Denver SEO Blog » Constant Contact

Constant Contact’s Business Partner Program Is Better Than It Seems

Zack Katz — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:08:04 +0000

Constant Contact doesn’t openly advertise their Business Partner Program’s competitive commission structures.

Constant Contact promotes their Partner Program with just a 15% starting commission, so it may come as a surprise that their commission structure goes up to 40%. No one else offers anywhere near that amount.

Here’s how their commission rate is calculated:

15% up to $250/month net revenue
20% up to $500/month
25% up to $1,000/month
30% up to $2,500/month
40% up to $5,000/month

Constant Contact offers very competitive commission for active affiliates

At first glance, Constant Contact’s partner program appears simply decent. The base 15% commission is nowhere near the 25% commissions offered by other programs. What they don’t tell you is that as you continue to build your referral list, you can qualify for higher commission tiers.

The difference can be huge. Let’s say you’ve kicked major ass and are sending them $5,000/month in net revenue. That $5,000.00 in revenue would earn you varying amounts of money based on what commission you received.

15% = $750
20% = $1,000
25% = $1,250
30% = $1,500
40% = $2,000

If you received the 40% commission tier, you would make $1,250 more each month compared to the base commission. Constant Contact doesn’t advertise this fact, but I believe it’s a huge incentive to start building your program today.

Better than the affiliate program

With the Constant Contact affiliate program, you get $2.00 for each trial signup and $50.00 when they convert to paid customers. That means $52.00 per converting lead. Let’s say they stay with Constant Contact for 5 years and sign up for their mid-range package of $30.00/month. Your referral will have generated $1,800 in revenue for Constant Contact. At the base commission structure, Constant Contact will have paid you almost $230.00 over the five years for that one signup.

Sign up for the Business Partner Program today.

* Full — and obvious — disclosure: I am a Constant Contact business partner.

Constant Contact Forms Generator – Create a Form for any Website or Blogger.com Blog

Zack Katz — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:20:45 +0000

I am proud to announce the Constant Contact Form Generator

Check it out now »

Katz Web Design has been developing this project during the past few months, on weekends and late at night. The time has come to launch a new forms generator for Constant Contact users.

Why use the Constant Contact form generator?

I love Constant Contact, but I have to say, I’m not wild about their default form designs. I set out to create a form generator that would provide users with more design options.

1-click Blogspot.com installation, or copy & paste HTML

After you have generated your dream form, you can copy and paste the HTML the form generates into any website, or you can install the form with one click on your Blogger Blogspot.com blog.

Configurable options

Basic design settings
- Form padding
- Width (in px or %)
Border style – the form uses Krazy Korners CSS-only borders, courtesy of CSSplay
Custom colors
- Border color
- Text color
- Background color
Font Styles
- Text Alignment
- Font family
- Font size
- Font weight (bold or normal)
Form Inputs
- Size of email text input — or remove the input altogether
- Email input default values
- Customize your Submit button text
And more!

Future updates

Improve rendering time in Internet Explorer – Firefox, Chrome, and Safari render ok. This will involve slimming down the bulky jQuery code used to generate the form.
Really neat image background options, including background gradients
More border options
Paragraph text field option, to add text under the form’s headline
Add email images options

Have an idea? Have any feedback? Leave it below!

Constant Contact WordPress Widget – Add a Newsletter Signup Form to your Sidebar

Zack Katz — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 09:24:52 +0000

This widget adds a Constant Contact signup form to your blog’s sidebar without touching code.

Download the Widget

ArrayIncludes options for Title, Button Text, Tag Wrapper, Form ID Code, and Intro Paragraph, show or hide CC link, Safe Subscribe link, and template options.

New: add a form in your page or post by writing [constantcontact] in the content.

To install, download the file and upload to your WordPress installation’s Plugins directory. You know the drill…and if not, leave a comment below.

Give me some feedback or links if you like this widget. Thanks!

Download the Widget:

View the Widget page on WordPress.org
Download the Widget from WordPress.org (.zip file)

Version History:

Refer to the Changelog on WordPress.org.

Future plans

Include nice templates, not just Constant Contact templates
Integrate form with the Constant Contact API
Make form fully valid XHTML (requires update from Constant Contact first)

Download Stats from WordPress.org

Receive Email Updates from Constant Contact Surveys: Feature Request

Zack Katz — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:36:11 +0000

Update: Constant Contact has implemented this feature.

Get notified when you receive new survey responses

I use the CC Survey feature to send out web design questionnaires to potential clients. As such, I keep a survey open and receive responses sporadically. Currently, there’s no way to be notified by Constant Contact when my survey receives a response.

A temporary work-around

What I’m doing to get updates is I share the survey results as a separate page, and then submit the url to a RSS-creation service, which will email me when the page changes. FeedWhip also provides an RSS option, so that I could subscribe to the changes. This option works fine, but not well enough!

My email to Constant Contact

After missing a couple of survey responses and feeling stupid about it, I finally let CC know that an email notifications feature is important to me.

I would like to have notification options for the surveys, so that I can choose to be notified when a person fills in a survey.

It would be good to have different delivery intervals (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, etc) and different delivery options, including email, file attachments (PDF, CSV, XML), RSS, SMS, etc.

Refer to Google Analytics export options and functionality. That’s what Survey should have.

Is scheduled reporting and better export options too much to ask?

Constant Contact charges $15.00/month for their online survey feature. It’s a fine tool, and integrates very well with their newsletter services (which is why I recommend it). The tool, while working well, leaves some features to be desired.

Constant Contact allows you to export only to CSV, and they aren’t too pleasant about it:

Below is a list of recent survey results (XLS that include text responses or any CSV) you’ve requested for exporting. Exporting these results may take up to two hours. Once the export process is complete, the files are available for only 7 days.

Other services can do it…Why can’t Constant Contact?

Google does reporting right

Google's report delivery options are truly great.

When it comes to creating custom reports, Google Analytics takes the cake. You can schedule reports at different intervals, sent them to multiple email addresses, and even choose between four handy formats (PDF, XML, CSV, TSV) that come attached to the email.

This feature makes Analytics about 300% more useful to me: I can set up my web design or SEO clients with automatic reports of the website’s progress. Very handy.

Zoho gets it right, too!

Zoho Creator's data export options are comprehensive.

Relative newcomer on the web radar, Zoho has slowly been building momentum by offering nearly every service that Google does, but with their own style. I’ve been using Zoho Creator recently for lots of projects, and the functionality/price structure is great for setting up simple, in-depth, and (mostly) intuitive database applications.

Zoho allows you to write scripts that will automatically email you when changes are made to the database, and they also give you plenty of export options for your data.

I want more features…but until then, I’m happy

It may sound like I’m on a rant (which I am), but it would sure be nice to be given more features than needed, rather than less. Surveys are a new service for Constant Contact, so I hope they’ll improve in time.

What’s your experience with CC Surveys? What features would you like to see, or what other service do you use?