April 1, 2009

Email Marketing for Your Dance Company with Constant Contact

Constant Contact is the most popular application for managing email marketing campaigns. I receive a large number of Constant Contact-generated emails from dancers and dance companies on a regular basis.

In this post, I'm including an introduction to setting-up your subscriber sign-up forms and introductory emails with Constant Contact. This initial configuration process is an important step in building your subscriber base and communicating successfully with your audience. It's also time-consuming, but worth the effort.

I'm assuming you have a Constant Contact account for purposes of this post. But if you use a different email marketing application, the same general ideas apply.

Introduction to Email Sign-Up Options

Log-in to Constant Contact. Select the "Contacts" tab and then select "Site Visitor Signup". Now you're in the section of Constant Contact where you create all of your subscriber forms and introductory/administration emails.

The following screen shot shows what needs to be customized before you'll be ready to send out your first email marketing piece. The "Signup Box" is the form or text message on your website or blog that invites visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter. The "Visitor Signup Form" is the web page or pop-up screen that captures data about each subscriber and records content preferences. And the "Contact Emails" are the various introductory and administration emails that you will need to customize to automatically communicate with your subscribers.

The visitor signup form is placed on your website or blog to tell people about your email newsletter and encourage them to subscribe. As the examples in the following screen shot show, there are three sign-up options: Text, buttons and forms. Most people use the form option to capture a subscriber's email address. You can customize all of the sign-up forms to match the colors, fonts and styles of your website.

Once a user enters their email address, they are taken to the subscriber sign-up form. I've included a screen shot of the Great Dance sign-up form. You'll notice that I keep things very simple. I only ask for one piece of data: a user's email address, which they have already entered and are now asked to re-enter. And there is only one content option: "Great Dance" under "email list." Based upon your needs, you could encourage subscribers to select from one or more email lists such as "performance information", "classes" and "presenter updates". My recommendation is to keep things simple and to only offer additional email list options if you can really justify the extra time and effort.

When configuring your sign-up form (screen shot immediately above), you can ask subscribers for lots of details: their name, address, phone numbers and other information. See the following screen shot for the many possible pieces of data you can potentially capture. But, as a general rule, only ask for the information that you absolutely need. The more you ask from subscribers, the less likely they are to complete the subscription process. If your dance company performs around the country, you might want to capture address and zip code information so that you can notify subscribers when you are coming to their city. Constant Contact, however, does not have very good segmentation tools for this purpose, but they are usable. When adding fields to your subscriber form, you can make them "required" so that the requested details must be entered.

It takes some time to customize the welcome and administration emails that are automatically sent to your subscribers. The welcome email is the most important because this is the email that subscribers receive immediately after completing your signup form. You can customize all elements of your welcome message as you'll see on the left-hand side of the following screen shot. It's important to add a few short paragraphs introducing new subscribers to what they should expect from your upcoming newsletters, and to customize the footer and other parts as well. To get the footer section properly formatted, I've had to go into the "advanced editor" to remove blank lines, a bit of a hassle.

If you have email tips and recommendations for how dance companies can use Constant Contact and other email marketing applications, please share.

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2 Comments

danciti said:

Personally I'm a huge fan of Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor but Bronto and Mailer Mailer are also very nice. All four of those support very advanced users and are created for companies who are really serious about creating great campaigns. They aren't very template based becuase they assume that you will want to create unique mailers instead of adding information to a template. I think this leads to much better results but you do need to be a pretty advanced user.

Added: April 3, 2009 11:29 AM | Permalink

Doug Fox said:

Danciti,

Thanks for recommendations.

I'll check out your suggestions.

That's important trade-off that you mention: ease of use versus functionality/customization.

Added: April 3, 2009 11:49 AM | Permalink

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