For those of you who read 75+ blogs a day, here’s the gist of today’s post: Constant Contact seems to have new customer conversion nailed. Sign up for a free trial and see for yourself.

Now, for those of you still with me, the details . . . As a consultant and writer, I find myself bringing attention to things that aren’t working. So it was with some skepticism last month that I signed up for a free trial with Constant Contact, the email marketing and survey service. I need a tool to help me manage the newsletter and email marketing efforts for my communication consulting company, Tilt Consulting [shameless plug].

The Constant Contact website has all of the typical online customer support tools (FAQs, online help library, email contact) plus a few not-so-typical tools (live webinars and recorded tutorials). Pretty good, no? But is it enough to prevent abuse of the generous 60-day free trial?

Here’s what got me. Less than 24 hours after registering I started receiving phone calls and emails from a guy named Jeff who identified himself as my personal “communication consultant.” Oh, really? I never anticipated needing one of those.

Within that same 24 hour window Jeff provided me with his direct email and phone extension, notified me of upcoming webinars for new users, and urged me to contact him personally so that together we could discuss how to best achieve my email marketing goals. Oh, and get this, I think he was even located in my time zone.

Turns out Constant Contact assigns a consultant to every new subscriber to help get them over the bumps of learning a new tool. And, though they don’t say this, to increase their customer conversion rates. My best guess is that it’s working.

When sales and marketing folks talk about customer conversion and retention, the non-technical term is “stick.” Those folks at Constant Contact seems to have figured out that to get customers to “stick” you must do one thing without fail: you must prove valuable to your customer. And that’s best done by showing that you value each and every customer, rather than by leading them to a deep and dark online customer support jungle and leaving them there armed with nothing but a problem and customer logon ID.

When was the last time you got timely, personalized attention on a tool so critical to achieving your business objectives? If you’ve got a story to share, I’d love to hear about it.