Constant Contact’s Matthew Montoya on Why Text + Email Is a Winning Combination in 2021

EZ Texting Partner Marketing Manager Amir Motameni spoke with Constant Contact’s Channel Marketing and Enablement Manager Matthew Montoya on how small businesses can better engage their customers and why text messaging and email are a match made to power growth.

EZ Texting: Perfect. Thank you for that. So, why is the combination of email marketing and text marketing so effective?

Matthew Montoya: The combination of email marketing and text marketing is so effective because marketing is all about relevancy today. People expect a personalized experience. And I don't mean necessarily that every piece of marketing says their name but more that the content is relevant, meaning it's actually about them. They're seeing their lives, their worlds. Especially in email marketing, the more you stay top of mind the more likely you are to convert them when the time comes. Email marketing can also help you segment and that's going to be a key theme in what I talk about today.

According to a study by e-marketer 80% of marketers say that email drives retention and repurchase, and according to help scout segmentation of email can increase click-through rates by 50%. So what is segmentation? Segmentation is simply taking a large group of people and breaking it up into smaller groups. Those smaller groups can be segmented by interests, geography, or gender, anything that's going to make your content more relevant to them. Email marketing is a great way to keep them right with you and text marketing is an amazing way to get them to act right now.

EZ Texting: Awesome. How much demand is there for text marketing as a service offering amongst your customer base?

Matthew Montoya: We're seeing heavy demand in all sorts of integrated experiences, especially in SMS and text marketing. A salon can build a relationship with email marketing, they can sustain a relationship, stay top of mind, use segmentation to find out what kind of services somebody might be interested in, or what kind of offers they are particularly interested in. But if you combine that with SMS you can not only remind them of an appointment, but you can also send them an immediate discount, knowing that they're interested in that discount because you're monitoring what they clicked on in your email marketing. It just makes sense to combine them together. On top of that, we're finding that a lot of customers are really interested in utilizing experiences, integrations, like EZ Texting, that share our belief in customer support and providing value and trust that our relationships are going to be good for their relationships too.

EZ Texting: So how can SMBs improve their engagement with their customers?

Matthew Montoya: Small businesses can improve their engagement with our customers doing the same thing small businesses have been doing and should be doing all along. It's all about knowing your customer. It's all about knowing what your customer is like, where they're from, what they're interested in. As I said, it's not enough just to share information anymore. With mobile devices you need to keep content succinct and it has to be relevant to the audience. And the only way you can keep that content relevant to your audience is knowing your customer, knowing your audience. So, if you want to improve engagement, you have to provide that relevant segmented content to them with maybe some personalization, literally showing information about them so that they'll pay attention to it in the act on it, combine that with SMS marketing, and now you can get them to act on that relationship. Immediately.

EZ Texting: Love it. So, why is the EZ Texting and Constant Contact integration so important for our mutual customers?

Matthew Montoya: The EZ Texting and Constant Contact integration is so important to our mutual customers because small businesses crave integrations. They want tools that they can use from companies they trust to work together to help them grow.

You know, if we think about the most used apps on your smartphone, I'd be willing to bet that it’s going to be texting and email. A lot of people don't think of those as apps, but we live in those apps now. Who else lives in those apps? Small business customers. So having this integration is really key to helping small businesses grow. Texting and email marketing kind of go together like peanut butter and jelly. They're very powerful tools by themselves, but if you integrate them and you use them strategically together, you can have fantastic results.

EZ Texting: How has your customer's behavior changed during Covid? Are they using Constant Contact platform differently?

Matthew Montoya: We saw more small businesses turn to constant contact during Covid than at any time in our history. But if you think about it, it's not that big a surprise. A lot of small businesses had been kicking the can down the road in regards to digital marketing and suddenly realized that they had no other choice because doing things the same old way wasn't going to work anymore. So there was a massive pivot to go online, to revamp or build a website, and to offer things through e-commerce. And utilizing email, social, and SMS to communicate and stay top of mind with customers became not just a nice-to-have, but a must-have during Covid.

Now, what we're seeing as we start to leave the COVID scenario, is that small businesses are continuing to embrace best practices in these tools because consumer expectations have changed. It's more important than ever to make sure that you're utilizing digital tools like email and text to keep those customers top of mind, motivated, and engaged.