That's one thing I would say about our department is we're very well balanced in terms of skill set. She really excels in that world. And I know that that's not my strongest suit. So I did find that transition a little more difficult than some of the other transitions that I've seen over the years, like mobile becoming such a big deal. So transitioning from people are just reading on a big screen anymore.
Gloria Hammond:They're reading on tiny phones. Well, phones are much bigger now. But tiny phones, you know? And how do I write my messaging so that when it's received on a desktop and it's received on a mobile device or even my website, How do I present the information on my website so that when you see it on a big screen and you see it on a small screen that it has the same impact? So learning how to really have bold headlines to capture interest and ensuring that there's always that easy to click through to get more information if you're interested.
Gloria Hammond:And making those transitions really gave me a greater insight into what are our members engaging with? What headlines resonate with them? What is it that I'm saying that makes them click? And what is it that I'm not saying and I'm not getting the click? So for me, those are some of the big changes I've seen in my eighteen years, the way websites are built now with everything has to be mobile responsive.
Gloria Hammond:I feel, you know, and I have this conversation with my colleagues all the time that it feels like with mobile coming into play, that websites have taken a step back. They're now you're really just you're scrolling. You need to allow for people to just scroll, scroll, scroll. Whereas before mobile really took off, you could have, like, short lots of click throughs, lots of menu buttons now, like your menu buttons. You really have to condense your your menu buttons so that when you're on mobile, you it fits on the screen.
Gloria Hammond:And, anyways, it's it's just been interesting, and it feels like we've stepped back in time with how we do our websites now.
Dave Charest:Yeah. It's interesting. Right? Well, I'd curious from your perspective then. How do I guess all of these kind of you know, you mentioned your website.
Dave Charest:You mentioned social media. You mentioned email, of course. You mentioned, you know, the live events. But, like, how do you approach using them all together, right, if that makes sense, right, to, like, get the message across. Like, how do you play with that?
Gloria Hammond:Whereas in the past, it was kind of you could do a little bit of siloing, but you can't do that anymore. It all needs to fit together, and it all needs to work together. So whenever we're doing a campaign of any kind, we make sure that we're not just thinking email. What's this going to look like in email? What's this going to say in email?
Gloria Hammond:It needs to tie with the website. So I'll talk specifically right now about new partnerships. So when we announced a new partner for the association, we don't ever just look at, what are we going to say in the email? We look at, okay, are we going to present this on our website? And what's the imagery going to look like on the website?
Gloria Hammond:And how is that going to tie into what we're saying in the communication and the visuals that we use in the communication? And then on top of that layered in is social media. What's the look gonna be on social media? And what's the the verbiage gonna be on social media? And they all have to tie together and and have a consistent look and a consistent message and not necessarily using the same words or saying exactly the same thing, but just how do they all fit together?
Gloria Hammond:And we work really, really well with our brand manager to help piece things together. Haley, who I already mentioned, she does really well at looking at what we need for the website, what we need for social media, and how our email communication is pulled together so that we're using same color, same consistency so that it really looks like a a full fledged campaign and not just an email here and the website looks like this and social media is completely different.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious. I mean, obviously, you mentioned earlier just bandwidth being an issue. Mhmm.
Dave Charest:And I think even being a dedicated communications team, right, that that still becomes an issue when you even think of, like, a like, a business owner doing kind of all of the things. Right? I think it's still relative. And so my question for you is, I mean, how do you approach getting this stuff done when it comes to marketing? Are you blocking time in your calendar?
Dave Charest:Like, how does that all kinda work out for you to actually get the work done?
Gloria Hammond:Yeah. I have to do that. I have to say Monday is this. Tuesday is that. I also really embrace AI.
Dave Charest:Tell me about that.
Gloria Hammond:Yeah. It's the newest, greenest thing on the market. I've really embraced AI now. I've been working with it ever since it came on the scene. I was like, okay.
Gloria Hammond:This is the next big thing. This is like mobile. Eventually, everyone's gonna be using it, And I need to know how. I need to know how best to use it. I don't use it to write things for me, but I will use it for inspiration.
Gloria Hammond:So in the past, you spend a lot of time when you're marketing coming up with the ideas. What a visual should I use with that? Or is my catchy headline as good as I think it is? So I use AI to help with those things. I might have a communication that I'm doing and I want it to have a particular look and feel.
Gloria Hammond:So I'll give a prompt of I'm doing a conference email, and we have a specific theme. Our conference this year has a really cool theme. It's Mission Possible, playing off of the Mission Impossible franchise. You know? And I'll come up with my headlines, and then I'm like, I don't really have a mission possible feel.
Gloria Hammond:And I'll just use AI to help me kinda get inspired. How can I tweak this? How can I change this? What kind of image could I create to go with this? And I don't use the AI to create those things for me, but I use AI to inspire me if that makes sense.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Absolutely. It does. I think that's I think that we've kind of landed on this, like, the generative piece of AI is kind of like the hot topic, but I think there are so many other use cases for it that are actually a lot more interesting than that. Not that the generative piece isn't because many people I mean, you're in a communications role.
Dave Charest:Right? So let's assume that you feel comfortable writing. Right? You feel comfortable with the creative aspect of that. But I can see where that's there's a true value in for people that maybe don't have that level of confidence, right, in terms of communicating with the written word.
Dave Charest:And so I think that's gonna be really valuable. I'm curious. I mean, have you played around with any of the AI tools within the Constant Contact account?
Gloria Hammond:I have. Quite a bit.
Dave Charest:So tell me a little bit about what you've done there then.
Gloria Hammond:Oh, goodness. I I'm looking for a particular image, and I just can't find it. I'll go in and describe what I'm looking for and ask to Jogrant. Sometimes, yes, sometimes no. Like with any generative AI.
Gloria Hammond:Right? It's all in how you craft your prompt, and I'm still learning how to properly craft the prompts.
Dave Charest:What brought you to Constant Contact? I know there's, like, a time frame when you started with us, and so you're around. Were you responsible for kind of helping choose the tool? Yeah. Talk us through that.
Dave Charest:What brought you to Constant Contact, and what made you choose us?
Gloria Hammond:We had a partner that used Constant Contact.
Dave Charest:Okay.
Gloria Hammond:And they were speaking at our conference and invited someone from Constant Contact. And I listened in on the session and had a very short conversation with the person that was there for constant contact at the time. And I really liked everything I was hearing in the session. And so I said, I think I want to move to Constant Contact. And I can't remember this lady's name, but set me up with like a trial account.
Gloria Hammond:And I played around a little bit. And I said, yeah, I really wanna go here. And so we did. And we've been there ever since.
Dave Charest:Amazing. Tell me a little bit about that experience. What has the constant contact experience been like for you?
Gloria Hammond:I like that it's so easy. Whether I'm starting from scratch on building a campaign or whether I'm going into some of the templates that are available in Constant Contact and just manipulating them to be what I need them to be, I just love the ease of the drag and drop. I know that when I started with Constant Contact and where Constant Contact is today is very different. Things have improved so much over the years with the different tools that get added and the ability to change things and manipulate things. So I would say that one big thing is that the ease of everything.
Gloria Hammond:Like, it's just so simple to pull a campaign together. And then I really like the reporting and analytics part of the back end of it. I use that so much to help drive changes in our campaigns in what we're doing, whether it's looking at the message that I sent out that I thought would convert 10 new registrations and I get two. Why? What did I do wrong?
Gloria Hammond:What was clicked on? What wasn't my registration link? Was it clicked on? So was it not clear with my call to action? I really look at the reporting that Constant Contact offers.
Gloria Hammond:And I know that you've just added some new reporting tools, which I thought were very cool. Data for me tells the story. And if I'm not looking at the data, I'm not getting the full picture of how we're doing. You can't get to where you wanna be if you don't know where you're going or how to get there. And that's what the data does for me.
Gloria Hammond:It gives me a path.
Dave Charest:What would you say are the notable results that you've seen from using Constant Contact over the years?
Gloria Hammond:Well, I benchmark us against other associations, and I see that we are no. Just don't like to brag about yourself, but performing. We're we're outperforming. And I think a lot of, like, being able to look at that data and make adjustments and understand our audience. So for me, our open rate, when I look at our open rate, our average open rate, typically we sit around 45%.
Gloria Hammond:I know that that's very high for an association world or a member based association. So I know that's quite high. But depending on particular campaigns, some of our campaigns, have 65. So for me, that's when I see something like a 656% open rate. That really excites me.
Gloria Hammond:But then I'm like, well, what about the others and what can I do differently and how can I change and how can I adapt?
Dave Charest:Well, you mentioned you have a a monthly newsletter that's always a consistent time frame that goes out. But you're also I mean, you're sending I mean, quite regularly. I mean, you're you're sending almost daily in many instances too. So talk me through that, like, someone listening to me is, like, daily. Yeah.
Dave Charest:But I have to imagine based on some of the things that I've heard and even just looking I mean, you have, like, 875 lists within your account. I have to imagine that those are very targeted sends that you're sending out. Right? So talk me through the
Gloria Hammond:Yes.
Dave Charest:The thinking of it's not like you're sending to everybody every day, but you're thinking through and choosing messages to get out. Right? So talk me through that thinking.
Gloria Hammond:Yeah. So our association, sometimes we will send little messages in a single day. Generally, when that happens, it's because it's very segmented. So we may be sending to a group in BC and a group in Ontario. And because they're two totally separate groups, we can do two messages on one day.
Gloria Hammond:Or we can send daily messages, and sometimes we do. But again, it's all about the segmentation and the regionalization, I should say, more than the segmentation. Because we are servicing the entire country, there's different needs at different times of the year, the month, the week that we can accommodate because we are doing our communications.
Dave Charest:I love that. I think that's just a a great thing for people to hear too, right, in thinking through it like that is that when you are thinking about what you're doing, there are people on your list that although they have a similar interest, right, have different needs, have different timings that they need things, different interests that really does allow you to look at your overall list a little bit differently. You start thinking about what those groups are so you can more effectively communicate with them. So I love that that you're doing that. Is there is there anything in particular that you do from a a list growth perspective?
Dave Charest:I mean, how do you how do you get people on the list?
Gloria Hammond:Are you familiar with Castle?
Dave Charest:Yes.
Gloria Hammond:So it's the anti spam law
Dave Charest:Of course. Canada? Yes.
Gloria Hammond:For us, that's made it a little difficult on the nonmember side because so much of what we send would be considered a commercial message. So it's difficult for us from a list growth standpoint with the non members. With our membership, typically what we do is we'll communicate through other materials that they should be on our email list. We also have a sign up form in Constant Contact that we will share with new members. So, if we have a new member that joins us, we want to make sure that they start receiving our communications right away.
Gloria Hammond:As an association in Canada, the anti spam law allows us to communicate with all of the contacts on our membership list without having to get their explicit consent. It's little bit of a workaround that we have that allows us to communicate with all of our members. And because we're a member driven association, our membership list growth, we don't It's gonna sound so bad. We don't actively work on that because as someone joins, they join our list. Where we focus is we look at our list of unsubscribed.
Gloria Hammond:So we focus on that and we come up with a strategy of, okay, so Dave unsubscribed. Why did Dave unsubscribe? So what our strategy is we'll reach out to the regional director for that particular member in that particular contact. And we'll ask them to make an outreach on our behalf and say, we noticed you unsubscribed. We'd love to get you back on our list.
Gloria Hammond:Why did you unsubscribe? Did you do too many communications? Is there something we can do to change that? And to be honest, many, many times when we do that outreach, it's, oh gosh, I didn't even know I unsubscribed. I clicked something and didn't realize I did it.
Gloria Hammond:Please put me back on. Sometimes it's a there's a lot of turnover in golf sometimes. No longer in golf or sometimes I don't think I'm getting the right communication. So then we'll ask, what are you interested You know, what do you wanna hear from us? And we'll adjust accordingly.
Gloria Hammond:That's our list growth really is trying to pull back anyone that's left.
Dave Charest:Got it. When you think of just what you're doing, I mean, is there a favorite feature within Constant Contact that you really like?
Gloria Hammond:If I have to pick one, I think it's the ability the new design menu where I can go in and I can say, okay. All my headings are gonna be this size, this font, this color, and all my hyperlinks are gonna be this color. And all of that, being able to set it and forget it is great. That is one of my Like from a campaign building standpoint, that is one of my favorite features. And I didn't start using it right out of the gate.
Gloria Hammond:And I would manually go in, saw our newsletter. Right? We have all the same size headings, all the same color, blah, blah, blah. And if I'm copy pasting from another document, I'd have to go manually change the color, manually change the size. And then I finally clued in that I had this handy dandy tool over here.
Gloria Hammond:And I went in and I can set all my everything. And it just speeds things up.
Dave Charest:What would be your number one tip for someone else just getting started with a Constant Contact?
Gloria Hammond:I think I would give them the advice of meeting with the customer success team at Constant Contact. And that one call after using Constant Contact for all these years, that one call gave me new tips and tool to speed up and be more efficient at using Constant Contact. So that would be maybe one thing I would say. And the other thing I would say is utilize the templates. They are a great inspiration if you're just starting out and you're not really sure how to build a campaign or how to structure a campaign for maximum effect.
Gloria Hammond:There's some really good examples in there that you can take, and they're so easy to manipulate and edit.
Dave Charest:Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number one, segment your list for relevance and results. Gloria's team sends communications to different regions and roles within golf courses, like superintendents versus general managers. This lets them tailor messages to avoid email fatigue. Think about how you can segment your own list to better serve your audience's needs.
Dave Charest:Number two, use AI for inspiration, not replacement. Gloria doesn't let AI write for her, but she does use it to refine headlines, generate ideas, and get past creative blocks. If writing slows you down, consider using AI as your brainstorming partner rather than your ghost writer. Of course, Constant Contact's AI tools can help you here as well. Number three, let data guide your timing and strategy.
Dave Charest:From reviewing open times to analyzing which subject lines drive clicks, Gloria uses Constant Contact's reporting tools to make informed decisions. She even discovered that 7AM on Wednesdays is the best time for their newsletter. So don't guess. Use your data to drive smarter choices. So here's your action item for today.
Dave Charest:Review your email reporting in Constant Contact this week. Look at one of your most recent sends. When did most people open it? What links got clicked? Use those insights to adjust your send time, subject line, or layout next time.
Dave Charest:Small changes can make a big difference. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Be a Marketer podcast. Please take a moment to leave us a review. Just go to ratethispodcast.com/bam. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show.
Dave Charest:That's ratethispodcast.com/bam. Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.