Syncing List Members from a CRM system to Constant Contact

[CJB795]

We currently have a CRM system that has its own "Marketing List" and "List Membership" similar to that in Contact Contact. We are developing an integration to sync these lists and list members from our CRM system to Constant Contact and want advice on the best method to "Sync" these records between these two systems.

It seems there are the following approaches available:

1. Update the Individual Contact List when an individual list member in our CRM system is either added or removed (this would be a contact by contact basis) and would give us almost real time updates to Constant Contact. This would use the following commands:

• PUT: https://api.constantcontact.com/v2/contacts/{contactId} (we would create a new list array of all remaining lists)

1. Sync the Marketing List using the bulk activities. We would delete all "List Members" and then run a second bulk command to then add the list members in bulk. This of course would not be real time but we could schedule it every two hours. Two ensure that only the contacts were added after the list had bee cleared, our sync process would wait for the 201 success code before posting the bulk contact list. The APi calls we would use would be:

• POST: https://api.constantcontact.com/v2/activities/clearlists
• POST: https://api.constantcontact.com/v2/activities/addcontacts

I would love for this to be as real time as possible but of course we have limitations on the API of 4 calls a second which if a user in our CRM system did a mass change to a list would probably push us way over and then we would be putting waits in our integration to handle resending the request until it eventually went through.

Can any one help with suggestions and has anyone done something similar with the bulk API?

[Jimmy_D]

Hello,

You have the two best methods already laid out. One thing to consider in relation to the first option is that you can create multiple API keys with a single account. How you split the work load on your end is completely up to you. I've heard of other customers add coding that split the requests among their keys based on the order the request came in. Similar to a wait logic, but instead of having to wait you just send the next request to a different API key.

They never shared their code with us so I don't have any examples to show you unfortunately.