About
Julie Niehoff has more than fifteen years in communications, specializing in technology marketing for small business and nonprofits.
In her role as Sr. Regional Development Director at Constant Contact, Niehoff’s primary focus is on helping small businesses, associations and other organizations to incorporate technology into their marketing plans, finding creative, affordable, effective strategies for building strong relationships with their customers and member base.
Julie is a sought after public speaker at conventions and conferences, a respected leader in the small business sector and a consistent resource for strategy and best practices education content. Niehoff has facilitated seminars and workshops for more than 30,000 small businesses and organizations over the last 4 years, in addition to keynote presentations at various international, national and statewide events.
Niehoff has been with constant contact since 2006, as one of the company’s first regional development directors. Today, in addition to speaking and writing and thought leadership activities, Julie also trains new regional directors and helps to develop programs for local markets, managing programs and staff development for the company’s popular Local Success Program.
Prior to joining with Constant Contact, Julie served as Director of Interactive Marketing for the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau and later launched a successful consulting business and co-founded MeetingsCentral.com, an online resource website for event planners. While at the Dallas CVB, Niehoff was responsible for a complete overhaul of the city’s online presence and worked to bring together back-of-house convention sales and services data with the more visible marketing and sales tools the city was using to stand out from other convention destinations. She created the Destination Business System, a SaS system for tourism organizations and businesses. The system allows staff to manage web content, sales proposals, convention calendaring and services in a single online data system.
Working with local technology partners in Dallas, Niehoff’s DBS system is now in use in many destinations including Vancouver, BC; San Diego, Cleveland, Nashville, Hawaii, Dallas, Austin, Houston and more. Niehoff sold her part of that business prior to joining the Constant Contact team.
Julie also serves as Vice Chair of Marketing Communications & Member Outreach for the Texas Association of Nonprofit Organizations (tano.org), is on the Marketing Communciations committee for Association of Fundraising Professionals International (afp.org) and is a a member of Meeting Professionals International, National Speakers Association, Texas Travel Industry Association and the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.
1.
Scott Shuppert | September 29, 2010 at 9:50 pm
Julie I attended one of your CC semionars several months ago. i have a problem. A person wishes to sell me an email list for my industry (Engineering – CAD/CAM) of about 80,000 email address. these have been collect via trade shows, etc. over the last 2 years. So this is not an Opt-in list. We subscribe to CC, and have faith this would be kicked out before we even start with them.
We also use ACT for our CRM and can send via that, and we can easily run that over a ahared hosted account from an ISP. But even this I would assume an ISP will kill that account in a heartbeat.
Can you suggest how we can send to this many emails and not get killed? Maybe even a competitive product to CC who is not so picky as to email lists?
I suspect it will take 2-3 sends to this list, letting people opt out cleanly before we can use it in CC. Any suggestions how I can clean this up, or use an outside service to send this a couple of times knowing that 3 sends later 50% are bad emails or have opted out.
2.
Julie Niehoff | October 26, 2010 at 8:32 pm
Scott,
Very sorry it took me a bit to see your comment and reply. It was hidden in my account for some reason but I just found it and want to respond (tho you probably found an answer already)… Let me start with a hard cold fact. It is illegal to send mass email to a purchase list of contacts. You are right, this would be kicked out of CC before you even start.
I also agree with you that while you can technology-wise, send mass email thru your CRM system over a shared hosted account, any reputable ISP will also kill it fairly quickly because there are inevitable and telltale email addresses in any list, purchased or otherwise that would throw up flags for their servers to catch. I do not have any issues with sending you to competitors, except that I do not know of any system that will allow you to send to a purchased list (even if you don’t tell them, they’ll figure it out pretty quickly)… I totally get that as a business person you don’t want to lose access to the list and let me be clear that it is not at all illegal to PURCHASE the list. Not at all. It is just a problem to send mass email to the contacts in that purchased list. … you can contact those people in many other ways in order to reach out an establish the relationship but you will get farther, in the long and short run, if you concentrate more on authentic, regular engagement with your existing customer base. That is where your best new prospects will come from. And they are qualified leads. I’m sure that I said in the event you attended that a repeat customer spends on average 67% more than a new customer… but beyond that, the customers those happy people bring you are also more likely to convert into happy paying customers as well. I know it’s not as good for the volume/numbers game that we live by in terms of sales and potential… but for true business growth and opportunity, smaller and more effective means are at your fingertips to gain a stronger foothold.
That said, if you want to send and clean the list on your own and bring a more qualified list into any system, you will always do better that way than with a fresh, new, hot-of-the-presses purchased list. Thanks for your question.