Email Campaign Quick Start Guide
Use this guide to quickly get started working through the typical email campaign creation workflow:
Before You Begin
Verify the following:
- You have a Constant Contact V3 API developer account and a registered application in the Developer Portal.
- OAuth2 authentication is configured for your integration. Learn more
- You are authorized to access the necessary scopes and privileges that allow you to get and change campaign data:
- Constant Contact users who are granting your application access to data in their Constant Contact account must have
campaign:writeandcampaign:reademail campaigns privileges. Developers can verify a user's privileges by making a GET call to the/account/user/privilegesendpoint. Learn more - You requested and received the
campaign_datascope from your Constant Contact users. For example:campaign_datascope is required to access campaign reporting data. Learn more Note: Adding a contact without their explicit consent is a serious violation of anti-spam laws and Constant Contact's Terms of Service.
- Constant Contact users who are granting your application access to data in their Constant Contact account must have
Custom Code Email Campaigns
Constant Contact uses format types (format_type) to support their different email editor versions and API email formats. You use the V3 API to create email campaigns using the custom code format type. You can still retrieve, update, and schedule the other email format types, but you cannot use the V3 API to create them.
Custom code emails provide you with a flexible way to control how your emails look and support many of the new Constant Contact email features. Custom code type 5 supports all features allowing you to:
- Send email to segments. Segments are dynamic lists of contacts that you create using different kinds of criteria.
- Use personalization tags to pull contact, custom field, or account information into your email.
- Be flexible with how you style your email. You can choose to use a style element or use inline CSS. Constant Contact will automatically convert your email to use inline css when you send the email to improve compatibility with email clients.
- You can also use the new custom code editor UI to view a live preview of your email and check for layout issues as you edit it.
Learn more about format type schema differences
Plan
Step 1: Define Your Goal
Step 2: Identify Your Target Contacts
Create a New Email Campaign
Test Send
- Learn more about email campaign activity test sends
- Learn more about AB tests
- Learn more about previewing an email campaign
Select Contacts
Learn more about updating an email campaign activity
Schedule or Send
Learn more about scheduling email campaign activities