Constant Contact |
Constant Contac Review: market leaders in email marketing, event marketing surveys and are aggressively pushing into social media marketing. The Constant Contact brand is ubiquitous on the web, as they have aggressively marketed the company for years to drive market share. Founded in 1998, are a market leader, have over 500k businesses and non-profits as referenceable customers, are moving into social media marketing integration and have a sophisticated email marketing platform loaded with features and capabilities.
Constant Contact has a robust email marketing platform, with over 400 templates, ability to customize virtually any aspect of your email marketing, “Designer mode” functionality, good reporting and statistical analysis integration, and support for XHMTl, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and even social media campaign integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and even Yelp.
Constant Contact Competitors include: AWeber, Campaign Monitor, Emma, iContact, MailChimp, MyNewsletterBuilder, Vertical Response and 20-30 second tier vendors.
Email Campaign Creation: These features are very sophisticated, with a broad array of customization capabilities for a specific email campaign encompassing almost an unlimited design or style using more than 400 custom templates in multiple layouts, colors and patterns, text block insertions and moves, wide choice of font sizes, extra features including images, links and documents, polls, surveys and even videos, coupled with drag and drop and WYSIWig (“what you see is what you get”) functionality.
Email campaign creation functionality is one of the things Constant Contact Email Marketing is know for – although some complain about the level of sophistication (“too much under the hood”) and feel the User Interface is too hard to learn and utilize. And, those Templates must be modified one section at a time, which can be a bit painstaking.
Overall Ease of Use: Your level of experience in email marketing campaigns and platforms will determine how you assess Constant Contact’s “ease of use.” We found the email marketing platform easy to use overall, provided you have some technical skills, with a User Interface like many other providers; i.e. options at the top of the screen, tabs across enabling you to open windows for adding or maintaining your email list and related functionality. Should be noted, Constant Contact breaks the email campaign setup into three primary processes: create the look of your email campaign, select your audience and then schedule and send.
Expect to spend 2-3 hours setting up first campaign: Be aware, it you are a first time user it will take 2-3 hours at a minimum to set up your fist campaign – it takes some time to get used to the UI, Template integration, email recipient selection and overall campaign management. You are taking a Ferrari out on the freeway!
Constant Contact has strict Terms & Conditions: You should be aware of and agree to Constant Contacts Terms and Conditions prior to sending out any email campaign – they are very sensitive to spam complaints and much more so than other vendors in our experience.
Social Media Integration: More and more, email marketing companies are expanding into the social media space, although the integration is a bit limited. Constant Contact supports social campaigns with integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube. Constant Contact also includes a cool Facebook integration capability, enabling visitors to subscribe to a Constant Contact Email list without leaving the Facebook page. These social media platforms are supported by “social share” buttons built in emails. This social media integration is not significant; but, it does stimulate email recipients to share information via their social media accounts.
Reporting and statistics: Are some of the most robust in the email marketing industry, giving you the ability run comprehensive reporting encompassing: bounce rates (numbers and percentage), open rates, link clickthroughs, complaints, opt-outs from your email campaign, forwarding and even purchasing data.
Bounce Rate Analysis: You can control the bounce rates and unsubscribe options during a campaign to understand who is unsubscribing and Constant Contact also enables you to access each recipients profile from multiple computers.
Surveys: Like many other email marketing services, Constant Contact offers survey capability, which helps to drive user engagement – these can be integrated with an email campaign as well.
Event marketing: These are different from their email campaigns; this is an add-on service that lets customers promote a specific event. You can create the event, promote it, register users, collect payment, and track results via Constant Contact’s Event Marketing services functionality.
Coaching and support: This is an area where Constant Contact shines. They have a very sophisticated help and support center that encompasses a searchable knowledge base, helpful tutorials (video and text), robust detailed user manual, helpful and accessible FAQs, helpful blog and even user forums.
Contact importing: Constant Contact lets you import contacts from Outlook or from QuickBooks.
Standard email marketing campaigns are priced on a monthly basis, and depend on the number of subscribers that you have in your email list.
Number of Subscribers | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
Up to 100 |
$0* |
Up to 500 |
$15 |
501-2,500 |
$30 |
2,501-5,000 |
$50 |
5,001-10,000 |
$75 |
10,001-25,000 |
$150 |
Over 25,000 | Special/negotiated |
* The 100-subscriber option is only available during a 60-day free trial of Constant Contact to review.
The Constant Contact Review: email marketing campaign pricing is very similar to competitors like AWeber and iContact, and is within 20% of the median price range. Pre-paying for 6 months will get you a 10% discount off the listed rates, while pre-paying for 12 months gets you 15% off the listed rates.
Event marketing pricing is based on the number of events published, rather than the number of RSVPs or registrations. Pricing varies from $20 per month for a single published event up to $150 per month for 41 or more events. Discount pricing is also available for event marketing.
Social campaigns carry their own pricing, based on the number of fans reached - we would like to see these costs reduced and/or integrated with over all campaign costs.
Constant Contact Review: this is a powerful email marketing platform with an almost infinite customization capability from one of the established market leaders in email marketing.
Reporting capabilities are extensive, and among the best available from all of the email marketing services providers – this functionality is superb.
The Constant Contact templates library is extensive, infinitely customizable and will give your email marketing campaign a unique look if you invest time into this process.
Free coaching is available from 9 AM to 7:30 PM on weekdays and the web site has a tremendous amount of information and supporting documentation readily available.
The Constant Contact system allows those unsubscribing to leave feedback, which can be very useful for email campaign monitoring and adjustment.
Customer Support is stellar – they are one of the few vendors that provide support over the week-end.
Image hosting is very limited.
The User Interface is somewhat cluttered, making overall navigation a bit challenging, especially for novice or first time users.
Currently, there is no capability to integrate with Google Analytics.
Setup can be tremendously complex. It can take between 3 and 5 hours to set up a campaign, including adding email addresses.
The system is highly sensitive to spam complaints, which can result in frequent contacts with customer service, and lots of wasted time going back and forth with customer service reps.
The social media integration pricing is low value, and can be replicated via lower-cost solutions such as Wildfire.
As is the case with many we-based applications, Constant Contact often presents problems with browser or platform compatibility. This results in extra time spent talking with customer support.
We find Constant Contact’s pricing tiers a bit on the high and they have a tendency to charge extra for many add on features (image storage costs are a good example), which we don’t like.
Constant Contact is certainly one of the market leaders in email marketing for good reason. Their email marketing platform is sophisticated, powerful and robust – their built in editor and templates are effective and easy to use once you get acclimated to their email marketing platform. As a small business email marketing tool, this Constant Contact review gives 7 out of 10 stars. We would have rated them higher, but found some issues with their pricing, platform complexity and customer support.