(I’ve been getting a lot of requests for creative ways to use the specific functionality of Constant Contact, so I have decided to post periodic tips for using the product in creative ways.)
Consumers want emails with short, concise information that’s easy to scan. Businesses want to deliver as much content as possible to differentiate themselves and educate customers and prospects. No wonder the email inbox is such a hostile environment! This tip helps you to make your emails more concise while giving your prospects and customers access to all your information using Constant Contact’s new Archive Feature.
Using the archive feature allows you to ’save’ your emails and create a link to them so the public can access them from your website. Archiving your emails is a great idea for at least 3 reasons:
- Archiving allows your website visitors to get to know your business through your email content without being a subscriber to your email list.
- Archiving allows your email subscribers to find information sent to them via email after they have deleted it or when their email is being blocked or filtered unintentionally.
- Archived emails add content to your website and improve your search engine rankings (especially when your emails contain good content and key words).
Here’s how you can use this exciting new feature to keep your emails more concise while still delivering lots of important information:
- Create a long version of your email. Include entire full-length articles, images, product descriptions, coupons, or anything else you want your audience to see. You’re not going to send this version to your audience (at least not directly to their inboxes) so make it as long as you want it to be.
- Save the email as a draft, then archive it.
- Create a short version of the same email by copying the long version and renaming it “emailname_short_date.” This is the version you’re going to send out.
- Change the content of your new short version by replacing the long full-length articles and product descriptions with short summaries, bullets, or the first few sentences of each section or article. The shorter version will be easier for your audience to scan and decide whether they are interested enough to read your email’s long version.
- Type “Read Entire Article…” or “Read All…” beneath your short version’s article summaries. Highlight the text and click the link creation tool to make the text into a link.
- Copy the archive link that points to the long version of your newsletter and paste it in to the link field in the link creation tool. (You can access the archive link by clicking the URL link next to the long version of your email on your archive manager page). Your short version is now linked to your long version so your audience can access the long version if they show interest in a particular section or article.
- Repeat this process until all of your summary articles or sections have a link to the long version of your email, then test the email and send it out.
If you have multiple articles in your long version and some of the articles begin beneath the bottom of the computer screen on your archive page, you might want to name the links in your short version appropriately so that you prompt your audience to scroll down after they click. For example, a link in the short version of an email newsletter with three articles might read “See Full Version (Scroll to Article 3)” under the article 3 summary.
For more help with Constant Contact’s archive feature, check out the Constant Contact Support Blog or log in to your account and click “get help” to search the answers database.
John Arnold is the author of Email Marketing for Dummies and the Director of Constant Contact’s local experts program.
