[Brooks]

Is anyone using Constant Contact? Any tips, tricks? We are just getting started and there seem to be some great tools, like a gift reminder link...

Has anyone used "their" add me to your e-mail list instead of the Volusion link so you don't have to import records on a regular basis?

Thanks

[chuck]

We've used Constant Contact for many years with good results. We recently moved to Volusion and I was looking forward to using the Volusion newsletter system until they capped it at 5,000 emails per month -- our list just went over 10,000. I just added the signup box to our home page tonight and then read your email.

Constant Contact can get pricey as your list grows, but the product performs well. You can get a 15% discount by having it billed to an AmEx card. They are also real touchy about the number of subscribers per campaign who supposedly report your mailings as spam.

[jeowind]

We had CC for about 12 months and switched to MailerMailer. We've used MailerMailer for about a year now and we're pleased with them. Although its not a very robust system. Great if you are sending basic emails for under 50K addresses per month. Not great if you want a lot of bells and whistles.

Summary is that we like MailerMailer better than the old CC.

[yellow281]

We use intellicontact and this is a really great company. Our list is only 1500 currently so we will likely switch to Volusion to keep things under one roof and hope by the time we hit 5,000 they would have adjusted the number.

[jhampton]

I use Constant Contact and love it. It's easy to use, and has a lot of management tools. We've got about 15,000 in our list, and I find it cheaper to pay based on the amount of people in the list vs. the amount of emails you send out per month. Plus I use the sign up box on all my Web sites and get a lot of good signups this way. You can create custom fields on signup such as, "How did you hear about us?" that you can use to generate great marketing info. Don't know much about volusions system, but don't really plan to switch.

[Ben]

cc have just added a customer surveys function that lets you build a survey and get info out of your mailing list, all you do is put the unique url for your survey into a newsletter. You can also put a coupon code on the final page of the survey as an incentive.
We got some invaluable feedback like this, the only advice I'd give is think long and hard about what you want to know. Customers won't fill in a survey everyday so make sure you get it right first time.

[VeryFineBooks]

We signed up for CC less than a month ago with excellent results. The net profits from just the 1st promotional email were more than enough to pay for the CC service for the year!
But then again, we have a very highly targeted list. This is the key, not just the service that you use.
Combine the two and watch your sales grow!

Very happy with CC. Great templates. The ability to add "BUY IT NOW PAYPAL" buttons in the newsletter is excellent! Makes it much easier to make a purchase through the email. Much more so than going on-line in the store, logging into the account, etc..

just watch the spam reports and build only Opt-in lists. People who are interested in your products/service.
Then your open and click-thru rates will be much higher.

[memaddog]

Does anyone have any great way to keep the Constant Contact list in sync with your Volusion sign-ups? How do you handle people being able to go into their account page (for the store) and opt in or out when that preference doesn't make it back to CC? I had someone look into doing an automated sync using the API but said that if someone opts in or out using their account page, the modified date stamp for that customer doesn't get updated. It only gets updated if you make the change in the admin section to the customer. Since there's no way to identify which customers have been edited, there wasn't a way to grab them for updating CC.

Any suggestions?

[babybeauandbelle]

that's exactly why we didn't go with CC. we are just using Volusions built in marketing emails (we make them ourselves, so we don't need any canned email templates) and we have had good luck...

Originally Posted by memaddog

Does anyone have any great way to keep the Constant Contact list in sync with your Volusion sign-ups? How do you handle people being able to go into their account page (for the store) and opt in or out when that preference doesn't make it back to CC? I had someone look into doing an automated sync using the API but said that if someone opts in or out using their account page, the modified date stamp for that customer doesn't get updated. It only gets updated if you make the change in the admin section to the customer. Since there's no way to identify which customers have been edited, there wasn't a way to grab them for updating CC.

Any suggestions?

[memaddog]

We do our own html as well but do like all the tracking info with CC. We can't use Volusion due to size though. We send out 48,000 emails a month. A tad above the 2,500 limit with Volusion.

Our quantity of emails is the major reason we're using CC vs one of the many others. Paying per email sent is way too expensive. We're paying about 4% of what it would cost to go with many of the pay per email solutions.