How To Integrate A Constant Contact Form In Blogger

A big part of blog management, is to be able for you to determine the popularity of your blog, and how much does readers enjoy each of your content. To be able to achieve this, it's recommended to add a newsletter subscription form to your blog, so that not only can you keep track of the number of loyal visitors that you have, but it also allows these visitors to be updates about the latest content of your blog, without them having to re-visit your blog every time.

While some form-generating solutions offer built-in lead notifications via e-mail, there are times that you may want to use your existing third party e-mail marketing service, such as the one offered by Constant Contact. Today, we'll discuss about the reasons on why would you want to integrate your Constant Contact service into your existing e-mail signup forms (such as the one offered by ContactUs.com), into your Blogger account.

Why Do It?

While most contact form solutions also provide an e-mail marketing system as part of their registration package, there are times that you wanted to use a different e-mail system for your marketing needs. The reasons for that can vary.

Perhaps you already have an existing account for an another e-mail marketing system which you frequently use before, and have gotten very used to its features that you're not willing to let yourself go for that service.

Or perhaps you prefer the other solution better for your e-mails, yet you prefer another solution for your forms.

Whatever the reason you have in mind, some solutions like ContactUs.com give blog owners a chance to integrate third-party e-mail marketing solutions like Constant Contact a chance to be integrated into their generated forms, you with just a few easy steps, you can get the best of both worlds.

The Actual Integration Process

Integrating your Constant Contact account into your Blogger account is actually very easy. If you follow these simple steps, the process should be seamless and error-free.

Note that for this example, you need (obviously), a Constant Contact account, as well as a ContactUs.com account for the integration process.

1.     First, log in to to your ContactUs.com account. This will immediately bring you to your account's dashboard. From here, select the “Form Settings” tab, which is located on the left part of the dashboard.

2.     You'll notice that, by default, the form that will be created is set to “Newsletter”. Since we're going to create an e-mail signup form, just leave this setting, and immediately click “Configure Form” to bring up the form configuration page.

3.     In this page,you can customize all aspects of your newsletter form, but more important, this is where you can setup your form to use your third party e-mail marketing service, such as Constant Contact. To do this, just select “Delivery Options”, the select “3rd Party Integrations” to bring up another menu which displays all the supported third-party e-mail marketing solutions.

4.     As noted in the menu, DO NOT USE the version 1 of the Constant Contact integration service, as it's outdated, and might contain bugs and errors. Use the version 2 instead.

5.     To start connecting your Constant Contact account with your form, you need to input your API key, along with the other required fields. These credentials are usually located into the settings area of your Constant Contact account. Once you have these credentials, simply copy-paste them into the required fields. After you're finished, simply click on “Save”.

6.     Once you clicked on “Save”, this will bring you back to the “Form Settings” menu, wherein you can see your newly-created newsletter form. If you wish to make any additional changes to your form, you can simply click on “Configure Form” again. Once you're finished, click on “Get Code”.

7.     To start adding your newly-created form to your Blogger account, simply copy the code displayed at the top of the screen, and paste it on your Blogger account using any of the methods listed for adding third-party code to your Blogger account. Congratulations! Now whenever a visitor subscribes to your blog, the lead-in notifications will be sent directly to your Constant Contact account.