Most of us get a lot of e-newsletters every week. Most of them are powered by Constant Contact. But, given the alternative means that local businesses have to communicate (blogs, RSS, videos, podcasts, etc.), is the era of the e-newsletter fading?
Constant Contact doesn’t think so. The 250-person, Mass.-based company has 100,000+ accounts. “We’re continuing to move up significantly,” says Senior VP Eric Groves. The majority of accounts are in the lower tier client base, paying $15 or $30 per month.
It would seem the company’s highly diversified customer base would be an early warning system for any big shift to other media. “It looks like a pie chart of the U.S. economy,” Groves notes – with a slightly higher dose of key small business and organizational accounts, including retail, business consultants, marketing consultants, non-profits and religious organizations. Eighty percent have 25 or fewer employees. Fifty percent have five or fewer employees.
But Groves says he hasn’t seen organic demand for video “or other bells and whistles” from his customer base. “Why does the average day spa need a blog?” he says. “One really good email per month causes a dramatic increase in their business.” To that end, the company provides regularly scheduled Webinars around the country to teach small businesses how to produce more effective newsletters.
Groves adds that the majority of Constant Contact’s customers come from referrals, but its partner program also contributes to the base. Among its top partners are AOL, Network Solutions, and American Express. “Plus thousands of designers.”
The plain text (except for links) email done right is still the best traffic driving tool around.
We just got our weekly missive out late on a Friday afternoon when our traffic generally starts trailing off (about four hours off schedule). Roughly 4,000 opt-ins. We screwed up the first thousand (one of those weeks). And we STILL got a 7% clickthrough and a 50% bump in pageviews over the rest of the day.
Yeah, the gearheads want RSS. But most folks still respond to an email. And linked text works on any computer or handheld.
2 Trackbacks
[...] Read more here. [...]
[...] Constant Contact, the leader among email marketing services for small businesses with 120,000 customers mailing out 500 million emails a year, has filed for an IPO. In the S1, the company says it is looking to expand its services beyond email to include survey solutions and upgrades, such as logos and archive access. (a May profile of the company is here). [...]