Hi Steve,

I’m a new user of Solve360 and I have to say I’m enjoying it so far. I’m attempting to test the constant contact function but I can’t seem to synch up with constant contact. I get a msg informing me that solve360 cannot currently access your account using the username and password. I have tried reseting the password in constantconnect website and then updating the workspace with the same but to no avail.

any advice.

J

Greetings, Great to hear that and welcome!  I do know that although CC allows you to use a space in their username their API does not support it. Any chance your username has a space? If not, just reach out to our support team and they’ll work with you to get it working.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for fast reply. my username has no spaces. I’ll get in touch with support. thanks
J

This is very cool…any chance there is a MailChimp integration in the works?

We don’t have a date for MailChimp but the pressure is mounting

Great… Any plans on integrating with Vertical Response?

We currently don’t have plans to hook-up specifically with Vertical Response, however with the Workspace > Contacts > Data > “Export this list feature” it’s not difficult to drop data into any other system.

Great tip… thanks

There appears to be an issue when a name field in Solve360 contains a comma.  For example, if a person’s full name is John P. Smith, Phd, it is typically rendered as Firstname: John P. and Lastname: Smith, Phd

This causes an error in constant contact as an invalid email address, and the email address is shown as Phd.

If you remove the comma from Phd, it works, but it looks nicer with the Comma in the name.

Is this a constant contact limitation, or a data export error?

Thanks for the report Jonathan.  We’ll take a look…

If someone opts-out thru Constant Contact, is this transmitted back to Solve?

The unsubscribe info stays in Constant Contact, it’s not returned to Solve.  If the contact is included in future lists Constant Contact won’t send the message because the address is already recorded in its system.

Ideally, we need to get the unsubscribe list back into Solve, because Constant Contact is not the only way that a contact is being emailed. We also have the automated emails setup in Solve that our salespeople use, as well as other marketing tools.

If Solve is the center of our CRM world, and we are really trying to make it that, then Solve needs to be the Master of all customer information. Not Constant Contact. A unsubscribe request needs to persist across all methods of emailed communication. The only way to be sure you don’t contact the customer again is to always have the most current information provided by Solve.

Please consider making this a bi-directional communication with Constant Contact. Automatically getting this information back into Solve can prevent a lot of trouble for your users. This disconnect was one of the big objections our marketing person had about Solve when we were evaluating CRM’s.

Thanks for all the recent enhancements,

Kevin

I would second Kevin, but also note that I was only able to find 1 CRM that offers some sort of smart list capability for its contact module. The architecture paradigm of CRM apps pre-dates emails—the Act! model: manual data entry and mass mailing of form letters.

The opposite is true for email marketing apps. Email marketing apps are by definition email/communication centric and focused on a more granular market segmentation. They allow you to target markets’ long tails customers—critical to small business operating in niche markets. Email marketing apps collect data from online survey, email, blogs and website forms. They leverage their digital ecosystem. Google is communication centric too, the Web 2.0 par excellence.

As marketers are starting to see the benefit of social media, they will migrate to the CRM 2.0. See http://marketingwhitepapers.s3.amazonaws.com/SocialMediaMarketingReport2010.pdf

Solve360 already offers the most email-centric solution with its dedicated mailbox filters. I hope they will have the resource to ride the social media wave and its communication-centric paradigm.

The points are timely…if there are any other ideas on email campaign integration please post them (asap)

Engineering SpecialOps - May 18, 2010 05:55pm

The points are timely…if there are any other ideas on email campaign integration please post them (asap) ;)

Hi, in that case, I would like to suggest Aweber, as a few others have asked for in the forum.

Aweber has the top rating for deliverability in email marketing at the moment, and has had the top spot for a long time. Is this in the works/possible?

From another app description:

“Over 50 years have passed [since the invention of the rolodex] and new technology has replaced the rolodex… and yet every contact management system continues to emulate the 3×5 contact card and displays everybody in alphabetical order… which makes sense if you have 100 contacts, but what if you have 5,000 or 20,000 contacts?  It doesn’t make much sense….

Segmenting large contact lists makes it easier to find people, interact with them, and manage our expanding list of contacts.  Why is this important?  Because the internet (and email) has grown the number of people that we are “connected” to exponentially – making it harder to ensure that different types of relationships are getting the attention they deserve.“

At some point, CRM will have to become a social network hub (all about relationship), allow smart grouping and integrate with multiple apps. You may notice that email marketing apps are becoming social marketing by integrating with Twitter, blogs,... They’ll fill the void.

There is a small Canadian CRM start up out there that has a very good platform/concept—but almost no features. It would be fantastic if they were to merge with Norada… some consolidation would result in stronger products and wider customer base.

@Ronald Aweber is definitely a recognized player, but we haven’t had much call for or support for them yet.  Mailchimp is this year’s crowd favorite—although from a client management and integration point of view their system is “underwhelming” (I’m being polite).  Our next step is digging deeper into Constant Contact—making the current functionality even more useful.  We’re open to looking at integrations with other providers.

@cfournier A supporting POV—CRMs generally focus on managing “customer records”, which is an essential business resource that produces a lot of value, but social media has the potential to anticipate needs / predict customer behavior introducing new models of engagement.

Hi Steve,

Actually, a few observations. I saw there are 3 or 4 requests for aweber integration on this forum already. Just because people aren’t poking you in the ribs asking for it, that doesn’t indicate that it’s not an integration you should target. It just means that mailchimp users happen to be more vocal on this forum.

I can understand for startups, mailchimp is cheaper, but aweber earned its reputation as the market leader simply by being the best and well supported. In the end, I would expect there would be some conversion from mailchimp to aweber when businesses compare what each are capable of.

I did try Constant Contact at the same time I was evaluating aweber, and back then CC had a lot to be desired. That may have changed by now, I don’t know. The other service I was intrigued by recently is iContact, I just don’t know how good their deliverability is, and that is important to me.

*So Consider This from a Marketing Standpoint:* As aweber is the market leader and and also has the greatest share of the autoresponder market. If you integrate with aweber,  Solve360 will greatly benefit from the exposure, as, just like the ONLY way I would have found you is through the Google Apps Marketplace, having that connection to aweber will allow many many more people to find you, who otherwise would not know you.

Plus, they are integration friendly, they already have a lot of things set up with other services/companies.

——

On a side note, what I would love to see, which I don’t know if you can do but would love it if you could, is if you could set the integration up so when people opt-in to the maillist, they are either entered into Solve as a contact and tagged as on the newsletter + receiving the autoresponder sequence, OR if they are already a contact that they are tagged as on the newsletter + receiving the autoresponder sequence. And if they opt-out, then a tag is checked that they have opt-ed out.

The key that this is down automatically so we can always know if the contact is IN or OUT of our list and act accordingly.

Best,

Ronald

http://www.elevatedmarketing.ca
follow us on Twitter! http://www.twitter.com/ElevatedMarket

There is a problem with Polish letters when exporting lists do CC. Letters like: ż,ł,ą are not exported correctly and swapped with other signs. Another problem is that in Polish when you greet someone you change the name a little. It is not the same as in English - for instance name Adam is same but when you ask Adam to do something you change it to “Adamie would you be so kind to…“. I hope you understand it. It could be handled by adding another field in which the different form is placed but… how do you export the specific field to Constant Contact? Any ideas?

+1 for aweber.. the thing with aweber is that all added contacts have to re-verified again after importing I believe which is not the case with others but I could be wrong here..

PKJR - May 25, 2010 01:47pm

+1 for aweber.. the thing with aweber is that all added contacts have to re-verified again after importing I believe which is not the case with others but I could be wrong here..

Yes, that is correct. If you import a list of email addresses, they have to re-confirm that they want to be on your list. Hence there will be some attrition if you are migrating.

I know iContact doesn’t require this if you promise you have a clean list. I’m not sure about CC, I know in the past it was the case where you could also import a list without re-confirming, but I haven’t used CC for a while so I don’t know.

But this is how aweber keeps it’s gold winning standard, by making sure its all up on the up and up when you do their email marketing, so they get the best deliverability. Beleive me, sometimes I wish it wasn’t the case, I get a lot of leads from trade shows and always attriction when people ‘forget’ they signed into my list when I import their computers. I may as well bring my computer to the actual trade show next time.

There seem to be very few email marketing systems that provide a write-back/sync to CRM, creating painful silos.  Features that I believe would be valuable:
  - Contact Sync with CC: So that if they hit the “Update my details” button on the bottom of the marketing newsletter, any updates from CC will post back to Solve360.
  - Survey results posted back to Solve360: Again, often CC can be used to capture new info about customers using their survey capabilities.  Ability to map this info to/from Solve360 would be great for acquiring better info about customers.

Good luck & best wishes,
Tony

I just got off chat with aweber support about what you wrote Toe Knee (great name!) and they said:

It should be possible in the upcoming months, though may require a hefty bit of work to get up and running to perfection.

We are adding a lot of changes and new features this summer to allow customization like that.

That’s great news as I can’t think of ANY that currently do that with a third party/outside CRM.

Incidentally aweber is currently talking/working with integration with Salesforce at this moment, so I would get on moving on this first. I’d kill to have this feature work and if Salesforce can do it, then they will have a lot of people jump to them - Guaranteed.

There is a problem with Polish letters when exporting lists do CC. Letters like: ż,ł,ą are not exported correctly and swapped with other signs.

This is actually a problem we reported to Constant Contact a couple months ago http://developer.constantcontact.com/node/955  We’ll try and get an update / correction from them.

The June 14th update introduces:

- Constant Contact data is now reported back through Solve (e.g. campaign stats for a specific contact)
- MailChimp integration

Engineering SpecialOps - Jun 27, 2010 09:17am

The June 14th update introduces:

- Constant Contact data is now reported back through Solve (e.g. campaign stats for a specific contact)
- MailChimp integration

That’s great. Is there even more reporting, two-way with Constant Contacts? Will you go to this length and more with Mailchimp? And any other newsletter services in the pipeline?

MailChimp does not provide detailed campaign details on a contact level so there’s no way for Solve to report it.

Yes, but will you be doing that? Other CRMs do have deep integration with Mailchimp.

I can also point out Infusion Soft, Swiftpage and Aweber having deep and detailed data pushed out to CRM’s.

(*cough Aweber, *cough).

If the data we want isn’t there it can’t be reported.  That’s right from the Chimp’s mouth.

Engineering SpecialOps - Dec 03, 2009 05:32am

We currently don’t have plans to hook-up specifically with Vertical Response, however with the Workspace > Contacts > Data > “Export this list feature” it’s not difficult to drop data into any other system.

I know our company would appreciate integration with Vertical Response!  Constant Contact isn’t the right fit for us, and the Mail Chimp integration doesn’t report back to the CRM in Solve360…

Is there a way to manually integrate Vertical Response, ie export lists as CSVs, do the campaign, and then import the VR reporting information back into Solve?  Would it be possible to export the reports as a CSV and append that information to the corresponding contacts in Solve?

Add my vote for iContact. Simple, inexpensive, works.

I just signed up for the trial and getting the feel for Solve360. I’m liking what I’m seeing so far, still evaluating. However I would love to see integration with iContact. They just rolled out a whole new set of features that we’re excited about.

Hi,

We use the link with constant contact right from the moment it was introduced and together with the status view (inserted as type of activity) at the contacts view, it works quite nice.

Now, We’d like to report back the results of questions to custom fields in norada.
In order to do that, I’d like to have the the norada contact id (as is found in the contact url) available in the constant contact database.

Is is possible to extend your data export and fill the norada contact id in one (the first) custom fields in constant contact ?

At this moment, I use email to find a match back into norada but that is not a real closed loop and might end up with multiple contacts.

Kind Regards,

Olger

Hi Olger, That’s a great point.  We started doing that recently with our Google contact sync (putting the permalink URL in the Google contact so you could jump back to the Solve page right from Google).  I’ll pass the tip along to the team here about Constant Contact.

Engineering SpecialOps - Sep 23, 2010 04:56pm

Hi Olger, That’s a great point.  We started doing that recently with our Google contact sync (putting the permalink URL in the Google contact so you could jump back to the Solve page right from Google).  I’ll pass the tip along to the team here about Constant Contact.

Does this affect only new contacts? (re: perma link)

It will be there for contacts that were synced since the change went in about three weeks ago.  If you do a “clear memory” and resync it should push the address over.

I’m going to throw another name into the mix.

Campaign Monitor.

http://www.campaignmonitor.com

I’ve used campaign monitor as a email deployment tool along side other crm’s (silos manually managed)

What is different than constantcontact and aweber.

1) You can setup a company account with multiple logins for users. Problem I have with CC integration, once the list is pushed over, the single login aspect is bit crude IMHO.

2) Templated emails with editable regions, decent mix of edibility yet simple

3) API

They are a pay per usage pay model, vs a monthly fee based on mailing list.

HT - Sep 24, 2010 12:21am

I’m going to throw another name into the mix.

Campaign Monitor.

http://www.campaignmonitor.com

+1 for me on this one :)

Thanks for sharing the website.
http://www.campaignmonitor.com

I think the three features would be very helpful.

Bob Morton

+1 for aweber. Not only for me but to also increase Solve’s visibility amongst big players.

Steve Ireland - Apr 12, 2009 07:42am

Constant Contact provides email marketing and online survey tools that help you create professional-looking email newsletters, manage campaigns and monitor the response. This free Solve360 add-on module will add a new option in the Contacts, Data toolbar menu. When selected this feature will copy the current filtered list of contacts directly to your Constant Contact account.

The feature is enabled by the account administrator and once enabled is available to all user accounts.

Learn more about this service and sign-up for a Constant Contact account.

More info:

“Push this list to Constant Contact” will copy all contacts currently selected by the filter e.g. Show ...

The key between the systems is email address.  Business Email is chosen, if Business Email is empty then Personal Email is chosen, if Personal Email is empty the contact is not copied.

Thanks you for the post.
Hi guys, Im a newbie. Nice to join this forum.

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+1 for campaign monitor

Hi.  Any news on the integration of aweber with Solve 360?  We are considering moving our crm/email system from ACT/Swiftpage to Solve 360/??, but get nervous about services like MailChimp with posts like this:  http://twohourblogger.com/mailchimp-vs-aweber/#more-1604

Plus, we really love all the helpful detail coming back into ACT from Swiftpage, allowing our team access to every “open” and “click” directly from the contact window. 

Any update on how to integrate 360 with aweber would be appreciated.  Thank you…  :)