Xero Offers Integration with Constant Contact for CRM

Effectively using customer contact information to develop future sales and stronger relationships is a critical factor for many businesses, but it can often seem overwhelming or cost-prohibitive for small businesses. Cloud accounting company Xero and cloud CRM maker Constant Contact are hoping to make the process easier and more productive.

Xero has announced that its online small business management system now integrates with Constant Contact, allowing small businesses to integrate their financial data with their Constant Contact account to develop intelligent, hyper-targeted marketing campaigns. This partnership makes it easy for small businesses to turn their own accounting data into powerful marketing campaigns and, in turn, leads.

Along with joint marketing activities, the cornerstone of the partnership is the seamless product integration of Xero with Constant Contact. In particular, this integration enables small businesses to create Smart Lists, a new feature within Xero’s online accounting software that empowers users to search contacts to create segmented lists using a variety of key filters, such as: customer financial and sales data, geographic location, items purchased, time period and price range. They can then easily import these filtered lists into their Constant Contact account to develop more tailored, effective and profitable marketing campaigns.

“Our small business customers often tell us that they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to market to the right customers,” said Jamie Sutherland, US President, Xero. “So we’re excited to partner with Constant Contact to help solve this problem by giving small businesses the ability to use their own accounting data to create smart marketing campaigns.”

For example, a shoe store owner who uses Xero can filter the sales data to determine who purchased sandals priced between $50 to $100 in Chicago during the summer of 2013. The owner can then export this list from within Xero directly into Constant Contact to send these specific customers a targeted promotion about the store’s 2014 collection of summer sandals within the same price range.

“Our reporting and analytics functions have been essential to the marketing success of our 600,000-plus customers, and this partnership with Xero offers them an additional layer of valuable data that further advances the goal of personalized precision marketing,” said Jesse Harriott, chief analytics officer, Constant Contact.“Considering the wealth of accounting and financial data small businesses can retrieve from their Xero accounts, this partnership will be key to our ongoing efforts to helping small businesses do more business.”

Smart Lists

Smart Lists is a new smart search function that enables users to search their customer contacts within Xero accounting software to create segmented lists. Businesses can use Smart Lists to create powerful targeted lists based on a variety of filters such as customers’ past purchase behavior, geographic location and payment behavior, including outstanding payments. It gives users the flexibility to export these lists to Constant Contact for email marketing or as a CSV file to use in a variety of ways. Users can quickly access useful lists by saving search criteria to filter data again when needed or save search results to refer back to static lists. More information at: http://www.xero.com/tv/video/?id=5987-constant-contact-and-xero.