Constant Contact Best Practices Blog

Welcome new blogger, Ellen Siegel

Amy Black — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:10:26 -0400

The Constant Contact Best Practices Blog welcomes new blogger, Ellen Siegel, our Director of Technology and Standards here at Constant Contact.

Ellen is the one who makes sure that we are on the “straight and narrow” when it comes to best practices. She is a CAN-SPAM expert and is knowledgeable on a broad range of current deliverability technologies. In an ongoing effort to help fight spam and protect legitimate email, Ellen is also a leader and active participant in a number if email industry organizations including the Email Sender and Provider Coalition (ESPC) and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG).

As a blogger, Ellen will cover issues including anti-spam, email authentication, deliverability, the law (as it relates to email marketing), and more. She will help you understand how these issues can affect you and offer guidance in navigating them.

In her first blog post, she gives an update on the recent developments with the CAN-SPAM Act.

Welcome, Ellen!

Best,

Amy

What you need to know about the recent FTC updates to CAN-SPAM

Ellen Siegel — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:04:33 -0400

As you may have heard, several weeks ago the FTC released its Statement of Basis and Purpose and Final Discretionary Rule (“final Rule”) on the CAN-SPAM ACT. So, what do you need to know about the FTC updates?

The update contains four new rules, and also contains some clarifications and guidance to the text of the original act in the form of the Statement of Basis and Purpose (SBP). Quite a lot to digest!

The good news is that if you are a single organization sending email on your own behalf and you comply with the existing CAN-SPAM guidelines, it’s likely that the new rules will have relatively little impact on you.

Here are the main areas to consider:

The difference between direct mail and email

Amy Black — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:40:18 -0400

If you are really into email marketing, I encourage you to sign up for MediaPost’s Email Insider daily email. There are a number of people who write for the column on various email marketing topics.

On-demand webinar: Grow Your Business with Email Marketing

Amy Black — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:01:39 -0400

This week, Constant Contact joined forces with the New York Enterprise Report to produce a webinar on email marketing. The moderator was Robert Levin, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the publication, and the presenter was John Arnold, author of Email Marketing for Dummies and director at Constant Contact.

The New York Enterprise Report is hosting the webinar on their site, so you can watch it at any time. This is excellent material if you are just getting started with email marketing or if you are looking for ways to grow your list and improve the communications you send. There’s a little something for everyone.

Topics covered include:

Formulas for powerful headlines

Amy Black — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:24:52 -0400

I’m on copywriter Bob Bly’s email list. He sends out some great writing tips that aren’t on his website, so I can’t link to them, but he’s graciously allowed me to post some of them on our blog. Here are some of his recent tips for writing powerful headlines:

7 "formulas" that can help you write more powerful headlines

By Bob Bly

Tips for creating excellent email newsletters

Amy Black — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:37:07 -0400

This month's issue of our newsletter Hints & Tips Email Marketing is all about email newsletters.

Content includes:

An interview with e-newsletter expert Michael Katz
An article on the ingredients for excellent newsletters
Four examples of newsletters that are following best practices
Info on a free newsletter makeover webinar and more!

View the newsletter issue now!

Email Insider Summit: Email design tips

Amy Black — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:05:14 -0400

I’ve got more notes to share from the Email Insider Summit. Here are some tips from Aaron Smith and Lisa Harmon from Smith & Harmon Associates. These folks are a talented duo from Seattle who know what they are talking about when it comes to email design. They also use Constant Contact to send out their email newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

Here are four design tips from Lisa and Aaron:

Images off solutions – Because many people have images turned off in their email accounts, use HTML instead of graphics and use alt tags with images so the recipient has a description of the image they are missing. Also, whether the images are enabled or disabled, your email should look almost the same.

Guest blogger Michael Katz on e-nurturing with e-newsletters

Amy Black — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:25:31 -0400

I invited email newsletter expert Michael Katz of Blue Penguin Development (he wrote the book on email newsletters!) to write about the impact that email newsletters can have on a business. Here’s his perspective.

Best,
Amy

The following was written by guest blogger Michael Katz

According to my friends at the reference desk of the Boston Public Library, there are more than 1.9 million professional farmers in the United States today. Interestingly, this same source couldn't find a single person in the nation categorized as a "professional hunter."

Frankly, this doesn't surprise me. Despite having slept through much of Mr. Schweitzer's 10^th grade social studies class, I did learn that the people who grow food for a living are considered more anthropologically advanced than the hunter/gatherers of the world. And so it makes sense that in a highly developed country such as this, hunting as a career option has all but vanished.

What is surprising however, is that in the world of Western business, hunting – not farming – remains the dominant strategy for growing a company.

The 3 “P’s” of email newsletters: promise, personality, and pay off

Amy Black — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:39:28 -0400

In June, Hints & Tips Email Marketing will focus on email newsletters. Working with the topic got me thinking about a great presentation I heard last year when I attended the Marketing Sherpa Conference in Miami, Florida. The session was on email newsletters and featured a number of professional email marketers who are each responsible for email newsletter programs.

One of the speakers was Rick Crossett who, at the time, worked at Tech Republic of CNET Networks. I was impressed when he said that he sent 45 different newsletters a month! I figure that a guy who sends that many newsletters must know a thing or two about the topic. And he did. His advice was simple, but memorable. Here’s what I learned from him, mixed with a few pointers of my own.

Email Insider Summit: Email deliverability panel recap

Amy Black — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:05:41 -0400

I’m learning a lot at the Email Insider Summit and am meeting a ton of people who spend their time thinking about and doing email marketing. The past two days have been so packed with sessions and networking events that I’m just getting some time to write for the blog now.

I’m going to start by going back to yesterday’s session on deliverability. If you read our best practice’s newsletter, Hints & Tips Email Marketing, then you will remember May’s interview with Ellen Seigel on the topic of email deliverability and spam. This session didn’t cover much more than we did in that article, but it never hurts to reiterate information that is really important, so here goes.