CONSTANT CONTACT CASE STUDY

Executive Summary

Constant Contact helps more than 650,000 customers worldwide find marketing success through the only all-in-one online marketing platform for small organizations. Constant Contact’sevent marketing customers and ticket sellers had a unique set of needs, requiring an extremely seamless sign-up and checkout process. Constant Contact decided to add WePay as a payment option in its event management product. Almost immediately, WePay differentiated itself with its fast, simple integration process — with developers able to get the answers they needed immediately so they could get to market fast. WePay proved to be a popular choice for Constant Contact’s event marketing customers, driving engagement through its well-integrated experience and fast set-up process.

The Challenge

While most people know Constant Contact for its pioneering work in email marketing, today, the company provides small businesses with value well beyond the email marketing space. With Constant Contact, users can run social media campaigns, solicit and accept donations, offer and manage promotions, conduct customer surveys, and publicize and manage registration for events. Some of these business functions include the collection of payments, and Constant Contact aims to provide users with a range of payment options to meet the varying needs of customers. In particular, event marketers and ticket sellers had a special set of needs:

• Simple sign-up process: Event customers often chose Constant Contact to help with a specific event that would happen soon, so the sign-up process had to be fast and easy so they could get up and running quickly.
• Accept payments fast: Event customers needed to start selling their tickets immediately, so they didn’t have time for an extended approval process before they could accept theirfirst credit card payment.
• No upfront fees: Event marketers might not realize significant revenue until their event was over, so upfront fees to process payments didn’t fit their business model.

The Solution

Constant Contact began looking at additional payment options to add to its event marketing tool to help meet the needs of a variety of customers. WePay satisfied those needs.

Especially attractive to Constant Contact’s product team was the seamless onboarding experience that WePay provided. Rather than requiring a redirect to a third party website and a lengthy underwriting process before a payment could be accepted, WePay could get new users up and running in minutes without event customers ever having to leave the Constant Contact interface.

In late 2013, Constant Contact decided to add WePay as a payment option in its event management product. Almost immediately, WePay differentiated itself with its fast, simple integration process. Constant Contact’s development team found WePay’s technical documentation both thorough and easy to digest, so they could get working quickly. What’s more, when the team needed additional assistance, they found WePay provided highly responsive, quality support.

The Results

Constant Contact launched WePay as a payment option in May 2014, and users quicklyresponded favorably to WePay’s ease-of-use and efficiency. Key benefits included:

• Simple and streamlined onboarding experience: Customers signing up to use WePay as a payment processor were able to do so quickly and easily, with minimal information needed for them to get started—a major win for time-limited small businesses and nonprofits using the product.
• Speed to acceptance of donations: Because of the limited information required to get started, users could be up, running, and accepting payments very quickly.
• Focus on small businesses: WePay’s focus on supporting small businesses, combined with its ease-of-use, and quality customer support enabled anyone to accept online payments, even with no prior experience in payment processing.