NetSpeak Technologies

Over the years we have been seeing basic improvements with Constant Contact’s online emailing tool. Recently, after some major upgrades, YourHost.com has began offering Constant Contact as a economical alternative to the Market Manager – Blue Hornet solution. Both systems have their place, but Constant Contact is by far more user friendly and less frustrating to the basic user. Write us if your you want info on the differences.

Last month we rolled out the unique Constant Contact – ShopSite Pro API integration tool. We are now offering this tool to our customers  Constant Contact.  CC API allows their ShopSite customers who purchase products to be automatically added to email list at the Checkout. This will save the web developer many hours of export – import time.

In addition to the API tool, we have found that Constant Contact can be very fluid yielding a positive customer experience. In testing and supporting Constant Contact, we want to point out one item that can come up that the average person might miss when sending out the final email. First thing you want to do is to add your friends or office associates to the test group and then start composing your email. Remember, before you send, test, test, test your emails. A real pro takes from 2-7 hrs to prepare, test, and send out a quality offering or newsletter. When you’re done composing an email you might find that the "text" part of the message receiveds into the inbox appears jumbled-up and does not look professional. This is a common occurrence with any good email system as it is just that "text" which the system is electronically producing text by stripping out all the HTML from your composed email… get it? Don’t worry about it as you soon will and just follow the next steps. What you need to do is go to your Constant Contact text editor, select the "advanced" link and turn on text editing. Then reformat your text so it looks decent with the proper spacing and layout. Then, pick a person in your test group, select to send text only, and send a a number of tests emails until it looks good. We are also finding out that Constant Contact offers  city and statewide classes to teach the  basic and advanced usage and most of which are free. It is ok to pay for some of these as you know you get what you pay for.  We are encouraging our readers to use a  good solid email system so you can regularly touch your groups of customers and organizations. Enjoy your use of Constant Contact and happy emailing.

Eric Kirkhuff Constant Contact, Email