Constant Contact offers some simple reports on your autoresponder campaigns, but little detail is available. Even through the API, the data is difficult to extract, but it can be done. This article details how Analytics Edge makes it possible to monitor your email series to see who each message was sent to, which ones bounced, whether they were opened, and whether they clicked on a link.
With Constant Contact, you can easily set up an autoresponder series, like a series of welcome messages. When someone signs up, they will get a series of messages over a period of time to welcome, nurture and engage them with your business. Basic summary reporting is provided, but it is difficult to see how engaged specific users have been to your messages.
Constant Contact makes its data available through an API – an application programming interface — but the autoresponder campaigns are not directly available yet. There is enough data available, though, to piece together a good picture of who was sent which messages, and whether they opened or clicked on anything in them.
The process described below make appear to be tedious, but it can be automated using the Analytics Edge Core Add-in with the optional connector for Constant Contact so you can monitor the engagement on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
What Data Exists And What Data Is Missing
Constant Contact autoresponder series are made up of multiple email messages, and each message is a campaign. The problem is that you can’t report on these campaigns — they aren’t listed. You can get activity for specific contacts, though, and if they interact with one of these unlisted campaigns, that activity appears with an associated campaign id.
If you pick a specific contact and look at their activity, you can figure out which which campaign_id number is associated with which autoresponder message, and build a simple cross-reference list.
Joining these 2 pieces of data together gives us all the detail we need to build summary or detailed reports as desired. The challenge is that the level of detail we are looking for is only available for individual contacts, and you could have thousands of contacts in your account.
This is not such a big problem, though, since you only need to query the contacts that subscribed to the series. The autoresponder series itself is usually triggered when a contact is added to a list, and we can get the list along with the dates that the contacts were added.
Leveraging the automation of the Analytics Edge Core Add-in, we can perform the following steps:
- download the contacts in your autoresponder list
- filter to keep only the recent ones (long enough to receive the entire series of messages)
- for each of those contacts, download their activity details
- keep only the activity for the autoresponder campaigns (from our lookup list)
- produce a report using the details now available
Example Summary Report
For my own use, I track a welcome series that is made up of 5 messages sent daily. I wanted a simple summary showing who was recently added to the list, and what was sent to them. I wanted a quick visual that would show if the message was sent (an ‘OK’ status), bounced (a bad status), opened (a good status) or if they clicked on a link (a great status).
Being a visual person, I leveraged Excel’s conditional formatting to go from red (bounce) through yellow (sent but not opened), to green (light green for opened and deep green for clicked).
Custom Reporting Available
This is just an example of the type of report that can be whipped up in Excel with Analytics Edge without a lot of effort (or expense). Analytics Edge customers use a variety of customized reports for their agency use — contact support@analyticsedge.com to discuss possibilities for your own. You don’t need to be limited to what Constant Contact provides out-of-the-box.