Tips on Using Constant Contact to Create Your Company Newsletter

By: Dina Giolitto

If you run your own business like I do, you don’t have much time
to spend fudging around with new programs. Here are some tricks
I picked up while using Constant Contact's email marketing
software to create my company newsletter.

First things first: gather up some subscribers!

Before you do anything, place the subscriber sign-up box on your
website, and anywhere else that your portfolio is displayed
online. You can’t send out a newsletter if you have no
subscribers! By the time you’re finished learning the Constant
Contact ropes, you’ll have at the very least a handful of
interested readers—but hopefully, more!

Make your visitor sign-up form as simple as possible.

You’ve already lucked out once because someone took time out of
their busy day to pay attention to you. The worst thing you can
possibly do now is make them work to become a subscriber. To
simplify the process, go to Constant Contact's More Features
section where you can "Customize Your Visitor Sign-Up Form."
Other than their Name, Company Name and State, uncheck all the
contact information boxes. You can always take down their
information later, if they decide to become an actual client.

Write and/or collect your articles ahead of time.

If you’re a writer, you’ll hopefully have some decent material
of your own on hand, saved onto your hard drive. If you don’t
have any articles, now would be a good time to write some. Don’t
type them directly into your newsletter from scratch. Navigating
through an unfamiliar program is a big enough headache without
trying to create error-free content. Use a word-processing
program you’re familiar with, then save and store the files so
your articles can be accessed easily, for this or any other
project.

If you’re not a writer and don’t intend to become one, go
directly to Ezinearticles.com. This website showcases thousands
of talented authors offering valuable tips. Many allow you to
publish their work without even having to ask (although some
require a quick permission request by email). Asking permission
to use someone’s article is a great way to expand your circle of
contacts! Once you’ve found the articles you’d like to feature,
copy and paste the text into a file stored on your computer.

Prepare your company logo in advance.

Constant Contact allows you to "pop in" your logo and resize it
to fit the page using their prescribed measurements. My logo is
300x180 pixels, but you can size yours to whatever specs you’d
like. Save it as a .jpeg file and then upload it to your
website. You’ll be accessing it from this URL later on.

I decided that my masthead looked a lot cooler as part of my
logo than in boring Arial type, so I designed the name of my
publication “The Good Word: Wordfeeder.com’s Writing and
Marketing Newsletter” right into the logo. With that in mind...

Go ahead and break all the formatting rules.

You don’t have to type the “suggested details” where Constant
Contact indicates. If they offer a space for you to type your
company newsletter name, but your name is already visible in
your logo, just don’t type it into the box! If you don't like
their "privacy policy" letter, write your own! Go on, break the
rules. Delete that line where they ask for the date if you want.
Don't add "helpful tips" like they suggest. You know you’re a
rebel deep down.

Set the Global Colors and Fonts before you create your
articles (not after!).

Your newsletter format should reflect the same style as your
website. My font of choice is Arial, color 996600--Wordfeeder's
signature Sienna brown. If you’re waffling around about point
sizes and headline colors, use Article 1 as an experimental
template. Type in some jibberish, and a bogus headline. Preview
several times, playing around with font sizes until you’re
satisfied with the whole look. Then preset your Global Colors
and Fonts to match. When you’re ready to pop in your article,
you can be sure it will be designed to your liking.

Note: Global Color and Font changes don’t affect existing text.
If you type your first article in Verdana and then make Arial
your Global Font, guess what, your first article is still in
Verdana. To save yourself a huge headache, set the colors and
fonts BEFORE you enter your content.

When entering article text, Control-A, Control-C and
Control-V are your best friends.

God willing, you already know that these keys stand for
Highlight All, Copy and Paste. This is the quickest way to
transfer an entire body of text from one file or program to
another. Open the original file containing your article, hit the
Control-A and Control-C keys in succession. Your text will be
highlighted, and then stored in your computer’s memory. Now go
to Paragraph 1 of your Contant Contact Article template, and do
a Control-V. The entire article will flow into the box. Use your
down-arrow key to move down the article body and insert html
paragraph breaks between each paragraph. Use your Preview screen
to make sure everything’s lining up.

"But wait!" you say. "Constant Contact’s article format shows
one box per paragraph. That means they want me to copy each
paragraph at a time into each box." Pah! Constant Contact
doesn't care how you create your newsletter. They just want you
to sign up for their software. If you really want to, you can
copy in each paragraph at a time, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Just fill in those paragraph breaks, and the pain of creating a
newsletter will be over before you know it.

Add images by uploading photos to your website and then
pasting the URL into the Constant Contact format.

This is an arduous process, and you may not care enough to
include pictures, but I like my newsletter to look jazzy, so I
use them. You can search for royalty-free images on
www.picturequest.com, or you can get photos from another source
if you have one. Select images that pertain to your content. For
example, I found a picture of a turtle to use with an article
about Slow Days at Work. It’s up to you how much time you spend
on the aesthetics of your emailed newsletter, but I for one
appreciate a quality presention so I would say, go all out!

Use the Quicklinks as an opportunity for free
advertising.

Once again, I recommend deviating from the newsletter template.
You can link to anything you want here; a selection of product
you sell, the writing or design samples of your website, or even
the website of a friend or business partner.

Don’t create a brand new newsletter campaign from scratch
each time you want to mail your subscribers.

The “Copy Campaign” button is an incredibly handy tool that
duplicates a newsletter you’ve already completed and sent. All
you have to do is change the name of the campaign, and replace
the former articles, headlines and photos with new ones. So if
you had some trouble getting your first newsletter in order,
breathe easy. You’ll never have to worry about it again. Just
take care to update all of the information so you don’t
accidently send dupes of articles you ran last month!

Constant Contact is a bit tricky at first, but with a little
patience, you, too can have your own email newsletter up and
running in no time.

Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.

Dina Giolitto:
Dina Giolitto is a New-Jersey based Copywriting Consultant with
nine years' industry experience. Her current focus is web
content and web marketing for a multitude of products and
services although the bulk of her experience lies in retail for
big-name companies like Toys"R"Us. Visit
http://www.wordfeeder.com for rates and samples.