Constant Contact and Xero Partner to Give SMBs Marketing Intelligence Based on Customer Sales Data

Constant Contact, a provider of marketing automation, and Xero, a provider of online accounting software, today announced a partnership that empowers small businesses to integrate their financial data with their Constant Contact account to develop intelligent, hyper-targeted marketing campaigns.

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 import these filtered lists into their Constant Contact account to develop more tailored marketing campaigns 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.

A shoe store owner, for example, who uses Xero can filter 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 at Constant Contact, in a statement. "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."

"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, U.S. president of Xero, in a statement. "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."

Other recent Constant Contact integrations have included MarketMeSuite, Bigstock, Pipelinersales, and several others. Xero previously announced an integration with Batchbook's marketing software.

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