One of the most important tasks for email marketers to perform is to respect their customers’ wishes with regard to receiving email marketing messages. If a customer updates his profile to change his subscription preferences, or requests to be unsubscribed from a list, then it’s incumbent upon the email marketer to honor that request. This helps to build a trusting relationship between sender and recipient.

The challenge for many small organizations is that they have their subscribers’ contact data, and perhaps associated preferences, in multiple places. Typically, the data will exist in Constant Contact, as well as in a business management application, customer relationship management (CRM) system, and perhaps also in Outlook. Constant Contact can make organizing all this information a little easier by helping you manage the unsubscribes. But what if your CRM also needs to know about a customer who unsubscribes from your marketing list, or perhaps updates her preferences or contact data?

For an email marketer to respect his customers’ wishes, he may have to take the manual step of updating his ancillary systems with the updated information. While this may be necessary, it may also be time consuming.

This is where using applications that are integrated with Constant Contact can be very helpful. Many application providers use the Constant Contact AppConnect program to automate these types of actions so that their customers have access to the most updated information regardless of where the data lives.

One example of this is our strategic partner, MINDBODY. The MINDBODY team provides business management solutions for the health and wellness industry through a powerful and cost effective platform. By joining the Constant Contact AppConnect program, MINDBODY was able to take advantage of standards-based APIs to make it seamless for customers to share and synchronize data with Constant Contact. “Clients can easily go into the MINDBODY system, tag a certain group of members or customers, and seamlessly send that data to Constant Contact,” says Robert Murphy, CSMO-CFO for MINDBODY.

This type of simplified, yet advanced, list management from the “source” application provides a powerful solution to the end user. They are now able to more easily make strategic decisions on their email communications strategy, yielding better responses from their campaigns. Since implementing its marketing solutions, some MINDBODY clients have reported an increase in their businesses of up to 30%. (To read a case study about MINDBODY, click here.)

As MINDBODY has learned, when you treat customers — and their information — with respect, success will follow.