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October 26, 2020
Distribution: All Active Volunteers
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Featured Dept. - Marketing
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Email Tip
Email Marketing in COVID-19 - Email Still Maintains a Strong ROI
But, More Emails Does Not Equal More Success
Email marketing continues to maintain a strong ROI. With the pandemic, consumers are receiving more emails than ever in 2020. The good news is despite the larger volume of emails that consumers are receiving, it hasn’t negatively impacted email engagement, according to emfluence Marketing Platform.
With your emails competing against so many, a strong strategy is more important than ever. However, part of that strategy should not be to send more emails. emfluence Marketing Platform recommends sending a subscriber 5-8 emails per month. Too few or too many can cause subscribers to lose interest or start ignoring your emails altogether.
As you start planning your next month’s campaign, here are helpful tools you can review in Constant Contact:
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Review your email metrics. In Constant Contact, if you go to the Reporting tab, you will be able to view a snapshot of how your emails are faring. Are the open and click-through rates going up or down from the previous time period? How do they compare to industry averages? More importantly, how is your conversion? Are your workshop registrations as strong as you would like?
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Review how many emails you are sending. In Constant Contact, in the Campaigns tab, there is now a Calendar View. Click on that and you can see a snapshot of how many emails sent out through the course of the month. Are there hardly any emails? Or, are you sending emails almost daily, and not segmenting your list? (We’ll address segmentation in a future issue).
If you are sending at a high frequency, but getting low open or click-through rates, consider trying some new strategies: 1) send a monthly newsletter 2) send a once or twice weekly email for upcoming workshops, 3) reduce the number of reminders if sending multiple reminders for the same workshops, 4) group workshop email promotions by topic.
Email marketing success is all about testing to see what works best for your readership engagement. Next month, we will discuss best practices for email formatting to encourage action from your readers.
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Social Media
To sign up for all upcoming social media calls please click here. You can choose which webinars you are able to attend, although we recommend attending all because the information changes with each call. The Social media monthly calls are held on the third Wednesday of every month at 2 PM EST, so the next call will be November 18th.
There have been some changes to Hiper’s social media program for FY21:
- Four posts per month will be published onto local chapter Google My Business listings. On average, Google My Business listings achieve five times more views than local website traffic.
- HiPer will no longer be updating chapter LinkedIn pages. This decision was made because Google My Business posts have higher visibility and engagement than posts to LinkedIn Company (chapter) pages. Your LinkedIn chapter pages will still be available for you to update at a local level, but Hiper will reallocate the prior three to four LinkedIn posts to your individual Google My Business listings as stated above.
For those of you interested in running digital ad campaigns in FY21, Hiper has some new Digital Ad Campaign package options. Each of the campaign options are opt-in only. The Opt-in deadline for a Q2 FY21 campaign package is Monday, November 23rd, 2020. You can review each of the options to see which would best fit the need of your chapter, as well as complete the opt-in form.
If you have questions about the Hiper program, please submit them using this form.
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SCORE Mentions & Success Stories
We had 1,226 media mentions in September!
Here are two of our most recent, high profile mentions:
Here are two of our most recent success stories:
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PwC Client Engagement Survey FY20
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The 2020 Client Engagement Survey with PwC was distributed to clients on October 12. Please encourage the clients in your chapter to provide their feedback.
If any volunteers are mistakenly included in the distribution list, apologies for any confusion or inconvenience. Please do not complete the survey, and instead, unsubscribe from the distribution list to prevent receiving follow up emails from PwC.
Key dates listed below:
- October 12, 2020 - Survey Launched
- October 27 through December 1, 2020 - Survey Reminders sent each week
- December 4, 2020 - Survey Close
- Late January 2021 - Survey data available in online portal
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SBA and Treasury Announce Simpler PPP Forgiveness for Loans of $50,000 or Less
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On October 8, the U.S. Small Business Administration, in consultation with the Treasury Department, released a simpler loan forgiveness application for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans of $50,000 or less. This action streamlines the PPP forgiveness process to provide financial and administrative relief to America’s smallest businesses while also ensuring sound stewardship of taxpayer dollars.
Click here to view the simpler loan forgiveness application.
Click here to view the instructions for completing the simpler loan forgiveness application.
Click here to view the Interim Final Rule on the simpler forgiveness process for loans of $50,000 or less.
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WOSB Resource Partner Training Opportunity
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To help resource partner mentors like you understand forthcoming regulation changes to the Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) certification process, the Covid-sb.org Business Advisor Learning Center is hosting office hour sessions with experts from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Government Contracting and Business Development.
In addition to explaining and answering questions about the regulatory changes going into effect October 15, 2020, these experts will describe the resources available to help you assist women entrepreneurs who are pursuing certification with the WOSB Federal Contracting Program.
Register for WOSB office hours by completing this secure Google Form with your name and preferred email address.
You will then receive a Google Calendar invitation to attend a 60-minute virtual office hour session at 1 p.m. ET on whichever date below is most convenient for you:
- Tuesday, October 27
- Tuesday, November 10
Thanks in advance for helping us better serve and prepare women entrepreneurs.
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Upcoming Live Webinars for Small Business Owners
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Opportunities written in Spanish for Business Mentor, Chapter Support Volunteer, and Workshop Presenter are available to post onto your chapter’s VolunteerMatch account. You can locate these on the Support Center here.
Don’t forget to repost your opportunities so that they remain at the top of the search results! If you have any questions regarding this platform, please submit them on http://bit.ly/score-marketing-requests, and we would be happy to help.
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If you are looking to publish articles in a local newspaper, or would like to share content on partner websites, please take a look at our Ask SCORE articles on the Support Center.
You can publish these articles as is, or use them as a base point to help you write a more localized version.
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With the new SCORE Company Store providing SCORE branded materials and swag, we would like to know if there is interest for the following items: calendars, masks and flash drives. These items must be ordered in advance for SCORE and would need to be purchased with personal or unrestricted funds.
Please let us know if you would be interested in purchasing any of these items by completing the form here.
If you are interested, please submit a form by 11/30/2020.
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Please work with your district director to finalize your budget before it is submitted following your district director’s instructions. You may want to check out the updated FY21 Chart of Accounts for more classification options, available here.
Your chapter may choose whether to have an annual budget or a monthly budget in Sage Intacct. Please fill out the appropriate tab on the template available here.
Budgets may be submitted at any time during the year, but our goal is to get the files by October 30, so that we can upload them for you by November 9. Chapters may wait until the national allocation is finalized before submitting. We will upload the budgets periodically as received.
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Resources for Clients
SCORE is collecting resources to answer client's critical questions during the COVID-19 pandemic—and afterward. Updates are being made regularly.
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Volunteer Toolkit
These resources provide the latest communications and notifications around SCORE’s policy and guidance during this trying time.
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1165 Herndon Parkway
Suite 100
Herndon, VA 20170
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Funded in part through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, conclusions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.
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