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C O N S T A N T C O N T A C T

Executive Summary

The Business Partner’s Guide to Email Marketing Services

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INTRODUCTION This Executive Summary of “The Business Partner’s Guide to Email Marketing Services” was created to provide website developers, marketing, communications or PR agencies, e-commerce providers, franchises, software vendors and consultants with a general overview of how offering a full suite of email marketing consulting services can differentiate your offering and open up significant additional revenue opportunities. Signup to become a Business Partner of Constant Contact. In addition to having access to our Marketing Extranet, you will be able to download the complete guidebook “The Business Partner’s Guide to Email Marketing Services,” which contains detailed information on how to make money by creating and executing winning email strategies for your clients and to build a business around value-added services that you can provide around Constant Contact.

1 © Constant Contact – All Rights Reserved Do NOT reproduce without permission

Overview Email marketing services are an essential component for website developers, marketing, communications or PR agencies, e-commerce providers, franchises, software vendors and consultants. Permission-based email marketing is well known by marketers as the retention marketing “killer app”. And, companies looking for high-margin value-added services that increase the ROI of their client’s online investment have embraced it. Email marketing turns website visitors into lifetime customers more quickly and less expensively than any other marketing vehicle.

Websites have traditionally been thought of as either an electronic storefront where visitors can make online purchases, or as an online company brochure. In both cases each website visit is viewed as an independent “session,” and little attempt has been made to establish long-term relationships with site visitors. By adopting an email marketing strategy, individual website sessions can be transformed into ongoing communications that result in increased customer lifetime value and recurring sales. This is why email marketing is a powerful tool that no website should be without.

E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y – T H E B U S I N E S S P A R T N E R ’ S G U I D E T O E M A I L M A R K E T I N G S E R V I C E S


Creating Winning Email Strategies Before sending your client’s first email campaign, understand their objectives and define their email strategy!

Document each of your client’s email marketing objectives prior to sending their first campaign. This will save you time in the development of each campaign, enable you to provide relevant feedback to your clients, and greatly increase their success.

Winning Email Strategies include: Setting Objectives Work with your client to determine the impact they hope to derive from their email campaigns. Start off by asking your clients what they hope to gain by communicating with their audience. Are they hoping to increase general awareness of various products and services, drive immediate sales, bring visitors back to their storefront/website, educate their audience or some combination of the above? Collecting Subscriber Information Once you have determined what information your client needs to collect, your client will be ready to begin the process of collecting the information. This process will include leveraging information that they may have collected in the past, and establishing processes through which they can collect information in the future - like the website signup tag (included as part of Constant Contact) shown here.

Obtaining/Maintaining Permission One of the most important components of a winning email strategy is making sure your clients obtain permission from their customers to send email marketing messages. While Constant Contact enables you to obtain permission from your website visitors and enables you to maintain permission by emailing responsibly, other sources of data that your clients may wish to import (i.e. customer databases) may not include explicit permission and therefore need additional attention.

Selecting Campaign Formats There are three basic communication formats. These include: newsletters, announcements and promotions. To determine the best format for your clients, start by reviewing your client’s objectives, and aligning their objectives with the appropriate format.



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Communication Frequency In order to determine the frequency of communication for each client, you need to take into account the client’s objectives, the communication format, amount of content that needs to be created, and the level of interest of the subscribers. For example, it is better to send a well-written quarterly newsletter with relevant links and content, than a hastily generated monthly newsletter with low relevance and poor messaging.

Campaign Analysis An important component of building a winning email strategy for your clients is the ongoing adjustment of the strategy based on the feedback received from past mailings.

Summary Building a winning email marketing strategy for your clients involves properly addressing all of the components above. Walking through each component with your client will reinforce the value you provide.



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Campaign Management Services The next step after creating a Winning Email Strategy is executing the on the strategy. Campaign Management Services represents a significant ongoing revenue opportunity.

Creating Client Campaigns Once you have determined the appropriate strategy for your client, the next step is executing the strategy. This section highlights some of the value-added services that you can provide to your clients and information on the capabilities included in Constant Contact.

Template Selection Once you have determined the email strategy, the next step is to determine the communication format that will convey your client’s message in the most effective manner. Constant Contact contains over 100 email templates including a wide variety of newsletters, announcements, promotions and seasonal/holiday templates with customizable colors and fonts, and placeholders for logos and graphics.

Template Customization In the event that your client wants to create a custom layout (beyond colors and fonts) for their communication, if you are proficient in HTML programming, you can offer custom template or campaign services.

Content Creation Your client may look to you to provide some input on their email marketing content and copy. You may have sufficient knowledge of their business to author the content. And, there are best practices on how content is laid out in messages that you can leverage to provide valuable advice and ensure your client’s email success.

Campaign Analysis Email marketing is unlike any other form of direct marketing in that a wealth of information is provided to the sender with regard to the quality of the addresses sent to, the number of messages delivered, the number of messages opened, and the actions taken by the recipient once they open the message. Analysis of each campaign, including performance relative to other campaigns, and reporting of this information to your client is a valuable service that you can provide.



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Open Rates Once your client’s email messages are delivered, Constant Contact provides a report for each campaign that displays the number of messages opened by recipients. There are a number of factors that can influence the open rate.

Click Through Rates Most email messages are sent with call-to-action links. The call-to-action links typically lead to obtaining more information or buying a product or service. Each of these call-to-action links is tracked in Constant Contact to determine how many recipients click on the link or “click-through.” Constant Contact provides three levels of reporting detail with regard to click-throughs.

Unsubscribe Rates Another important report is the unsubscribe report. This report will give you a monthly summary of the number of recipients that have unsubscribed from your client’s database. While it is inevitable that recipients will occasionally unsubscribe, significant growth in the number of unsubscribes from one month to the next may signal that you are either communicating too frequently to your recipients or that you are sending them information that is no longer of interest.

Email Database Management Your client’s email database is a core asset of their business. Helping your client maintain the quality of their database will help them to grow the value of this core asset, while establishing the services you are providing as a critical component of their ongoing marketing strategy. Database Management includes four primary components: Interest Category Management, Database Import/Export, Bounce Management, and Unsubscribe Management.

Interest Category Management Ongoing changes to Interest Categories will include the addition of categories that reflect changes in your client’s lines of business, new communications they will want to add once they become more proficient in email marketing, and special mailings that they may want to send to subsets of their database. Database Import / Export You will find that many of your clients will maintain a separate customer database outside of Constant Contact, and will want to be able to continually update information between the databases. Some of the most common customer database software packages include ACT!, Goldmine, and MS Outlook. The synchronization of information between the client’s existing database and Constant Contact is a valuable service that you can provide. Constant Contact will accept import formats of Excel, .CSV and .TXT.



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Bounce Management Each time you send an email campaign on behalf of one of your clients a certain number of the emails will bounce. Emails bounce for a variety of reasons and Constant Contact’s bounce management system has been designed to help you understand why each email bounced and to enable you to take appropriate corrective action on your client’s behalf. You can then report back to your clients and provide information to assist them in updating their database.

Unsubscribe Management Every email sent with Constant Contact contains an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. While this link enables the subscriber to edit the Interest Categories they are subscribed to or completely unsubscribe, some recipients ignore this path and merely reply to the message requesting removal from the email list. It is imperative that these requests be honored in a timely fashion.

Account Setup Services To ensure your clients get off to a great start, provide them with a set-up package that includes all five of the services outlined below. To determine the approximate level of effort required, create and review a “pre-launch” checklist with your client and determine those components you will be responsible for, and those that your client will be completing.

Website Signup Tags Included in each Constant Contact account is a customized HTML tag that can be inserted in a client’s website to facilitate the collection of email addresses, personal information, and

personal preferences from website visitors. Signup Tag customization can also be a added-valued service that you can provide.



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Visitor Signup Form After a subscriber inserts their email address to join a mailing list, a signup form should be displayed to collect additional information about the subscriber and their interests. Constant Contact automatically delivers a Visitor Signup Form that enables the subscriber to provide greater detail about the information they want to receive as well as additional contact information.

This form contains a wealth of information about your client’s subscribers. Assisting them in setting this up correctly can have a significant impact on the value derived from future email campaigns.

Confirmation Emails Constant Contact includes two confirmation letters that can be

customized on your client’s behalf. The letters include the Welcome Email delivered to new subscribers who signup via the Website Signup Tags, and the Confirmation Email that is delivered to existing subscribers who change information contained in their record (e.g. Interest Categories or Personal Information.).

Database Setup The final step in getting your client ready to send email messages is to properly import existing email lists into Interest Categories that the client can then send email messages to. It is important to review your client’s email strategy prior to establishing these lists. Email addresses can be segmented by relationship (customer, prospect, supplier), by product line (Widget customer) or by interest (bike specials, bike tours in Europe).



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Summary It’s easy to differentiate your offering and open up new revenue opportunities with a full suite of email marketing consulting services based on Constant Contact. And, you can signup as a Constant Contact reseller with no initial annual fee.

Use Constant Contact yourself! As part of the Business Partner program, you will receive a free Constant Contact account for your own marketing use. This Constant Contact account will also have several marketing templates that can be used to market Constant Contact and your service and product offerings.