Your locally owned toy store probably uses it, as does the neighborhood bakery,

yoga studio, and hardware store. As a leading online marketing platform for

small organizations, chances are the local businesses you frequent as part of your

daily routine rely on Constant Contact to stay connected with their customers.

Constant Contact, an Endurance International Group company and a leader in

email marketing since 1995, provides hundreds of thousands of small businesses

around the world with the online marketing tools, resources, and personalized

coaching they need to grow their business.

The company is committed to making digital marketing easy and effective for

non-technical business owners and their staff. That commitment is reflected not

only in the experience its customers have with its software-as-a-service (SaaS)

solution, but in the “you don’t have to do it alone” customer service approach

that promises to always be there for customers, with real people—educators,

experts, and coaches—who are ready to help.

Finding root causes fastThe promise of “always being there” applies to the software as well. “Our customers

are small business owners with little time and even less technical knowledge.

They expect our products to be available, easy to use, and free of errors,” says

Adam Gelinas, advisory software engineer at Constant Contact.

Constant Contact chose New Relic to gain the end-to-end visibility it needed to

maintain the reliability, availability, and performance its customers expect.

“Without New Relic, we would be blind to the impact of production issues on our

Constant Contact Improves Reliability of Its Email Marketing Solutions INDUSTRY

Technology

LOCATIONWaltham, Mass.

USE CASEMonitor performance, customer

experience, and business metrics for

hundreds of applications, servers, and

user interfaces

PRODUCTS USEDNew Relic APM, New Relic Browser,

New Relic Insights

WHY NEW RELICDelivers full-stack visibility to help

minimize production issues and their

impact on the customer experience

HIGHLIGHTS• Substantially reduced the number

of production incidents as well as

the duration of customer impact

per incident

• Accelerated time to market by

giving engineers more time for

sprints instead of troubleshooting

• Supports DevOps culture and the

move to AWS public cloud with

visibility into performance and

increased confidence in code

deployments

Customer Case Study

customers,” says Gelinas. “Our engineering and operations teams rely on New

Relic APM, New Relic Browser, and New Relic Insights to monitor and track

performance, customer experience, and business success across hundreds of

applications, servers, and user interfaces.”

The data provided by New Relic provides the DevOps organization with the visibility

needed for quick and efficient resolution of incidents. It also provides product

owners, customer support, and other business stakeholders with actionable insight

into key performance indicators (KPIs) that impact their business functions.

Getting insight into the customer experienceNew Relic Browser gives Constant Contact deep visibility into browser-side

applications and customer experience. The team uses it to get insight into issues

such as JavaScript errors and bottlenecks as well as gain a better perspective of

what customers experience when they are interacting with applications day to day.

Constant Contact makes extensive use of the custom attributes

feature in New Relic Browser and New Relic APM. This powerful

capability enables the organization to monitor attributes specific

to its use case, including remote IP address, browser type,

current product build per transaction, and more. “With custom

attributes in New Relic, we can monitor at a very granular,

targeted level, allowing us to troubleshoot much more effectively,”

says Gelinas.

The error profiles capability in New Relic APM helps Constant

Contact quickly identify what is unusual about an error or set

of errors, helping to speed incident resolution time. “The error

profiles feature streamlines my process for troubleshooting,

which saves me time. I routinely switch the grouping of errors

so that I can easily see patterns in the attributes we are

tracking,” says Gelinas.

Democratizing data across the businessWhile the technical side of the house uses New Relic Insights to organize and

visualize the data collected by New Relic APM and New Relic Browser and

share that data with others, the business side of the house is starting to take

advantage of interactive custom dashboards as well.

With custom attributes in New Relic, we can monitor at a very granular, targeted level, allowing us to troubleshoot much more effectively.

Adam GelinasAdvisory Software Engineer, Constant Contact

Constant Contact Improves Reliability of Its Email Marketing Solutions

Looking over the shoulder of engineers, business stakeholders realized just how

valuable the monitoring data could be to understand business performance as

well as customer experience. When launching a new product, stakeholders can

immediately see how the product is being accepted and used. The business can

request an A/B test for product changes and then instantly observe the results.

“It started with one business dashboard in New Relic Insights that shows transactions

for a new product offering,” says Gelinas. “But now we’re getting requests for

other custom dashboards that show usage, transactions, button clicks, and other

metrics that help stakeholders measure success and track KPIs that are important

for the business.”

Gaining more time for delivering new products and featuresWith New Relic, the engineering team no longer has to wait for calls to come

in from customers to find out about problems with the customer experience.

Constant Contact Improves Reliability of Its Email Marketing Solutions

© Copyright 2018, New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. 02.2018

“From alerts to Applied Intelligence services, New Relic makes

it easy to monitor everything and stay on top of the metrics

that matter most to our customers’ experience with our product,”

says Gelinas. “Additionally, we’ve improved the quality of

deployments, with the overall number of production incidents

significantly fewer than before.”

It’s also helping the organization in its adoption of DevOps

practices. “As teams continue to move away from our

previous monolithic/throw-it-over-the-wall approach and

embrace DevOps, New Relic supports this new culture by

providing visibility into performance throughout the software

lifecycle,” says Gelinas. “It really helps instill a sense of

ownership and accountability for the software and the

customer experience.”

The time that New Relic saves Constant Contact in trouble-

shooting impacts not only the customer experience but the

bottom line as well. Gelinas explains, “Before New Relic,

software engineers would need to abandon their sprints to troubleshoot

production issues, which delays the availability of new products and the revenue

associated with them.” Today, engineers can stay more focused on valuable

development work, reducing the costs and delays resulting from troubleshooting

or having to redo their work.

Moving from private to publicThe next major initiative for Constant Contact is to migrate its applications from

its private OpenStack-based cloud to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public

cloud. In addition to greater agility and faster access to new technologies, the

company is hoping to improve and streamline its continuous delivery workflow

with automation available for AWS.

The company is finding New Relic to be an essential tool for ensuring continuity

of the customer experience as applications are migrated. “We’ll be using New

Relic to monitor the migration to AWS and make sure we’re maintaining the same

quality levels using our current benchmarks. This will allow us to build in the

cloud with speed and confidence,” says Gelinas.

And that quality of experience is what continues to drive the success of Constant

Contact’s customers. Those bakers, brewers, builders, and all the other small

businesses down the street can thank Constant Contact and New Relic for the

digital marketing experience that helps them reach their full potential.

From alerts to Applied Intelligence services, New Relic makes it easy to monitor everything and stay on top of the metrics that matter most to our customers’ experience with our product.

Adam GelinasAdvisory Software Engineer, Constant Contact

Constant Contact Improves Reliability of Its Email Marketing Solutions