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As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the Be a Marketer podcast! New episodes every Thursday!
On today's episode, you'll hear from a business owner that knows the money is in the list. This is the be a marketer podcast.
Dave Charest:My name is Dave Charest, director of small business success at Constant Contact, and I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing. And on this podcast, we'll explore what it really takes to market your business even if marketing's not your thing. No jargon, no hype, just real stories to inspire you and practical advice you can act on. So remember, friend, you can be a marketer. And at Constant Contact, we're here to help.
Dave Charest:Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining us for another episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. And hello to Kelsi Carter. Hi, Kelsi.
Kelsi Carter:Hello, Dave Charest. How are you doing?
Dave Charest:I'm doing fantastic. Thank you. As always, happy to have you here so we can talk about what we got going on today.
Kelsi Carter:As always, super happy to be here.
Dave Charest:So this is another episode in our series of Constant Contact community coaches joining us here. So who are we chatting with today?
Kelsi Carter:So today's guest is Melanie Diehl. She is the CEO and president of Melanie and Co Marketing Collective, which actually recently celebrated its 15th birthday when we recorded the episode. Melanie's also a certified constant contact partner and a constant contact community coach. So she really seems to do it all.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Amazing. So we got together with Melanie to just chat about list growth, specifically. But before we get into that, we actually learned a bit about her business as well.
Kelsi Carter:Yeah. Prior to her getting into marketing, she actually ran an interior design business for 25 years and then had an overhead crane business with her husband. So she's definitely no stranger to small businesses.
Dave Charest:An overhead crane business.
Kelsi Carter:I know.
Dave Charest:That sounds exciting. Her small business journey, of course, started many years ago after being laid off from her corporate job. So let's go to Melanie as she reflects on her small business beginnings.
Melanie Diehl:I learned a lot of lessons. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't grow up in a family of entrepreneurs, so I didn't know what I was doing. I've never heard of such a thing as a business plan or anything like that. I just was a girl with a sewing machine and some talent and a desire.
Melanie Diehl:So I went to business. I got busy sewing and making draperies and crookens and the soft goods and learned a lot of lessons. One of my first real paid jobs, I broke a window, so I had to pay for that, and walked away with making probably a loss on that job. But in those days, the Internet didn't exist. It was yellow pages and community bulletin boards and word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth is what really grew my business, the networking.
Melanie Diehl:That was kind of the marketing I did back in the early days, but it worked.
Dave Charest:Well, oddly enough. Right? I mean, a lot of the same things we still rely on today as small business owners, but there's more technology available to help us
Kelsi Carter:do that kind of at at a larger scale in many instances.
Dave Charest:As you've kind of transitioned between these different businesses, I'm sure you've learned a lot with each of them and
Kelsi Carter:as you come into your own consulting business.
Dave Charest:What do you love most about running your own business today?
Melanie Diehl:I love seeing the moments for my clients. I love seeing the victories that they have. I love my team, and I work really hard to support them so we can support our clients. I like to see them embracing new ideas and concepts and being open to trying new things because I think that's important. If we're gonna grow as business owners, we've got to be open to new concepts and not stuck in well, back in the day, we didn't do it that way.
Melanie Diehl:I love to to watch them be willing to grow as well.
Dave Charest:How big is your team today?
Melanie Diehl:Well, I have 5 on the team, including me. They're not all full time, though. So I have 2 core team members, and then I've got 2 part time team members that we're on call when I need them.
Dave Charest:Most challenging thing about running your business today?
Melanie Diehl:Things change so quickly, and I think it can be really challenging to stay on top of those changes and those trends. Also, one of the things that I see I struggled with it in the beginning, and I see a lot of my clients struggle with this too, especially when they're just getting started. I learned this lesson when I went to a conference. Don't charge less than market rate even when just starting out. And I didn't charge market rate for the longest time.
Melanie Diehl:And I think what happens then is that leads to burnout and it leads to all of these negative things that turn and kind of impact your business on a negative way. So that's one of the biggest lessons I learned is to know your worth and be willing to charge it because there's someone out there who's willing to pay for the premium service or product that you have to offer. And those are the people that you want for your clients and customers anyway. So know your worth and charge it. That's the probably the biggest lesson that I've I've learned in my 35 years of being in business.
Dave Charest:Well, I guess, how long have you been a Constant Contact certified partner now?
Melanie Diehl:For more than 10 years.
Dave Charest:More than 10 years. Love that. Thank you for that. And you're also a Constant Contact community coach now. Why don't you tell me a little bit about what that role entails?
Melanie Diehl:So this is a new program that's recently rolled out, and it's a lot of fun. There are a few of us who were invited to be part of the beta program of the community coaches, and we're really active in the the online community with constant contact customers. And these are people that may be new to the product, maybe they've been around the product for a while, and they're just really trying to grow their business and learn more. Learn more about marketing, learn more about gaming, learn more about landing pages and surveys and all of the things that Constant Contact offers in the way of product, but they're also asking for advice on just growing their business in general. So we do have a lot of those newbies who are just exploring and just maybe maybe go back some side gigs that they want to turn into full time products or full time, experiences once they retire or leave their 9 to 5 or what have you.
Melanie Diehl:So the variety of people that are in there asking all sorts of questions, and it's really an engaging community because people are very supportive of each other, and I like that. I haven't seen any of those negative nancies in there at all. It's very pleasant, positive, upbeat experience, And I really like to learning from my peers as well. So some of the other community coaches, the constant contact team, I learn from them all the time. And I'm a believer that ongoing education, always be learning, is just a model that all of us need to learn from.
Melanie Diehl:Okay?
Dave Charest:Yeah. I love that. Well, appreciate you in there helping out other customers, of course, and, you know, working with the other coaches. And I've talked to a lot of Constant Contact customers, and luckily, no negative Nancy's have come up along our way either, so I love that. So we're here to talk about audience building.
Dave Charest:And at the end of the day, when you think about digital marketing, it's really all about finding your audience and then developing a relationship with them so that they, well, know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you. Right? And I often talk about this idea of the party principle, and it's the idea that right? Right? Social media is kinda like this big party where you can find and you can meet your people.
Dave Charest:And then, like, email marketing is that after party. It's people that you're connected with. You've made a connection to them, and you wanna stay connected with them. And then that text or SMS marketing is kinda like that VIP party. Right?
Dave Charest:Right? These are a select group of people that have really given you instant access to them in the form of their mobile number. And so end of the day, it's really all about moving those people closer and closer to your business so you have a list of people that you can kind of contact on your terms. And so I guess my question to you, Melanie, is from your point of view and what you've seen over the years, why is growing a contact list so important for a business?
Melanie Diehl:My very first answer to that, Faith, is you own that list. It is a highly valuable asset to your business. If you think back to the days before technology and digital marketing, you had a book of customers. You had your customer list. That was an asset to your business.
Melanie Diehl:The same holds true with your email list. You own this, and it's something that is of value to you. Remember, back in the day, 5, 5 or 6 years ago, Matthew Montoya was trying to teach us the value of our list so we would kind of see exactly what our list is actually worth to our business. And everybody was surprised when they walked through that exercise to see what our list is actually worth to us as business owners. You go sell your business, you can sell that book of business along with it, that list of customers.
Melanie Diehl:So it really is a valuable asset. It's not something that we said and forget. So it's not just, oh, I did my list growth, and now I'm done because we know that there's gonna be some attrition. There's gonna be loss. So we need to replace that with gains.
Melanie Diehl:We should always be building our list.
Dave Charest:It doesn't have to be a huge list either. Right? Depending on the nature of your business, but it's something you always should be working on. And I would argue, make a priority because it's, again, somebody comes to your store, somebody comes and visits your website. Once they leave, if you don't have a way to contact them, you've got no way to get them back.
Dave Charest:And so what are some of the ways, and maybe even some of the constant contact tools you recommend to your clients in terms of thinking about how they should be growing their lists?
Melanie Diehl:So landing pages are probably my number one tool for list growth. We know that not like we were talking about, you know, bringing people to the party and that that whole party mentality. We also need to think about what's in it for me. So one of the things that I strongly encourage my students and my clients to do most of the time is to avoid using join my list as a reason to join my list. Right?
Melanie Diehl:What's in it for me? Consumer. Why should I join your list? So having that whole personal touch, that whole I know you well enough to say that maybe this is of interest to you, and that's where landing pages come into play. So we're giving them something in exchange or an email address.
Melanie Diehl:And probably everybody who's listening to this has exchanged their email address or something of value to them. And it can be something very simple. I like what you said a minute ago. I don't think the list of our size is as important as the value. I always choose quality over quantity.
Melanie Diehl:You can get a whole bunch of random never check my email address except for this one freebie people if you want to, but does that really serve you at the end? So probably not. Probably doesn't serve you. So using landing pages and targeting those landing pages to the right audience using some of the other tools that we have in our toolkit is probably the best way to get some ideal clients on your list.
Dave Charest:Yeah. One of the things I love about the landing pages is that you don't have to necessarily, like, integrate them into your website. For example, you can kinda use them. They stand on their own. So they're like almost mini websites in many ways where you're able to just put up a page quickly, the information you need to put on there so you can get the information that you need to get from people into your point in exchange for something.
Dave Charest:Usually, right, like a sale or a discount if you do those types of things, or maybe it's just like exclusive content is another thing we see people signing up for. I think these are good things to use, in particular, on social media, for example. Include a link in your bio that leads to your landing page. To your point, you can make them for specific things or in specific audiences and use cases. You can create a QR code to use those when you're out at live events to put on print materials.
Dave Charest:Those types of things, I think, is really important. Talk to me about even when you start thinking about when you do get to that point where you are putting things on your website as well, talk to me about maybe forms that you may wanna use.
Melanie Diehl:We like to every website that we build for our clients is going to have a contact us page, contact us form in the footer, and some sort of capture lead capture as well. So in addition to the contact us form, you know, there's some people who are not super fans of pop ups. Oh, I would never put a pop up on my website, and I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that pop ups work. However, pop up forms can be a whole lot different than they were just 2, 3, 5 years ago. It doesn't have to cover the entire page.
Melanie Diehl:We have a lot of settings. We can use the constant contact pop up form works great on websites, and you can manipulate the settings. So it's not intrusive. It's not obnoxious. It doesn't cover the entire page of content, then they can be highly converting.
Melanie Diehl:Case in point, my client Diane, aesthetician, client of mine for 9 years, which is almost unheard of in social media marketing world. Right? You have the client for 9 years. See how we put a pop up form on her website. She is a solo esthetician, solo practice.
Melanie Diehl:Reasonably small list, about 400 subscribers on her list. We put a pop up form on her website. I went and I checked the statistics on it. 10% of her list came from her pop up form. Pop up forms tend to work, but they need to be hastily done, and we can do that using constant contact.
Melanie Diehl:So I I'm a huge proponent of those.
Kelsi Carter:I know that they I know that they work.
Dave Charest:Yeah. I just wanna kinda recap some things for folks here. One, owning the list. It's really important. It provides great value to you because you have customers and potential customers that you can reach directly.
Dave Charest:Make sure when you're thinking about growing your list that you are actually offering something of value to them in exchange for giving you that information because that'll be more valuable to you in the future. And then it's really simple to get started when you start thinking about the tools that Constant Contact offers. I'm thinking landing pages here, the probably the quickest way to do this because you again, not tied to a specific website or anything like that. You can get up and going right away. And then, of course, putting forms, pop up forms, inline forms, whatever the case may be that you wanna use for your website, I think is also important.
Dave Charest:And I think maybe the big thing to leave people with is just make sure you're asking people. Right? You're asking them and giving them that reason why they should join that list, make that offer to them because that'll be really important and help you get more people on that list. Well, friend, let's do a little bit of a double recap here from that discussion. Number 1.
Dave Charest:Charge what you're worth. Now the biggest lesson that Melanie has learned over her 35 years of being in business is that you must charge at least the market rate for your services. And if you don't, you run the risk of burnout and other things that impact your business in a negative way. So heed Melanie's advice. Know your worth and be willing to charge it.
Dave Charest:There's someone out there who's willing to pay for the premium services and products that you have to offer. And those are the people that you want as your clients and customers so that your business can thrive. Number 2, focus on growing your email list. Now, Melanie, remembers a time before technology and digital marketing. You had a book of customers, and that customer list was an asset to your business.
Dave Charest:Now the same holds true with your email list. You own it, and it's something of value to you. And as a business owner, you can sell your business and that list of customers along with it. So make sure you're always building your list. And number 3, collect contacts with a landing page.
Dave Charest:Now Constant Contact sign up landing pages allow you to quickly create a custom web page to collect information and add it directly to your Constant Contact account. Now you can make landing pages for specific audiences and use cases. And remember, if you can offer a discount or an exclusive piece of content like a guide or a checklist, you're gonna have a bigger chance of people joining your list. So you can include links to your landing page in your social profiles, your email signatures, and you can even create a QR code to use on printed materials like a brochure or a business card. Constant Contact makes that process easy for you.
Dave Charest:So here's your action item for today. Create a sign up landing page and share it in the Constant Contact community for feedback. I'll include some links in the show notes with resources to help you get started. Then once you create your sign up landing page, share it in the constant contact community for feedback from one of our community coaches. And, hey, you may even get some new subscribers. 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. That's ratethispodcast.com/bam.
Dave Charest:Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.