As a Communications Director or church leader, you know the importance of staying in touch with your congregation. But, that’s not always as easy as it sounds.
Are duplicate email lists in multiple systems creating havoc for your communications? How much time are you spending exporting and importing contact lists just to send an email to a targeted group within your church?
With the new integration of Realm and Constant Contact, those problems are gone! Let’s talk about how this integration will:
- Ensure matching databases with a daily two-way sync
- Support targeted emails by sending new lists, updating lists, or replacing contact lists
- Allow you to provide more customization options for email communications
Plus, we’ll give you a sneak peek at what’s to come soon with this integration!
Sync your contacts.
You can now sync your Realm and Constant Contact accounts – yes, even multiple accounts – to ensure your contacts are matched in both solutions. Once enabled, the sync takes place nightly.
How many times have you been right in the middle of something when a member calls or walks into your office wanting to update their email address? Well, the best part about the sync between Realm and Constant Contact is that it is a two-way sync. This means whether you are able to quickly pull up Realm or if you are already logged into Constant Contact, you can make the changes in either solution and the sync will update it automatically in the other solution.
Send contact lists for targeted emails.
You know the saying, “When everything is important, nothing is important.” This fundamental thought drives many communication plans, which is why you have groups in Realm and contact lists built-in Constant Contact to send targeted communications about things pertaining specifically to that group of people.
With the integration of Realm and Constant Contact, you no longer have to manually build or export/import contact lists from one to the other. You can send a list of contacts to Constant Contact from groups, reports and queries, and many other areas of Realm. When sending a list, you can choose to create a new list, or update or replace an existing list. Not only does this save you time, but it also reduces the chance of errors within your contact lists.
Customize your email communications.
We’ve listened as many of you have called and spoken about the need for more robust customization options for your email communications. And this is one of the bigger reasons we chose to integrate Realm and Constant Contact.
Now, you can use Realm to manage your contacts and church groups, and then send those to Constant Contact where you can create customized templates that represent your church. Create multiple templates with custom images, colors, fonts, and layouts that support your many ministries, events, and outreach efforts, then use those templates when sending emails to your members and subscribers.
What’s coming …
We know you .. you’re already thinking of ways you can use this new integration to simplify your communication processes. So, while you’re planning and thinking through how this benefits your church, we want to arm you with a few additional features you’ll see soon within the integration of Realm and Constant Contact.
You’ll soon be able to send giving and pledge statements via Constant Contact! You’ll get all of the advantages of using Realm to track and manage contributions, plus the bonus of being able to send those statements to Constant Contact where you can customize them to match the branding of your church.
Start using Realm and Constant Contact today!
Already have Constant Contact? Follow the steps below to start syncing your contacts.
- Log into Realm
- Click Admin
- Choose Manage Realm Account
- Click on Additional Features
- Select Learn More beside Constant Contact Sync
- Click “Link a Constant Contact Account” and follow the onscreen instructions
New to Constant Contact? Sign up today.
Does syncing work in the other direction? We use Mail Chimp currently, to ask visitors and potential members to leave their contact information with us, which we either upload CSV or manually enter in Realm if they meet our requirements to upload into our system. We require more vetting of persons before putting them into our database, due to potential access to our directory if they activate their account.
With Constant Contact, if we design a sign up form to receive our eNewsletters that ask for name, email, address and phone number that goes to a designated email list (like Newcomers), will that data sync to “live fields” in Realm?
Hey Stephanie, The sync is a two-way sync, however, it does not add new profiles from Constant Contact to Realm. If new data is updated for existing contacts, that will sync into Realm. However, in the case of new contacts signing up for your newsletter through Constant Contact, those contacts would need to be added into Realm via an import.