Sky's the Limit With Constant Contact

For Kerry Slattery of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, the timing of ABA's announcement of a new partnership with Constant Contact -- a company that provides services to manage e-mail marketing campaigns -- could not have been better. "I was just getting ready to do our regular e-mail newsletter for April and the announcement coincided with that," Slattery told BTW. She said she signed up with Constant Contact and e-mailed the newsletter to her list of 2,200 subscribers that very day. "It looked very good.... And I think it worked great!"

ABA announced its new partnership with Constant Contact at the end of March. Through the partnership, all participating ABA member bookstores are provided access to Constant Contact's suite of tools, which make it easier to create and send compelling e-mail newsletters. In addition, participants earn annual rebates.

Constant Contact's software allows booksellers to not only create professional looking e-mail newsletters but also to collect site visitor e-mail addresses and interests; import in-house permission-based e-mail addresses; target e-mails to specific audiences; manage lists and track results; and more. The program is also CAN-SPAM compliant.

Slattery noted that once she had figured out what template to use for her store's newsletter, the rest was simple -- even importing the e-mail addresses and names from her store's database "turned out to be really easy," she said. "It's a one-time upload.... It let's you choose just some of the fields [from your own database] and [the upload] was ... instant. And when I sent it out, it was instant -- that was great."

A key benefit of the Constant Contact software is the reporting feature available via the Constant Contact website. Once the newsletter was e-mailed, "I got a report, it was exciting to me," Slattery said. "It let me know if e-mails had bounced and the different reasons for it," and "it allows to see who clicked what -- it's useful to know the kind of things people are interested in." Moreover, the online report provides the user with real-time information, she noted.

Slattery also pointed out that being able to provide links in the newsletter back to the Skylight Books website is also helpful, not to mention a great impetus for keeping the store's website up-to-date. "The newsletter has a few short articles -- we had one about the Campaign for Reader Privacy and so we had a link: click here to sign the petition," she said.

Thus far, the response from Skylight newsletter subscribers has been positive. "I received some e-mails saying, 'We like the new format,'" Slattery said. "It was easy, and it appears to be effective."

ABA member bookstores that sign up through the ABA reseller program will earn rebates for their participation and will earn an annual rebate equal to the average of one month's Constant Contact fees. (For example, if over a 12-month period you pay an average of $30/month to Constant Contact, you'll get a $30 rebate from ABA.) And BookSense.com participants will earn an annual rebate equal to two months' Constant Contact fees.

For more information on Constant Contact, click here. For a previous article on Constant Contact, click here.

For more information, contact Len Vlahos via e-mail at [email protected]. -- David Grogan