Kevin O'Brien's Blog Posts

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?

When we announced AppConnect^TM earlier this year, we were anticipating that new developments would come in two forms: integrations with third party applications and extensions for Constant Contact that make existing product features easier to use. We have been thrilled with the results to date on both fronts.

Today, I want to show you how I was able to use a new extension that was added to Constant Contact, based on our public APIs and a standard Constant Contact account, to create a customized “Welcome” experience for our new developers who joined the web services program. The extension that I used for this is our new Contact Capture Tool that enables you to add an email address, along with demographic details, right from your desktop.

As we were planning and developing Constant Contact AppConnect, one of the “real world” case studies we routinely circulated around the office was the Golf Course Management Application. We talked about the difficulties that a user (a golf course manager, for example) of such an application has when trying to manage contacts and members in the software and then communicate with them using Constant Contact.

Two applications, both in need of the same set of data. 

We discussed that there were “pain points” that led to frustration for the users as well, and how our APIs would help to alleviate these pain points. We verbalized the golf course management app because it was, in our minds, an easy story to tell. Most people understand the business problem, and many also have personal experiences with golf courses (not all are worth bragging about, however -- especially mine).

In response to many customers’ requests, earlier this year we launched Constant Contact AppConnect™ (http://developer.constantcontact.com) — a destination for software providers, developers, and other “techies” who want to integrate or connect a website or an application to Constant Contact. Constant Contact AppConnect gives developers access to our web service APIs so that they can create tie-ins with our contact features or reporting data. AppConnect is a big step towards making it easier for anyone to put their stamp on Constant Contact.
     
We have already seen some great integrations built — Wordpress® extensions, shopping cart tools, vertical software integration, and much more. Even our own plug-ins for Quickbooks®, Outlook, and ACT! by Sage have been developed using the AppConnect platform.