Constant Contact Works Marketing Magic with Tealium Tag Management

Constant Contact serves more than 600,000 small business and non-profit customers worldwide and is growing rapidly. The company provides marketing solutions through integrated tools that help businesses reach, engage, and acquire new customers via e-mail, events, social media, and other channels.

Technology innovation combined with marketing expertise and agility help power Constant Contact’s ongoing success in reaching small business customers. Michelle Grover, senior digital analyst at Constant Contact, says that Tealium iQ tag management plays an important role in the marketing team’s online acquisition, analytics, and optimization activities. “Tealium is an enterprise-scale solution that breaks down barriers in digital marketing and analytics. It’s like a magic box that makes things happen, giving us even more speed and agility to launch the tag-based applications we use to drive new business.”

Technology Complexity Impacting Marketing Agility

Michelle says that tag management became a hot topic at Constant Contact when the complexity of the process impeded marketers and burdened web developers.

“Digital marketers had to rely on developers to hard-code new tags. While the actual coding only took a day or two, the work had to be balanced among other big priorities. Deployment was also tied to engineering releases, which could delay activation of a new tag.”

Tealium Selected to Empower Marketers, Save Developer Resources

Michelle says that of the tag management solutions evaluated, only Tealium offered enterprise-class functionality and scale. “Tealium had the most robust feature set and a flexible user interface, as well as multiple content delivery networks to assure required speed and reliability.

“The ability to define tag load rules, modify profile templates, and use prebuilt extensions also allowed us to customize and optimize interactions without having to go back to developers for help. Tealium combined value with the functionality we needed to manage marketing tags. It also benefits on the analytics front.”

Today, Constant Contact’s digital marketing and analytics teams use Tealium iQ to deploy and manage some 100 tags across the public constantcontact.com site, plus approximately 10 secondary sites, including event properties, a mobile site and a localized UK site. “We use the main Tealium profile to manage both the US and UK sites,” adds Kaminski, “so we can take advantage of load rules to target activities specific to the constantcontact.co.uk site.”

Constant Contact’s web platform is a proprietary application developed in-house and hosted at their data centers. Tags managed through Tealium iQ include Adobe SiteCatalyst, Conversant Mediaplex, Crazy Egg, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Qualaroo, UserVoice, and many more.

Improved Marketing Agility and Savings

“Tealium helped us move an entire work stream from the web development team to digital marketing and analytics,” Michelle states. “Acquisition marketers, for example, now have tag publishing rights up to the final stage of review/production, which is completed by our analytics team. Tag deployment can now be done in a day or in many cases within just hours and we’re no longer tied to engineering releases. As a result, marketers are more agile and the development team is freed up to focus on other priorities.”

Michelle tallies substantial savings across the organization. “Using Tealium cuts hours of work each week for the digital marketing and development teams. The return on our Tealium investment was measured in weeks.”

More Focus on Revenue-Generating Initiatives

Michelle emphasizes the business impact of such savings. “When we first started using Tealium, our focus was on helping acquisition teams drive more business. Marketing efforts still center on driving prospect traffic to constantcontact.com but with the added control and agility Tealium gives our staff to deploy online applications (such as conversion m-boxes through Adobe Test & Target), teams can be strategic, proactive, and sophisticated in their optimization efforts.

“We’ve also significantly expanded our analytics work. Because of the simplicity of tag deployment, we’re able to launch timelier and more sophisticated site analytics. We spend fewer resources on the basics of tagging and more on higher-level, business-generating initiatives. My team concentrates on visitor-to-trial conversion rates. Using Tealium for tag management, we’ve been able to more effectively drive our primary conversion event, which is persuading prospects to sign up for a free 60-day trial of our e-mail service.”

Improved Reliability

Product developers traditionally preferred to avoid or minimize third-party dependencies within the password-protected customer portal.

But Michelle says that with the control and management that Tealium affords, developers have begun taking advantage of online solutions. “Recently, in the process of testing a new product feature, our product developers needed more qualitative user feedback. We demonstrated the control that Tealium provides, both in firing the tag in specific scenarios and in enabling instant on/off toggling. We turned the tag on, the survey worked as expected, and the product team experienced an impressive response rate with extremely useful feedback.

“Without the protection of Tealium tag management, that survey would have been impractical to set up. But using Tealium, we were able to safely deploy a very low-cost third-party solution and, within a matter of days, engineering obtained invaluable user feedback.”

Michelle says that using Tealium streamlines troubleshooting—enabling faster detection and correction of misbehaving tags—and, by loading tags asynchronously, improves web site performance.

Revolutionizing the Success Formula

“By helping small businesses do more business, Constant Contact has experienced tremendous growth,” Michelle said. “The Tealium solution has kept pace with that growth, helping to streamline complex processes, increase our marketing agility and efficiency, drive results, and even contribute to product design.

“Tealium feels like a true partner, sharing our commitments to customer satisfaction, simplified marketing, and creative problem-solving. Their engineers are some of the best we’ve worked with in tackling the unique technical considerations of our business. Tealium’s technology and expertise contribute directly to our ability to revolutionize the success formula for Constant Contact’s small business and non-profit customers.”

About Constant Contact

Constant Contact helps small businesses do more business. The company has been revolutionizing the success formula for small businesses, nonprofits and associations since 1998, and today works with more than 600,000 customers worldwide. Constant Contact offers the only all-in-one online marketing platform that helps small businesses drive repeat business and find new customers. It features multichannel marketing campaigns (newsletters/announcements, offers/promotions, online listings, events/registration, and feedback) combined with shared content, contacts, and reporting; free award-winning coaching and product support; and integrations with critical business tools—all from a single login. The company’s extensive network of educators, consultants/resellers, technology providers, franchises and national associations offer further support to help small organizations succeed and grow. Through its Innovation Loft, Constant Contact is fueling the next generation of small business technology.