SaaS Integration: Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a Software as a Service (SaaS) application used for email marketing, social media marketing, event marketing, and online surveys. Constant Contact has become a popular email marketing solution with its ready-to-use email templates, drag and drop tools for customization, and flexible pricing model.

While Constant Contact and other cloud computing services offer significant cost benefits and enhance overall business efficiency, they also generate cloud silos. When multiple SaaS applications are deployed, enterprise data becomes scattered throughout the cloud, leading to inaccuracies and redundancies in information. The negative impact of cloud silos, however, can be minimized by connecting Constant Contact with other SaaS and on-premise legacy systems. In other words, we need integration.

Constant Contact: Integration Use Cases

There are a variety of integration use cases for Constant Contact that increase its business value and enhance business process flows. Some examples include:

• Drupal integration to grow email lists from new subscribers.
• Salesforce.com integration to synchronize customer contact information, enhance customer relationships with updated and accurate information, measure the effectiveness of marketing programs, and facilitate cross-functional collaboration between sales and marketing departments.
• Application collaboration with social media platforms to automate and coordinate delivery of marketing messages across different channels and synchronize data.

Integrating Constant Contact with Custom Code

With the rapid development of SaaS and a stream of new offerings regularly entering the market, other integration use cases will undoubtedly emerge. The same cannot be said about cloud integration solutions, which have lagged behind SaaS over the past decade. The consequence of this was that SaaS users have tended to tackle the problem of cloud integration by writing their own code.

There are some enterprises that still prefer to develop custom integrations. After all, this means that you can build connectors to meet specific integration needs. With the availability of the Constant Contact API, moreover, customers and third party developers can build connectors, mashups, and other applications.

Writing custom integration code, however, has several drawbacks that counter the advantages of deploying Constant Contact and other SaaS applications:

• Time and Cost: Writing custom integration code is a time-consuming process, especially when you have to write large chunks of code by hand. When the bulk of IT resources are being allocated to developing integrations, moreover, other projects receive less attention. If your integration project becomes too complex to handle in-house, hiring integration consultants effectively cancels out any cost savings gained by deploying a SaaS application over traditional enterprise software.
• Maintenance: An integration project doesn’t end when your connector goes live, either. Ongoing maintenance and updates of custom integrations are required to ensure that connections continue to run smoothly. When Constant Contact upgrades its API, for instance, you will likely need to modify your integration code to maintain compatibility.
• Scalability: Writing custom integration code makes sense for small businesses with simple architectures, but becomes an inefficient and complex process when new SaaS and other systems are quickly added to meet changing business needs. Connecting Constant Contact to another SaaS application can be relatively simple; connecting it to 25 other cloud and legacy applications is far more challenging and tedious.

iON: Integration for the Cloud Era

Aimed at eliminating the headaches of writing custom integrations, Mule iON has emerged as a cloud-based service that enables users to quickly connect Constant Contact with other SaaS and on-premise applications. An Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), Mule iON supports a variety of SaaS integration scenarios and includes the following features:

• iApps: iApps are standalone integration applications that connect particular SaaS offerings and are built and shared over the Mule iON platform. This means that SaaS users can leverage the growing number of iApps and out-of-the box connectors to quickly integrate popular SaaS services while developers can utilize Mule iON’s robust capabilities (including a powerful runtime engine and service orchestration) to build integrations for specific use cases. For both SaaS users and developers, Mule iON minimizes the need to write custom integration code through a configuration approach to building integrations.
• Browser-Based Management Portal: Visibility into the uptime and performance of integration applications is important for making sure that runs smoothly. Mule iON includes a browser-based management portal for managing integrations without requiring the installation or configuration of additional software.
• Secure Cloud to Premise Integration: Cloud integration encompasses not only SaaS to SaaS, but Saas to premise integration as well. To seamlessly connect applications across the cloud and enterprise, Mule iON includes a Secure Data Gateway that is can access data residing on-premise without compromising the firewall.
• Essential Cloud Features: Mule iON includes core cloud features--flexible pay-as-you go pricing, an elastic and scalable structure, and multi-tenancy for data isolation and security--which allow you to perform integrations in a cost-effective, flexible and secure manner.