Constant Contact – Matching Your Storytelling to the Right Audience

Sean McClellan: Good afternoon and welcome to our session on Constant Contact presented by Amy Dorsey. As the partner success manager, Amy brings 11 years of Constant Contact education and support experience to help nonprofits achieve their goals and grow their organization through Read More

Sean McClellan: Good afternoon and welcome to our session on Constant Contact presented by Amy Dorsey. As the partner success manager, Amy brings 11 years of Constant Contact education and support experience to help nonprofits achieve their goals and grow their organization through product training and industry best practices. Amy brings over 20 years of experience in presenting actionable and insightful content to audiences in person and virtually.

Amy also brings personal experience in working with and volunteering for multiple nonprofit organizations, including Habitat for Humanity, Larimer County Food Bank, and various animal rescue organizations, and understands how to drive donations and engagement through top-of-mind marketing and appeals. Before I hand it over to Amy, I’d like to remind everybody to be sure to add your questions in the Q and A tab, so that way we can see them and keep track of them and answer them at the end of the presentation. Any questions asked in general chat may not get answered due to the constant scroll of the screen. Amy, I’m going to turn it over to you.

Amy Dorsey: Great. Thank you, Sean. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the DonorPerfect Community Conference, stories worth sharing. I just love that the theme of this meeting is about storytelling, because as a nonprofit, really the one thing nonprofits want to do is they want to tell their story. I’m really excited and grateful to be a part of this meaningful conference.

As Sean mentioned, I am with Constant Contact who is presenting this segment of your conference today, and as Sean mentioned, I’ve been with Constant Contact for about almost 12 years now. I am a partner success manager with Constant Contact, but that isn’t really the part about me that I want you to know. That information basically just qualifies me to be here today to be presenting. The truth is I know nonprofits. I am entrenched with so many and I think we all know how that goes.

It’s really easy to get woven into nonprofits. From the night that I was cooking supper at the Catholic charities mission, where I left and snagged my black cat off the streets and to the dog that lays next to me every night that snores loudly that came out of a kill shelter in Houston that was rescued by a nonprofit I support here in Colorado. One thing that I just want to share is these are just a couple of the nonprofit organizations that I support, but each person on this conference, each nonprofit, you have made a choice to make the world in some way a better place.

I just wanted you to know that I celebrate you and I get you. Not only do I get you DonorPerfect gets you, Constant Contact gets you. It’s so rewarding working for and partnering with a company that is dedicated to helping small businesses and non-profit organizations. Before we go further today, I’m going to go ahead at this time and turn off my camera for the presentation. At the end, as Sean mentioned, we will have that Q and A session, and I’ll go ahead and turn my camera back on for that. Thank you.

A few things worth noting with Constant Contact, regardless of the quality with which you crafted your email campaign and segmented your list, your email has to land in your recipients’ inbox. Constant Contact has best-in-class delivery with 97% email delivery rate. We also provide hundreds of professionally designed mobile-responsive email templates. DonorPerfect also provides its Constant Contact customers with a menu of fundraising templates that we’ll get into in just a moment and support.

I am so happy to say that we have customer support, because your talents lie elsewhere, and we are here to help you and help you be successful. There are three things that every nonprofit share, one, as I mentioned before, is to tell their story and to be heard. Another is to increase donations and support and the third is to make a difference. Email marketing allows non-profits of a powerful time-saving and cost-effective way for you to tell your story.

Integration with DonorPerfect makes sure your story is being told to the right people and that is the focus of this presentation today. No matter how good your story is, it’s only as good as the relevance of the people it reaches. Today, I’m focusing on why segmenting your reach is so important. Why is relevance so important? You may ask, mass marketing, isn’t going to produce the results we want. We need to send more relevant emails. Not everyone is the same. Also, keep in mind the fact that over 144 billion emails are sent daily.

Each group likely might need unique offerings and have very different needs. If we send unique emails to these smaller groups, it’s more likely to produce more opens, clicks, and produce the results you’re trying to achieve for your nonprofit organization. This is segmentation, taking a larger group and breaking them into smaller groups. Now that we are learning why segmenting is so important, let’s talk about ways in which the DonorPerfect integration will help you.

The integration with DonorPerfect and Constant Contact makes it easy for you to share your story. Constant Contact can sync nightly with your donor information, it’s automatic. You can be doing other things, even sleeping. It also uses filter set in DonorPerfect to assure your story and appeal reaches the best audience. This is just the start of our story today. As I mentioned earlier, in addition to the professional templates from which you can choose in Constant Contact, thanks to DonorPerfect, you have a broad menu of professional custom-built templates for fundraising.

They worked with Constant Contacts, custom services team to provide pre-formatted email fundraising templates that leverage DonorPerfect’s 35 years of fundraising industry experience. The templates cover some of the most common fundraising campaigns, just drop in your logo and your information about your campaign. Let’s go ahead and take a look at some examples. On this slide, this is the Constant Contact template picker, where you can find the custom-made templates that DonorPerfect provides you.

They can be easily identified, because they start with a DP. You can see that they have four categories of templates for you. They have monthly giving, they have the welcome series, they have crowdfunding, and they have to give Tuesday. For this example, I’m going to go ahead and pick a giving Tuesday template. As you can see here, it’s got the giving Tuesday branding, it’s got your logo placeholder here. It’s got a placeholder for a relevant image from your organization and it’s got a pre-formatted give now, button.

It also gives you some idea about the content. Once you bring in your logo, your relevant image, and your content, as well as your branding, you’re ready to go. It takes just a few minutes to get out a relevant branded email campaign. Selecting the right template is just the beginning. You then have to make sure that you are reaching the right audience. Here’s an example of targeting the right people to hear our story. People often ask me how they can get better results from their email marketing efforts.

While there are many factors that can play into this, sending the right messages to the right people is one of the most effective ways. It allows you to create relevant messaging that catches each person’s attention and encourages them to take the action that you want. Here’s a couple of examples. This first example is people who’ve shown an interest in donations, but didn’t take action. The second example is people who have shown interest in volunteering or advocating, but never took action.

You can see the relevance of these two campaigns is very different and I’m going to be targeting very different audiences. Times have really changed when it comes to email marketing. Email blasts to your entire list at once is a thing in the past. In order to get better results and create those relevant messages, segmentation are creating smaller groups of contacts with one or more commonalities is the way to go.

People who receive relevant emails, personalized to their interests, lead to less unsubscribes, more action, and engagement, and six times higher transaction rates in turn. This allows you to build relationships. People will be more inclined to keep coming back and working with you and even refer you to others who may share a common concern, or passion, or an interest. Let’s take a look at a few stats on why targeted email is still important.

One study shows that 21% of people unsubscribe from emails, because they aren’t relevant. Those emails that are personalized show six times higher donation rates. I also want you to think about the fact that gaining new advocates, volunteers, and donors can be anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one, wow. Sending timely relevant emails that people are actually interested in is a great way to keep people engaged with you in turn, it helps build relationships so people will be more inclined to keep coming back and doing business with you and may even refer you to their friends. I have a personal example of this. I do volunteer work for a slaughter horse rescue called Story Ridge Ranch. A friend of mine was asking about the meaningful work that I did, because every time she talked to me I was either mucking a stall or grooming a horse or I graduated to training horses. She said, “I would like to go out and help you.” My friend, Bobby now comes out with me and she grooms the donkeys and the sheep. Telling the story also gets people with common interests to go engage as well.

We know that you’re already strapped for time and resources. The idea of segmenting your list can seem time-consuming and overwhelming. There are things you can do that I’ll share with you today to help save time in this process. I’m going to provide some tips and ideas for your own segmentation strategy and talk about the tools in your account that you can use to manage your lists and accomplish segmenting goals. I also want you to know that if you spend some time now to segment your contacts list, your email marketing efforts will be more productive moving forward, so you can get the results you really want. Some upfront time dedication to this process is really going to make significant results for your email marketing strategy.

Let’s take a look at our agenda today. We’re going to cover some basic strategies to segment your list, then we’ll talk about some options to think about in order to save you time, that’s by getting people to segment themselves, and how to use the existing data and tools to send relevant emails to your list and make sure that your emails are landing in the correct people’s inbox. We’re going to go ahead and start with basic strategies to segment your list.

Your story is unique, and so is your audience. I like imagine all of you out there in the audience to look just like this happy group of people right now. In order to come up with the right segmentation strategy to convey the right story for your contacts, you want to really think about what’s most beneficial to them. Not every story is going to be as relevant to every subscriber. Think about the various ways someone might connect to you. What part of what you do might resonate? Could it be how you’ve changed lives? Whose life? Where are you making an impact? Do they just want to volunteer? Or would they donate as well? Think about the types of content you’ve provided in the past, what action did they take based on that content? Not only do you need to consider what actions they’ve taken, if any, you should also consider different demographic characteristics, interests, location, and behaviors. You basically want to take contacts and split them into different lists or segments. When you’re ready to send your next targeted email, you can send it only to that group. Past data you have is going to be beneficial in this, but there are some things we’ll talk about later today that will help you collect details or information on what they are interested in.

One thing you can segment by is the actions or behaviors your contacts and customers take. Their actions can tell you– I’m referring to the actions that they take in your email campaigns. Their actions can tell you a lot about what they’re interested in. There are a few aspects to this first, you can think about the action that people may take from your past and current email campaigns. The emails that they opened. the links they click. Again, this is available to you in your Constant Contact reporting. If they open an email on a specific topic, you might put them in a list-based on that topic. If they click to read more on a topic or to make a donation, volunteer, or attend an event, you certainly know much more about them. Also, if they don’t open or take action from your emails, it can be an opportunity to target with something completely different. With behaviors and actions. It’s also important to think about the products or topics they’ve shown interest in other areas that includes the purchases or donations they’ve made. Also, along those same lines, think about whether they are a prospect, a donor, a repeat donor, a volunteer or an attendee, maybe even a vendor. All of these behaviors can help you segment your list and determine the types of messages you could send. For example, naturally, you’d want to segment those who have yet to donate versus those who’ve donated in the past. Same thing with your storytelling message, what might appeal to them most in the message that you send.

Demographics, this next data strategy, excuse me, I’m going to take a quick sip of water. This next strategy to consider is the demographics of your audience. Think about whether there are different groups of people you’ll want to create based off of things like age, gender, income, or where they work, even perhaps, people with disabilities. My best friend was rendered quadriplegic as a result of a car accident, and she does a tremendous amount of service work with Canine Companions for independence, in her chapter in the Hudson Valley, New York area, and she goes out and she does public speaking engagements. This is the type of service that she can do is Story Ridge Ranch was to reach out to her to volunteer to come, groom, and train horses, that wouldn’t be relevant to Kara and she would most likely unsubscribe, but she has a very– Excuse me, a very philanthropic heart. She would be somebody who would definitely donate. She would give her financial assets to Story Ridge Ranch. Again, demographics is really important in targeting the right person.

You might tell a very different story to groups in their 20s rather than someone who’s in their 50s. As we all know, with age comes a different perspective. Someone who is retired is likely looking through a very different lens than someone who is in their 20s or their 30s. The same story may not apply to both. Very common in the non-profit space income. Knowing how much someone may be able to give might affect how you approach them with your storytelling. You’d not likely want to shoot for the moon with a group just getting started. Also, what do they do for a living? That might not only help you decide what segment to put them in, but also what appeal in your storytelling to use. If you have a group of business leaders, for example, it might make sense to have content that is straight and to the point, where with a group of artists, you might want to pull on their heartstrings a little bit more.

This next strategy is psychographics, which have a lot to do with your audience’s lifestyle. This segmentation strategy works well for those of you who offer a very unique value proposition. For example, if you are an association that supports business education, knowing the personality of your audience may help you target them with more compelling storytelling. Obviously, those of you that are in a religious category would watch for values that are consistent with why someone has joined your organization. For this strategy, you can think about things like their interests or hobbies, social status, personality type, attitudes, and their value and how that can tie back to your story. I’ll show you how you can learn more about your audience in just a moment.

The last one is geographic. For this, you’ll want to think about your current and potential customers where they’re located. This is also something to think about if you have a physical location or even multiple locations that customers will need to visit. For example, if you work for the world hunger organization and you appeal to local food banks, and have geographical considerations, if you were having a special event at one of those locations, you wouldn’t target all your markets. For example, here in Larimer County where I live, our food bank partners with the world hunger organization, and every year, we do what’s called a crop walk and the proceeds of that walk benefit both the world hunger organization as well as the Larimer County Food Bank. It’s going to target Larimer County people, because it’s an in-person present event. If you segment based off of different locations, you may also want to adjust your messaging based off of cultural differences, or even interests. The same thing based off of geography you can use zip code, city, state, county, community, or even country.

The next thing we’re going to cover today is how to get your subscribers to self-segment, because the truth is, time is money. I know for a lot of you, as I’ve mentioned previously, sitting down and segmenting your list can seem very time-consuming and daunting. If I were to ask each one of you what intangible thing do you wish you had more of? It would probably be time. We have tools to save you time so you can go about the business of making the world a better place, because that’s what you do. When you can get your contacts to segment themselves, you’ll be able to save a lot of time and effort. The truth is, time is money. That’s where this idea of self-segmentation comes into play. You can ask your new or existing contacts to choose what information they want to receive and collect information to help you segment your list. This can be done through a link called Update Profile in the footer of your Constant Contact email campaign.

A nonprofit could also give their supporters the option right from the beginning to indicate whether they are interested in adoption, donors, news and updates, volunteers. What I’m showing you here is a pop-up form that we give you that you can put on your website. This is a great opportunity for them to see your participants in your non-profit organization to select the email campaigns that they want to read. The thing to keep in mind here is you don’t want to overwhelm people, you only want to keep your options to about three to four lists. Remember, when you’re doing this type of form, less is more. Adding too much information to your form can put people off and you might lose their interest. Remember, once you get a contact, you can send them information later via the Update profile form to ask them to provide you that additional information that you might need. This next one is great, because when somebody clicks on a link in your email, you know they’re interested in that topic. This is called Click Segmentation. When you implement this Click Segmentation tool in Constant Contact, the contact will automatically be added to the list that you’ve chosen right when they click on the link in your email campaign. I’m going to take you through this process in detail, because this is a huge time saver and you will have a real gauge on your reader’s interest.

Here’s an example of what this looks like, inside the Constant Contact editor, you have the ability to add some text and then on that text, you can say that you want it to link to a specific website. Here you’ll notice that there’s a box that says enable quick segmentation. This is left unchecked, because I wanted to point out, this doesn’t automatically happen. You have to go in and you have to enable it by checking that box. Once you do that and you get your email campaign, you can see what it looks like. When the contact receives your email campaign, they click on the link where you’ve enabled Click Segmentation, and then that web page opens so you know this contact has taken an interest in this information. Behind the scenes, the contact is added to the list that you’ve mapped. In this case, I’ve asked anyone who clicks on that link to go into the Advocates list, and this is done automatically. I now know that [email protected] has an interest in that topic, and I’ve got them automatically segmented through Click Segmentation. This is so hugely time-consuming, I encourage everybody to make sure that you get really familiar with this process.

How many of you currently send an email newsletter that includes multiple topics? I’m guessing many of you. Well, with Click Segmentation, it’s great to implement this scenario as well, because you can take one email campaign with multiple topics and you can map multiple people into the topics that they’re interested in. For example, on this particular segment, thinking of the feature of Click Segmentation, for those people who click on the link to read more on the second article, you could map them to a specific list and then send additional information just to those people or students about developing key skills such as problem-solving and critical thinking. Let’s go ahead and talk about some other ways you can segment your lists and send relevant emails to your subscribers. I shared with you how your subscribers can segment themselves, now I’d like to take some time and show you the ways that you can segment your subscribers. All of these allow you to create groups of contacts, and these all have different advantages. The first thing I’m going to talk about is lists. At a minimum, you will need to add contacts to a list. You are likely already segmenting data from DonorPerfect into these lists, and that is a great start.

You can think of a list as a container holding your separate group of contacts. They are something you manually create either when uploading your file to Constant Contact or on the contact page directly. Lists are also connected with your sign-up forms and can be public-facing if you are giving your contacts the option of what list they would like to be added to, for example, in that pop-up scenario that I gave you previously where they had four list options, those are customer-facing. When sending an email, you can send one or more lists at a time. If you send to 10 lists and someone is on more than one of the list, they will only get your email campaign once. Now, if you want to create subgroups for the contact in these lists, that’s where tags and segments come into play. Tags are sub-groups that you manually create, these are not customer-facing. You can think of them as a label for a sub-group of contacts. You can tag groups based on contact details that you upload or anything else you know about the customer. They are only seen internally. Customers cannot tag themselves from a sign-up form, as I mentioned. These are internal-facing only. It is all something you manage on the backend of your Constant Contact account. When sending an email, you can either narrow by tag or exclude a tag from that send.

If an animal shelter wants to have a big list with all their current volunteers to save them in one place, but then they want to identify the types of projects they are interested in, they could create tags for events, outreach, influencer or even location, and then when sending an email they can narrow by tag or they can exclude a tag, because they are having an email that wouldn’t apply to a specific group. Segments, on the other hand, take much less manual work and allow you to create groups based on multiple types of criteria, including contact activity, which is determined for you automatically. You don’t need to go through the contact one by one to find out who has been engaged with your emails and who hasn’t, using our segmentation tool. You can create a group of people who haven’t clicked in an email in the past year, for example. The only manual work you need to do to create a segment is indicating what criteria you want to segment by. When sending an email to a segment, you do not select a list at all. You send directly to the segment and you can only send to that segment once, one at a time. One segment at a time. Also, the segment refreshes automatically before sending an email, but you never need to manually make updates. This is a key point, because if you integrate Constant Contact with DonorPerfect, as your contacts sync up, they will be added automatically to your pre-selected segment.

Let’s dig deeper into these ways to segment. Segmentation by list is usually where people start, but there are some challenges to solely segmenting this way. Trying to segment my list can be a challenge, it requires you to keep up with list, names. I’ve literally seen people who have hundreds of lists. It becomes overwhelming, it requires you to remember where you put people. Sometimes you might want to send to a smaller part of the list, and you can’t use lists to filter out that perfect group. Tags are a much more granular way to segment. The benefit of being able to send or not send to tagged groups makes this method very powerful. There is some work up front you’ll need to do, as I mentioned, to tag these individuals, but the benefit is eventually very time-saving as you don’t have to go through your lists to figure out who you want to target or not target. For example, tags can be added at any time, you can have as many tags as you need, you can remove tags at any time, and you can send to multiple tags. For example, I can send to donors who live in Dothan, Alabama, who went to Troy State, who also like one of your programs. That is going to be a very, very targeted email campaign.

Here is just a screenshot of where I’ve taken Copley.Ruth, and I’ve pulled up her contact record and I can actually identify her as somebody being associated with Leeman and a female. Those are the tags associated to that contact record. When I create a tag,, I can then use that tag to send to or not send to. Because I can choose multiple tags, I can refine who I plan to send the email to. With Constant Contact’s segment tool, you’ll be able to combine a single or multiple pieces of information to find the right people for each group or segment. Segments allow you to create customized groups of contacts using campaign engagement, contact information, and list membership. There are also pre-built segments located in your account that allow you to quickly email to your most engaged, somewhat engaged, and least engaged contacts. Those are automatically built for you by Constant Contact based on your email sending history. These are generated based on the opens and click stat of your contact as well. The best part is that the segments you create through this tool will automatically be updated each time you send an email, so you’re always sending to the most relevant information to the right contact. Let’s say we want to target our volunteers in a location, let’s say Orlando. Let’s assume that this is a group I might message frequently. Also, let’s imagine that I add volunteers into this group fairly often. Lastly, let’s be clear. I have to have the fact that they are based in Orlando in my records tied to the email address. Again, with segmentation, you have to have that record attached to the contact to do this manually, excuse me to automate this process for you, but this is huge. I’m going to take you through this entire process. I’ve got my segment name. I’ve called it Donors in Orlando.

Next, let’s say I want to focus on volunteers who have not engaged or clicked any links in any email in the past 30 days, this might be really relevant if you have an upcoming event and you really need someone’s engagement, and you can see here that they’re not engaged. You want to target that group to send them something a little bit more relevant about the fact that there’s a time element here. Here then we’ll look specifically on our advocate’s list. You can also choose multiple lists. You’ll see here that there’s an and or an, or, and lastly, as I mentioned, we’re going to target the city of Orlando.

I can do this by zip code or zip codes. I can actually build segments on any data I’ve synced into Constant Contact, as I mentioned. When I hit save what I’ll have is a segment that meets the criteria I set. I can save this as a list as well. I can add this to a group or an existing list, and I can even send to the segment directly without even having to add them as a list. This is a really powerful tool. This again, allows you to identify relevant common information in your contact records. That’s going to really help you send very targeted mailings. This is actually using the segments at work. Instead of clicking on a list, I choose a segment. I then choose the segment I built.

I can send to that segment, but what’s cool is anyone who has met the criteria I choose since I built the segment will automatically be added and receive the email. This is really great if you sync your lists from DonorPerfect, because when you sync your contacts are automatically added to the segment that you prebuilt. At this point, I want to start to wrap up so that we can get to the Q and A session. Before we do, I want to recap a few things. One it’s important to start by determining the types or topics of relevant emails you’ll need to send. This will also help you determine which segmentation strategy you want to use.

This will also help you ensure that you’re sending information that keeps people engaged in taking action from your emails, because it’s all about engagement. Next make sure you implement the three self-segmentation options that we mentioned today. These are going to save you time and allow you to collect information that helps your segmentation. I’ll just go over those again with you. Remember, you can use lists on your form to allow people to choose the type of content that they want to receive. They’re self-segmenting, right from the beginning of their relationship with you.

Also, you can use the update profile form in the footer of your campaigns that I mentioned earlier to collect information from your existing subscribers. This is really handy, because that less is more concept where you’re just getting the really needed information up front, and then you can appeal to them to give you more additional information later. You can send an email that focuses on asking people to update their profile with you. Finally, you can use that Click Segmentation tool in your emails, because when people click on a link, you know, they’re interested in that topic, product, or service, whatever it is that you’re featuring.

The last thing I want you to remember is that all of the data you collect in the self-segmentation options, and over time with your emails through the reporting we provide is going to help you improve your strategy. That segments tool within Constant Contact allows you to combine pieces of information, to create the right groups you can target with the right information. If you leave here today and only do one thing, make sure you use that Click Segmentation tool that will give you a great start at segmenting your list without a ton of effort from you.

Just remember to send targeted relevant information to the lists you create to improve your results. Let’s go ahead and recap. Constant Contact gives you reporting on opens, clicks, and other relevant information. Make sure you are looking at those analytics, because they too share a story. Look for trends and differences, tweak content, send times, segments. Test what works for you and compare your results. Don’t be afraid to try something different. In the beginning. I mentioned how I get asked what drives email results. We really focused here today on the segmenting, but there are other things like time to send, subject lines.

There’s a lot of really key, critical things that can definitely involve your engagement. Don’t be afraid to try new things. We’re here to help you grow together. Constant Contact has partnered with DonorPerfect and we’ve got an exclusive savings for you based on your attending this conference. You can go ahead and use this short URL to get started today, and DonorPerfect is going to give you 50% off for two months. Also, I just want to mention that we are going to be available to answer any questions that you may have in the lounge. Please do feel free to come join us in the lounge.

I do know the DonorPerfect salespeople, the account managers are going to be in the lounge as well. They are also going to be there and available to answer your questions. I think at this time, Sean, I just want to go ahead and say, bear with me one moment. I’d like to thank DonorPerfect for allowing me to be here today with all of you and thank you all for attending this session, because this session isn’t about DonorPerfect, it’s not about Constant Contact it’s about you.

As I mentioned in the beginning, this is now the Q and A time. We’ll also be available as I mentioned in the lounge. Sean, with DonorPerfect, has been alongside me today, virtually and at this time I’d like to turn it over to Sean and answer any questions you may have.

Sean: All right. Test, test. I think I’m back. All right, we’ve got several great questions going on. I’m just going to take it from the top under the Q and A session and then I’ll also double-check the chat, just to see if there’s anything I missed. The first question for you is we’ve got some folks wondering where they can locate the DP-specific templates in Constant Contact. They’ve checked the email template section and they just weren’t able to find them. Is that something we can highlight?

Amy: Yes, absolutely. If you have an existing, Constant Contact account and you’re on your campaigns tab and you click to create they’re in the template picker,. You actually have to click create, and then you would select the email campaign. There is where you’re going to see not only the Constant Contact templates, but you’re going to see those four categories of DonorPerfect templates.

If you don’t see them, it may be for some reason, your account, even though you’ve integrated the DonorPerfect integration with Constant Contact, you may not have a backend affiliation, so we’d want to make sure that you give our support team a call, that support team that we offer, and just see what we can do to fix that for you. Every affiliate of DonorPerfect will have those four categories of templates that I showed you earlier.

Sean: I’ll go ahead and put the partner support number in the answer to that Q and A question. If anybody’s interested, you’ll be able to access it there.

Amy: Great. Thank you, Sean.

Sean: Of course. All right. The second question when supporters unsubscribe, how do we make sure they are only unsubscribed from that particular list or segment not from all of them?

Amy: That’s a great question. When somebody clicks the unsubscribe, they are going to be unsubscribed from the entire account. Now there is a link, the update profile form that’s also available in the footer of your email campaigns is also available when they hit unsubscribe. If they go ahead and they click to update the profile and they deselect any list that they no longer want to be receiving those email campaigns they can do that. The only thing that can get a little tricky with that though, is because there is this automatic sync from DonorPerfect to Constant Contact. It’s possible that that contact could then be re-added on that overnight sync. You’re just going to want to be really careful with that.

Sean: Awesome. Thank you. All right. The next question can the tags feature integrate with DonorPerfect? Does that information get shared from Constant Contact over the DonorPerfect account?

Amy: Tags, they’re internal facing, they’re not external facing. There’s nothing that you can do in terms of tags that will sync with the DonorPerfect integration. However, you have to create those. You have to say, give me people who live in Orlando, and then I have to manually tag them. People can add themselves to a list. You have to manage tags and segmentation either can be done by you, or it can be done automatically.

For example, another option other than tagging those people, let’s say, for example, you have a field in DonorPerfect that’s listed as Volunteer Vendor Donor, and you have that as some segmented category and you upload that and you have a segment that’s pre-built. Once you sync that list,, it will automatically fill that segment. Segmentation may be the way to go there.

Sean: Okay. Then for our DonorPerfect users, that sounds like it would be an excellent use of the flag field.

Amy: I have to defer. I’m not very well versed on the actual integration. I just understand how it works so, hopefully that’s it.

Sean: That’s why we’re here together.

Amy: Okay. Yes, so can you confirm that?

Sean: Yes, if you were to use the flag field, I think that could serve a similar function when combined with our filters.

Amy: Okay, perfect. Great. Thank you.

Sean: All right. The next question is, can you segment on geography in Constant Contact? Which I believe you answered with your Orlando example, but I didn’t know if you wanted to elaborate on that.

Amy: Yes, absolutely. You can segment based on geography, but you can even drill it down. You can say, zip code 80525, 80537. You can do multiple criteria. You can do Florida, Georgia. Geographic location is definitely something that’s huge, because in the example that I gave, there’s going to be– Geographic location could have a lot of relevance depending on the list that you’re targeting.

Sean: Cool. All right. Here’s one. Is there a benefit for using a segment versus a contact list?

Amy: These are all great questions. Thank you. With the list, you can select a list and send to that list. Sometimes people don’t want to send to the entire list. They may want to only send to a chunk of that list. Like for example, if I’m a pet shop and I have cats, birds, and dogs, and I have an entire pet shop list, it’s going to go to everybody, but let’s say I’m having a sale on dog food. I probably want to just target the dog people. With a list, you can’t do that and then you’re going to run the risk of possibly somebody unsubscribing, because they’re not getting relevant emails.

Sean: All right. Let’s see scrolling through. Here’s an interesting one. Is there a way to see what a particular group has in common? That is how can I somehow see what a group that hasn’t clicked in the past few emails have in common with one another?

Amy: Okay, so that’s a great question. Basically what you’re asking is not only give me the last few people that haven’t clicked on any emails, but again, you can use that segmentation to drill it down further. You can say anybody that hasn’t clicked on an email in the last six months who is on this list. If you’ve created lists that have commonalities, you could do it that way. Segmentation has tons of options.

Some of it may actually require you exporting that information, because the reporting feature it’s very robust and it does give you the opportunity to export all that information. Some may require a little analysis, but I think the segmentation tool, I would definitely steer you to that segmentation tool, because I think it’s going to give you the ability to drill down to the level that you’re looking at.

Sean: Awesome. Here’s a more technical one. In addition to templates and the drag and drop branding, is there access to directly edit the CSS of email templates?

Amy: That’s a great question as well. Within the Constant Contact and DonorPerfect templates that you’re provided, there is not the ability to edit the CSS. However, we do have and it’s basically called an advanced editor. We do give you the ability to create your own custom-coded email templates.

Sean: All right.

Amy: I will say however, we are tracking that as a customer feedback. I’m not sure if it’s something that we’re actually looking at implementation, but we do give you that ability to create your own custom code templates.

Sean: Got you. All right. Here’s another one. I see the value in segmenting, but I’m not understanding how that is different from pulling a list. Oh, sorry. Bumped that and just moved on my screen. I’m not understanding how that is different from pulling a list out of DonorPerfect with filters. It seems it would be better to keep one database maintained versus two. I don’t know if you want to speak for the benefit of segmenting in Constant Contact versus letting the DonorPerfect filters create all of the lists.

Amy: I think there’s a lot of value in those filters. If I’m understanding correctly, the DonorPerfect filters will allow those contacts to actually be mapped to a specific list and that’s great and that does work for a lot of people. However, let’s say again if you have that donor mapping or that donor flag, but then you want to drill down and do things like, I’m only sending to people who attended conferences or who live in a certain geographical location. There’s segmentation, so flags do work quite well. Lists definitely do work and if that’s working for you, great, it’s just, you might get better results from drilling down those flags and using the segmentation tool.

Sean: To that from the DonorPerfect side of things, there may be some constituents within your organization that are not donors and therefore may not be in your DonorPerfect system, so of course, a list pulled from DonorPerfect wouldn’t include them. If that is a scenario that you find yourself having. All right, here’s a question, is Constant Contact a separate application from DonorPerfect?

Amy: It is. We’re a partner with DonorPerfect and we integrate with DonorPerfect and they’re a valued partner and as a result of DonorPerfect making a commitment to its customers, its non-profit organizations, they worked with Constant Contact to create these templates for you, but we are two different platforms that integrate.

Sean: I’ve certainly answered that question before in my day to day. All right. I think–

Amy: We feel the same.

Sean: Those questions keep coming in. I’ll keep popping. I think this is the most recent one that I’m going to check the chat. If someone updates their Constant Contact profile, does that sync back to DonorPerfect?

Amy: That, I don’t know. I can definitely look into that and let you know. I’m not sure if there’s a two-way sync back from Constant Contact.

Sean: I can speak to, I know some of the information such as if they responded to an email or if they’ve marked themselves unsubscribed that will transfer back over to DonorPerfect, but it’s not going to necessarily update the entire profile.

Amy: Okay. Whoever asked that question, if you want to join us in the lounge, I can definitely do some investigation on that and then when we’re in the lounge, after the keynote speaker, we can try and get that question answered accurately for you.

Sean: This is actually I think a question that I’ll want to field here, because it’s about DonorPerfect, but would you put members of your organization who are not donors into DonorPerfect? It depends on what their connection to your organization is while the name indicates that donors are the primary data point that we would recommend putting in your system many organizations will include volunteers and prospects as well, so you can certainly have a benefit of adding those, but that depends again, kind of on the size of your organization and the various databases that maybe you use in your day-to-day. Give me just a moment.

Amy: I do apologize. I must have spoken a little fast today. I do see that we got done a little bit early, so if I was speaking too fast for anyone, I do apologize.

Sean: I’m just going through and just making sure I’m not missing any questions.

Amy: Okay, perfect.

Sean: Here’s one. How can you create a segment of just folks who are not in DonorPerfect?

Amy: Well, that’s a good question. We do track the source. The source shows that it’s coming from a third party, but I don’t think source is one of the segmentation. What you could do is you could export your contacts to include the source and then you could sort by source– I’m just thinking out loud here. You could sort by source to see who was brought in by Constant Contact, excuse me, who you brought into Constant Contact that was not brought in via DonorPerfect. You’d have to export your contacts into a sort based on the source. You couldn’t really create a source is not a segmentation option. It’s great feedback. I can definitely pass that feedback along, but it’s just not currently an option.

Sean: Of course. All right. Here there’s two questions that are pretty similar. Give me a moment while I read them both over, and then I think you can probably answer them simultaneously. Someone just created a log in for Constant Contact to follow along with the live presentation. At the end of the presentation you provided the 50% off link. They currently have the 60-day free trial. Can they use the 50% discount at the end of the trial period? Then the other question was a similar question. They are paying for Constant Contact through DonorPerfect. Are they able to use the 50% discount on that as well? I don’t know if that’s something you want to address.

Amy: Definitely. The DonorPerfect for the person who’s in trial. That DonorPerfect promo that we provided is good through June 30th. Definitely, getting there with your free trial, check it out. The free trial does allow you to go in and use the system and see all of the cool features that it has, but it does have a send limit of a hundred.

Once you get up and ready to go, it might benefit you to pay for services anyway, but just to give you that timeline, it does end on June 30th for the existing customer. I would probably say reach out to the DonorPerfect account management directly and they can see if there’s anything that we can do on the backend. We don’t have so in place or special pricing.

Sean: Just keep an eye on the questions as they’re coming in now. If a user is already part of Constant Contact and you put them into DonorPerfect, will it put in a duplicate person or combine the user profiles? If you want to answer that from the Constant Contact side, I can then follow up from the DonorPerfect side for you.

Amy: Okay. Just to clarify, are you about if someone has an existing, Constant Contact account and then we affiliated on the backend?

Sean: I believe so.

Amy: Okay. That’s also an interesting question, because in the past we have not been able to migrate existing accounts under DonorPerfect. We are allowing them as a one off currently. I would definitely again say if this applies to you to contact the DonorPerfect account management team so that they can reach out to us, if we do, in fact affiliate your account on the backend it would just be business as usual for you. You would just be logging in and get the benefits of having that backend affiliation with DonorPerfect.

Sean: Then speaking from the DonorPerfect side, if you have an existing person in Constant Contact and they are existing in DonorPerfect. Then you link the two accounts, as long as the email address is the same, it should match them together. It won’t create like a new record in DonorPerfect.

Amy: Okay. Thank you for clarifying that.

Sean: If somebody unsubscribed, can they be resubscribed? My previous employer using Constant Contact said once they were unsubscribed, they could not be resubscribed with that same address. I don’t know if you can offer any insider or clarification on that.

Amy: I’d be happy to offer some clarification on that. We do, if somebody unsubscribed that is to protect that’s for us to comply with the can-spam laws. It also is to protect you from sending emails to people who don’t want to receive them. If they come back and they decide that they do want to resubscribe, that’s not a problem. We can definitely do that. You can’t do that though. They have to add themselves.

We give you tools like landing pages that you can send them to where they can, re-enter their email address and rejoin, or we have in Constant Contact. If someone’s unsubscribed, there’s actually a, button that says resubscribe and that automatically sends a link to that contact record that they can click on to get re added. Maybe the confusion there was that you weren’t able to add them, which is correct. They have to add themselves.

Sean: Makes sense. All right. This is the last one I’ve

Amy: Got one time for one more, Sean.

Sean: I was going to say we have one more in the Q and A and then we’ll go into our wrap up. We purchased the mailing list and therefore discovered we could not use Constant Contact utility to contact them. Is there a way to circumvent this issue?

Amy: I’m sorry. I was talking, I didn’t catch a great part of that.

Sean: We purchased a mailing list and therefore discovered we could not use Constant Contact utility to contact them. Is there a way to circumvent this issue?

Amy: There is not Constant Contact is a permission-based program and one of the first slides that I showed was we are first in class with deliverability. We have 97% deliverability rate. That is because of our relationships that we’ve built with these internet service providers and these email service providers, and purchase lists is a really good way to get marked as spam. It’s your reputation and it’s our reputation. We do require that anyone using Constant Contact has permission from the contact directly, either express or implied to email to Constant Contact purchase lists are not allowed, but I’m sorry. You did have that experience. I would definitely stay away from purchase lists. They’re no bueno.

Sean: All right. I see there are some more questions coming in, but at this time I would recommend joining Amy in the lounge related this afternoon. Amy, if you want to provide them with the time on that one again, when you’ll be available.

Amy: Sure. Actually, we have– Thanks. I don’t think I was clear. We do have some Constant Contact marketing support in the Constant Contact lounge now. Please feel free to join. They are available. I’m going to jump in after the keynote speaker, but you will have all day long and tomorrow you will have access to somebody at Constant Contact who would be more than happy to talk to you about these scenarios. I greatly appreciate your engagement and these questions. They were all really great questions.

Sean: All right. Well, I want to thank everybody for attending our session and Amy, I want to thank you for taking the time to join us today. Thank we hope that you’ll all join us in a few moments for our keynote where their story begins, lessons from community-centric and donor-centric voices given by Rob Healy. At this time we’ll be ending this session and we hope to see you all in the keynote.

Amy Thank you everyone and thank you, Sean. Greatly appreciate it.

Sean: Absolutely. Bye.

Amy: All right, bye.