If you're a regular here, you already know that
Constant Contact is the industry leader in email marketing. We use it for our own business and
recommend it to our small business and non-profit clients. Constant Contact helps you create emails
that stand out on any device. They have hundreds of these pre-designed templates suited for every
occasion and platform, and the easy-to-use editor means you don't need a degree in marketing to
design beautiful and effective email campaigns. So let's l
ook for a moment at a side-by-side
comparison. Here we have a plain text email that you might send out through Gmail or Outlook
or Yahoo. And here is that exact same text plugged into an email template from Constant Contact. Just
the addition of the header there makes it look so much more professional and the "Rregister Now"
button makes it easy for people to take action. But if we add an eye-catching graphic
like this one we created with Canva, now this email really pops both on desktop an
d
mobile, plus I can use this same image on our website, on our social media, on YouTube for a
really compelling and comprehensive campaign. Side by side there's really no comparison. And
the entire thing, including the graphic email and social media posts, took me less than 20
minutes. Today we're going to show you how. We're going to start with Canva. Canva is an
online design platform for people who are not graphic designers. And just so you know, we
are not affiliated with Canva in any
way. We don't get anything if you sign up. I'm just
a big Canva nerd. It's probably my favorite thing on the internet, so I feel really strongly
if that if you're not using it you should be. Kind of the top three things I love about it are:
first and foremost, it's easy to use. It has a drag and drop editor so you don't need an art
degree to make beautiful eye-catching visuals. True story: my 12 year old uses it to make
thumbnails for his YouTube channel, so if he can do it you can do it.
it's very accessible.
Secondly there's a free version and it's very robust, unlike a lot of these free resources
out there. The free plan includes more than a million photos and graphics and a quarter million
templates for you to customize. If you do decide you want to upgrade to the pro version, it's like
$120- $150 a year or so. Not crazy expensive; less than Netflix. But for a lot of you, the free
version will be really all you need. It's very robust. And lastly Canva integrates seamless
ly
with all the top email service providers including our favorite, Constant Contact. So what I'm
going to do now is do a live demo to show you some of the graphic design features of Canva and
how you can use use it to create custom images, and then after that we'll wrap up this
webinar by showing you how to beam those images directly into Constant Contact for use
in your email marketing, social media posts, etc. So let me switch cameras here. [Catrine]
And I'm going to add while she does
that, I'm going to remind you that you have the question box
and I'm monitoring that during the whole webinar here. [Dixie] Thank you, that is so helpful.
Okay so you're seeing my Canvas screen, correct? Yes, awesome. Okay so when you go to login it's
just Canva, c-a-n-v-a, and up here you can sign up. Again, free to sign up, free to use unless
you find you want to upgrade to the pro version. So I'm already signed. Whoops,
let's get it back there. We'll get it back in one second. All right
so I am already signed in. Right here
is where you can search for whatever you want. So if you are trying to create an email, a blog,
you know whatever it is you're looking for, a social media post, right here is where you can
search. You can search by the type of thing that you're correct trying to create or you can search
by keywords. So if you are an animal shelter you could search by "dog" or "cat" or "animal" and
it's going to give you some templates things would be helpful to you. You
can also click here
where it says "Create a design" and choose from these options. And one of the things I love about
Canva is it already knows what size you need for commonly-used things. So for like Instagram
posts, for example, or you can always create a custom size down here. For example, if you always
use the same size image on your blog or in your emails that you're sending out to customers, you
can create a custom size and then it's there every time. So whatever photos people are se
nding you
to use in your email, you just zip them right into that custom size and they're always going to be
correct. [Catrine] I actually have a question from Samantha about exactly this. We just created,
if you go to our YouTube channel and I hope you subscribe to it, we have a short video about
exactly how to add images to a set size. [Dixie] Absolutely, yeah. So check that out. But right
here where it says "create design" and "custom size," that is going to be what you use that for
if
you're specifically just using an image but want to make it a different size. Okay so right
here for today's demonstration, let's pretend that you are a realtor and that you know you have a
blog and you have social media but you're sending out email marketing to your people every month to
keep you top-of-mind with that audience because in your business, you really want people to remember
who you are to refer you to friends and that kind of stuff. So let's pretend we're a realtor. I'm
just g
oing to click on it and you'll see that there's 3,470 templates with the word "realtor."
I could also choose "real estate" or similar words and get other types of templates. Here what we
have are some beautiful design templates that you can pick and customize for your use. There's
lots of things here. This is something pretty that you might want to put in your email. Here here's
a nice little one that you might want to put on your social media. You can even make postcards,
a lot of differen
t things that you can click and customize. So for today we're talking about email
marketing, which I'll give you a fun little tip. We often encourage people if they're going to
write content for their email they might as well put it on their website as a blog because that's
going to improve your search engine optimization and then you can put that same content in an
email to your customers, your clients, your leads. And now you have used your time wisely and
used it in both places. You can
also take little snippets of it and put it on your social media.
So now you've gotten three different places. I'm looking, since it's going to be for email,
I'm looking for kind of a simple design, not too busy. Let's try this one and we just say
"customize this template." This is what is going to go at the top of the email that we're going to
send out every month to our real estate customers and leads and clients. All right, so we always
want to give them some content that's useful to them
. It's not always about us. Sometimes you
want to give them reasons why they should choose you as a realtor - what makes you the best. But
typically you want to give them things that are helpful to them. So maybe information about
home staging or improving your curb appeal, what's going on with interest rates, that kind of
thing. Let's say this month we're going to send them something about home staging so we just
literally type over the words that are there. And let's say we're going to ca
ll it
"10 tips for Home Staging." Then I can either delete this, or I could bring
it down here and make it my website. You know whatever, I'm the best realtor.com.
All right then we need to look for some images that we want. So I'm going to go over here
in the left side where it says "Elements" and type in anything that you might want.
So in this case I'm doing "home staging" and it's going to give me all kinds of
options ... graphics, videos, photos, even little frames that look like home
s.
Right now I'm looking for photos. So I could pull any of these in and make this part
of my design. Let's give this one a try. [Catrine] When you look at those, you could see
that some have a little crown on it. That means if you are using their free version, you you have to
pay extra for those. And the ones without a crown or the ones you can use. But with the Pro version,
everything is included. [Dixie] Absolutely, and again, that's I want to $13ish a month, or you
can get it $120 - 15
0 a year, not super expensive. I would go through and kind of try different ones
to see which ones I think go best with my color scheme, which ones speaks best to my customers.
You know you're going to have a different looking house if you're in Florida versus California
versus the middle of the country. I'm gonna do this one because it's free, it doesn't have a
little crown. And I just really love the aesthetic of it. So I can pop that right in there. I'll
show you another example. If I go
back to this one and I don't like the way it looks, I can always
double-click on it and move it up or down so I could show a little more of the chair if that
was more important, or a little more of the artwork on the wall. You can always move things
around. But I'm going to go back to this one. So we've changed our title, we've changed our
picture, we've added this here. Another little thing you might want to add is your logo. It's
always good to brand so let's pop that in there. It's over
on the left side - this is where you
upload files. If you click "upload," you can upload things for future use. They'll always be
there in your library to reuse again and again. And then I literally clicked on it and it popped
it right in here and I can move it anywhere I want. I can also resize it. Now we have something
that looks really custom. And say that this font doesn't really speak to your brand, say you have
something that's a little bit more feminine or a little bit more personal
, you can change
the font as well. I'll just click on this, click here, and there's thousands of
different fonts you can choose from. This one's a little bit more feminine
I think, and I can make it bigger. See how nice that looks? Another thing I like to
play with is color. We talk a lot about branding. When you send things out, we don't want it to
look like a mismatch of things from everywhere. You always want to have the same fonts, the same
colors so that it's instantly recognizable an
d looks very custom to your organization. This
is a font that you would want to use again and again on all your different pieces. Now let's
look at colors. So this right here is a little graphic that's kind of overlaid over the photo.
You see that it's somewhat transparent. You can make it more or less, depending, and you can also
change the color. So we have like little branding kits, Canva allows you to do that, where we've
saved the colors from some of our clients. I could change this co
lor, if this was the client I
was working on - and you'll save yours there - and these are the colors from your logo the colors,
from your website, the ones that you want to use consistently again and again. I could change
it to the colors that I've decided to use. They also have a little Color Picker here
that shows colors specifically from the photo, so you could pick those as well. This is a
really useful thing. And if you click this one right here, it's got this little dropper and
you
can pick a very specific color. If I wanted to get this green out of this flower I could,
but all these are different ways that you can customize this image. So this looks great! I
mean this took me, what, two or three minutes? Another thing you can do is, we like to batch
these. Your time is important. You don't want to have to recreate the wheel every time. If
you just click this plus sign to duplicate, now you've got two of these. And say next
month you want to do a different email and t
his is going to be about interest rates going
down, or about curb appeal, or about what to do if you're trying to sell in your home during the
holidays, you've recreated this and all you have to do is change the words and change the image. So
next month's could be "Amp up your curb appeal." All we have to do is change out your text.
I'm going to look over here in the elements section for something having to do with curb
appeal. We could pick any of these that we want and just pop them right
in there. I kind
of move this up or down, depending if I wanted to see more of the house or more of the
grounds. Now we've got two beautiful images that have our brand colors have our brand fonts
and have our logo, all perfectly ready to go. When you have your image ready, then it's "well,
what are we going to do with it?" One thing you can do is just download it - download it to your
computer. And you click the "Share" button and then you click "Download." But if you're
going to use Cons
tant Contact or any email service provider, we can show you how to beam them
directly in there. Again with the share button, you're going to click "More" and then right in
here I'm just going to type "Constant Contact" and you'll be able to share it directly.
So I'm using a test account. I'm not going to do it live. But I'm going to show you on
our slides in just a second step by step how to do that. But before we move on, are there
questions about the design process in Canva? [Catrine] I h
ave one here from Miranda. If you
click on elements again over there. No that was probably not the right one. She asked "can you use
your own photos?" [Dixie] Absolutely, so that's "Uploads" right here. When you click "Uploads" to
upload files, if I click this it's going to bring up my desktop. You could also upload things from
your Google Drive, you know that kind of stuff, anywhere that you have access to files you can
upload them here. That's how we got this logo in here is I uploaded it
from my computer. This
is a recent photo I uploaded from a client. So, yes, you can upload your own photos,
graphics, logos, anything that you have. Great question. Any more about the using Canva and
the design process before we move on? [Catrine] I don't see any more questions about that. [Dixie]
Okay let's switch screens then and go back. Okay so before ... Canva has been around
for a while ... the only choice was to download these to your computer and
then re-upload them to your websit
e, re-upload them the Constant Contact, re-upload
them to Facebook and YouTube and all the different places. But now they have this cross
device editor where you don't have to do that, where you can connect directly to it.
So let me show you how that's done, From your Canva account, you're going to click
"Create a design" and select the type of graphic that you want to create. That's the process I
just showed you. You're going to choose your size, customize it as much as little or you like,
like I just showed you in the live demo. Once you've finished with your graphic and you're
happy with it, you're going to click "Share" up at the top-right corner and then from the drop down
menu, select "more." We got that far. You're going to search for "Constant Contact" or your email
service provider and select it from the menu. You're going to click "use" to publish your design and that's going to put it into
your Constant Contact library. And then finally you'll click "connect." If y
ou haven't already done so, you'll
want to log into your Constant Contact account. If you don't have an account,
let us know we can hook you up with one. So you'll click "allow" - and you only have to
do this part once - to grant Canva permission to connect to your account. And of course if
you ever want to disconnect it for any reason, you can do that within the Canva editor. [Catrine]
You have to do that in order for the two programs to communicate, giving your permission.
[Dixie] And th
en from the drop down menu, you're going to select the file type that you
want and click "Save." So a little pro tip here: for either email or web use, we highly recommend
that you use the JPEG file type. These are going to be good quality but with a smaller file size so
that readers don't lose patience with you waiting for those big images to upload. The other option
you might need, on occasion, is a PNG. That's only for when you need something with a transparent
background, maybe like a l
ogo or something. But for the vast majority of uses, JPEGs are
going to be your go-to for email or web use. And finally select "view in constant context" so
you'll be able to view that graphic that you just made and use it in your email marketing
campaign. Because it's in your library, you could use it over and over again. Once in the
Constant Contact editor, you can either insert or replace a blank image block. You're going to
select your fancy new graphic from the library and click and -
bam! - beautiful email ready to go.
Catrine, I know you have a best practice to share about repeating the text that's on the graphic
also within the body of the email? [Catrine] Yes, so the images you put in here, they should only
be like a headline, something to grab people's attention to read the text. Because anyone reading
on their cell phone, it's tiny. You don't want them to sit there and expand and contract the the
image, the text on an image. So both on a website and in email market
ing, you want to use images,
maybe a headline, but the text the content needs to be in the text. The one you see further down
here that says "Get fit with our..."and so on. When we first saw the very first layout for a
realtor, many of those were for printed materials, printed flyers, and tthat concept is not going
to work with email. You cannot put a PDF file and people can look. It has to be an image
file, a JPEG file, that people are looking for, both in email and on a website. It's impo
rtant
to, don't start to create some kind of look like a printed newsletter, and then try to push
that into an email, because then people have to open up here and open up here and open up there.
That's not how email works and people are used to reading like this and just scrolling down.
[Dixie] Yeah, those are great tips, absolutely. Because this image is now in your Constant
Contact library, it's also available to use in other things, like social media posts which can
be created and sched
uled within Constant Contact. So it's kind of a one-stop shop. They have a few
different plans, so if you're on the Light plan, which I think starts around $12 a month, that
social media post would go right away. If you're on a Standard plan, you have the option to either
post it right now or schedule it for later. So if you're trying to get it all done at once, you
can schedule one for today one for Wednesday, one for Friday. You can work that way in
advance. So we know this was a super qu
ick and kind of a simple example. We try to show
you as much as possible in a 30 minute workshop, but if you missed a step not to worry. We'll
be sending out a follow-up email later today with a copy of the slide deck and also a replay of
this so you can see step by step what we did. And we'll also post it on our YouTube channel. So
let's see if you guys have any more questions. Speak now, we are here. [Catrine] Yeah,
Miranda asked "Are each of those steps repeated to incorporate Canva crea
tion into your
website, blog, social media, etc?" No, you only connect Canva with Constant Contact once but
when it comes to putting things on your website, then you have to download it and upload it to the
server for the website. But with social media, yes you only do this connection once and you use
the part in Constant Contact where you can post the social media. [Dixie] Great question [Catrine]
And then "Can you put videos created in Canva into Constant Contact?" Yes, I think it's the s
ame
thing there. You never see email with a playing video, but people click on it and it opens up and
you can see. [Dixie] Yeah you can have a link to a YouTube video, but you can download videos to your
Constant Contact library for use on social media as well. So if you have a short 10-15 second
video that you're going to use in your feed, you can do that as well. [Catrine] And someone
asking if someone recommends doing a Canva website then transferring to Constant Contact versus
creating
it in Constant Contact's integration? If you have created a website in Constant Contact
before you can work on that but they do not, at this time, offer a website creation in Constant
Contact. I would use Canva to get an idea what a website would look like, but then you will
need to build it in the website software which is different. [Dixie] Yeah, and we recommend
WordPress. WordPress is sort of the industry standard if you're looking to build a website.
We do that as well, and we have ot
her workshops that are specifically about getting started and
building a website. Sp you can check this out on our YouTube channel, or just give us an email or
call - we answer every one - and we'll be glad to point you in the right direction. [Catrine]
Linda, I see you have a question. I don't know the answer to that one, so send us an email and
we will reply to that later on today. [Dixie] All good questions. All right, we're gonna move
on them. We are going to take a little bit of a hiat
us for the summer, but we invite you back
in September for our next free Workshop. The link and QR code to register for that are on
the screen. We're going to be starting a new series called "Bootcamp for Small Business" and
the first topic is "Online Marketing." This is kind of what we're talking about here. We're
going to cover the basics of online marketing including how customers find you online, how to
set yourself up for success, and how to encourage that new and repeat business. We i
nvite you
to join us for that. If you are interested in trying Constant Contact for email marketing,
we use it for ourselves and many of our clients, you can get 30% off the first three months with
this referral link. And we'll help kick start your campaign by designing a custom email template
for your organization. So we encourage you to give that a try, no risk. [Catrine] Yeah, if you start
to set it up and you get stuck in the beginning, if you use that link give us a call or send
us an
email and we will be happy to help you. [Dixie] We do a drawing after every
webinar for a free consultation, so please check your follow-up email later today
to see if you've won. We'll include a copy of the slide deck as well as a replay of the video. With
that, here's our contact information. If you have any questions we're only a phone call away. We
invite you to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more helpful marketing tidbits. Thank you so
much for joining us. You've really been a v
ery good audience, and we look forward to seeing
you again in September! [Catrine] Thank you!
Comments
Excellent presentation!