Constant Contact Reviews

Pros

I'm pretty familiar with email software, having used four different options extensively. Constant contact was the slickest interface, the most intuitive programming, and all of the features I wanted, without being too expensive or difficult to use.

Cons

I have nothing but good things to say about constant contact. If I had to find a thing I like least, it would be the confusion between campaigns and programming.

Pros

Just like any other email marketing tool, they can do the job. No complaints. Email creation for fast email campaign is a breeze. Templates are as well handfuls to choose from. Drag and drop features as well. And it seems that they have much more responsive email system compared to other clients.

Besides, you can use there service for user registration, A/B Testing and surveys.

Cons

First off, Constant Contact can do the job. No Problem. The problem comes when you deep dive into there system - technically taxing, not so user friendly interface, hard to implement branding etc...

Bugs, of course. When you drag a widget, it won't appear on the canvass. Exporting HTML version of the email is also a pain.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing Constant Contact

Well, to try the difference. Found out, they do have there own thurns and thissles with them. Pros and cons.

Switched From

Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to Constant Contact

We are MailChimp user. We have been disgruntled with MailChimp for some reasons. Until, we try Constant Contact for a change. Only to know both of them has discripancies with them. Can't choose one from the other.

Pros

As a digital marketer, I have used Constant Contact with multiple clients and companies over the past 2+ years, and have always found it to be extremely helpful. The majority of my program usage has been for email marketing, although I have heard from team members that it is excellent for social media marketing and other areas of digital marketing as well. For email marketing, I have done it all from creating a company's very first email blast to creating contact lists to monitoring the performance of email campaigns. I recall the first time I used Constant Contact to write an email newsletter for a small business, and was immediately impressed at how simple the interface was for a then-beginner like myself. I was able to change up the imagery (including font and color scheme) and add my photos and infographics. To this day, I love how Constant Contact allows users to create different contact lists for other purposes and campaigns, and the program makes it very clear when sending out emails who exactly that email will be going out to. Though I don't have as much experience with campaign analytics using Constant Contact as I do with some of the other features, I do know that it's reporting of metrics/KPIs is extremely helpful when observing the performance of a particular email and of a campaign as a whole. I look forward to using additional features offered by Constant Contact in the future, including its tools for social media marketing.

Cons

Thus far, the only issue I have with Constant Contact is related to the different features available with the three pricing plans. Although Constant Contact's pricing is good when compared to its competitors, the selection of features available with the cheapest pricing plan, Lite, is rather limited. With this plan, only one user is allowed, and not much storage is given. With email marketing, there is neither A/B testing nor segmentation, which I find to be quite frustrating. Features related to ads, SEO, and scheduling social media posts in advance are not available either. With the Standard pricing plan, there are some more ads, segmentation, and email marketing features available, but users cannot see the full scope of all that Constant Contact has to offer unless they pay for the most expensive plan. Free trials are available, which is helpful, but there is also no free plan. Some of your competitors offer free plans (albeit with limited features) in which at least the basics of the program can be used.

Pros

Constant Contact maintains our lists and is pretty user friendly.

Cons

It could be a lot more user friendly. For example, sometimes you can drop a photo into an email you're working on, other times they want you to upload and put it in which is a much longer process, and time prohibitive if you have a lot of photos to include. They also don't have many email templates which would be helpful.

Pros

I do like that Constant Contact seems to be doing a good number of upgrades that are in other larger platforms.

Cons

To me, it seems like Constant Contact was created for small product-based B-C businesses - that's why the general fields include birthday and anniversary. The first client that I used it with, I didn't decide to use it so I didn't realize this at first.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Reasons for Choosing Constant Contact

Someone recommended Constant Contact

Reasons for Switching to Constant Contact

The company wasn't ready to move to a CRM yet and wanted to try a cheaper product just for email marketing.

Pros

Constant Contact is very intuitive and user-friendly. People with no email experience can easily jump in and create nice-looking emails. Adding contacts and sending emails is also very simple! It really does all the basic things that a company would need to send emails. A perfect beginner email software!

Cons

Since I started using Constant Contact in 2019, the platform is virtually the same. We use other software (like Axios) that are constantly adding new features and content for their platform, whereas Constant Contact doesn't. Unfortunately, we have used Constant Contact to its capacity. Our emails cannot improve or change with the features that are currently available. It would be nice to see more customization in emails and better analytics reporting!

Pros

The simplest thing to say is that it is really amazing. This product at work makes a lot of things easier for me in my work.

Cons

When you use this product, you cannot save it, contrary to what everyone will like when using it

Pros

Constant Contact is overall easy to use and update as your company needs. The support is very helpful and always able to assist with my questions.

Cons

Some of the features are limited in regards to customization. Also there are a number of emails that default to end users spam files so our entire contact list does not receive emails.

Pros

Constant Contact has a good selection of digital marketing tools that can be used with ease. It has a versatile email template library to help us get started and with the A/B testing feature we can tune the campaigns to beter resonate with our audience. Integration options save time, extend reach and with the the inclusion of the SMS marketing possibilities we cam beeter engae with leads and customers. It has a budget-friendly pricing making it a good choice for starting businesses.

Cons

Some advanced automation features might have a learning curve a bit steep to master.

Pros

I liked that I was able to send bulk emails with the program and that data was organized in a logical format

Cons

I didn't like the versatility of the product, it was challenging to customize it to appear the way I wanted it to, and it was especially so as the views between desktop and mobile devices were inconsistent.

Pros

Constant Contact was our top choice for two reasons. 1. Emails are more customizable than other platforms. You can move elements side to side which you can not do on a handful of competitors' platforms. This was huge for us as the look and style of our email are extremely important. 2. Constant Contact offers the ability to create landing page sign-up forms. Total game changer and incredibly easy to create!

Cons

Frequently the platform slows or errors and the text editor covers the text box we are working on. To fix it, we have to refresh the page and likely lose our work.

Alternatives Considered

GetResponse and Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing Constant Contact

There was more flexibility and options for email layout and design.

Switched From

Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to Constant Contact

There was more flexibility and options for email layout and design.

Pros

In the early days of using this type of mailing software for subscription based newsletter campaigns, CC was at the top of its game and most popular. We chose it for that reason, and did it automate and streamline the process of sending email campaigns, however, the problems with CC falsely penalizing for spam caused us to switch providers.

Cons

We imported a significant subscription list which we gathered over several years. When sending a campaign upwards of 5K to 6K, there are going to bad addresses or people which decide they no longer want the content. Fair enough, however, we had a double-opt-in platform in place, and send a campaign 1x monthly. There are always going to be individuals who hit "spam" on email platforms, such as Gmail, because it's a fast way to unsubscribe and delete. This happened enough times, with just 2-3 people (out of thousands) using the Gmail spam report, that CC began to throttle and limit our service. We sent, time and time again, evidence of the double-opt-in from a particular group of spam reporters, to show we don't send unsolicited email -- ever. CC would remove the throttle, but it happened enough times that we grew irritated. If CC made it easier to unsubscribe, and Gmail made it not easier to hit a "spam" button instead of an "unsubscribe" button from CC, we wouldn't have had the issue. We felt the customer service was poor and unfair given the extremely low percentage of those who clicked "spam" (2-3 individuals) out of 5-6K recipients on a given campaign. We closed our CC account, switched, and never had the same problem with the follow-on provider, who took better care of us, and, our readers.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to Constant Contact

Seemed easy to use by multiple staff members. That wasn't a good enough reason to stay, and we didn't. We switched to Mail Chimp (happily so).

Pros

1. Constant Contact makes it easy for me to send bulk email that goes straight to inbox and that what got me entangled with it.

2. I noticed a very rare feature that Constant Contact have that many other doesnt have. Constant Contact, allows me to collect donations from people. Many of the clients i have helped setup Constant Contact like the donation feature part so much too.

3. Constant Contact allows me create absolutely any kind of form that is needed for my list building.

Cons

Constant Contact doesnt have a free forever basic plan. Although they give first month free but I think they should have a plan for small businesses starting out who cannot afford their $20 a month.

Alternatives Considered

Brevo

Reasons for Switching to Constant Contact

Sendinblue plan doesn't fit my budget, its too high compared to Constant Contact. Also, Sendinblue free plan is not encouraging. It says I can only send 300 emails per day.

Pros

The email templates and survey features are really helpful. We can also connect their email lists into our website pretty easily. It's nice to have one paid service that sends out emails AND sends out surveys. MailChimp doesn't offer both features in one, so it's why I stick with Constant Contact. It's also cheaper than MailChimp for the amount of contacts we have. It's expensive, but it's the best one we've found.

Cons

It's not very user-friendly to make the edits I'd like in the actual emails I'm making. There aren't very many templates useful to us, so oftentimes, I end up making my own template and then saving it. The photos don't always load easily when I pull up our photo album, but it does eventually work when I mess with it a bit. My colleagues oftentimes have difficulty with using it as they're not as used to it as I am, so I wouldn't say it's user-friendly off the bat. It takes a learning curve for sure.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to Constant Contact

It would have been us making a switch from Constant Contact to MailChimp as Constant Contact was what we already had. I didn't feel like MailChimp was worth switching everything over, so I have just stayed with Constant Contact.

Pros

It's simple. Drag and drop editor is dummy proof. Very simple to build emails and automations. Ability to do emails with multiple columns.

Cons

Not able to do edge-to-edge designs and the footer is less customizable than our previous email software (Mailchimp)

Pros

As one of the longest-running email marketing tools out there, Constant Contact has gone through some growing pains over the years as it updated its design tools and features to get more in line with the newer competitors coming out, but I think it's still one of the best options for nonprofits. It may not be the cheapest option anymore, but the price is still reasonable compared to some other competitors, and they seem to have added way more features at the basic subscription level, like social media management.The email templates aren't the *best* looking out there, but they have become more modern-looking over time and are mobile-responsive. Many people don't realize that many of those beautiful emails you receive from big companies are not accessible to people with low vision who use screen readers or who don't have images displaying for various reasons (older email providers, slow internet, strict work email accounts that don't allow images, people being too busy to click on the "display images" button, etc.). This is because the majority of those emails are basically just a bunch of images with text in them, not text within the actual body of the email (which is what screen readers can read, and what shows up when images are disabled). Nonprofits in particular must be very conscientious about accessibility - sometimes your grant funding even requires it - so keep that in mind!Deliverability, list/tag options, and customer service were all fine (see 1 exception below).

Cons

This was several years ago now, but at a previous organization (a very small nonprofit with a budget of less than $500k and only 1.5 staff working on communications & fundraising), our account was reported as spam, and I didn't appreciate the way we were treated by customer service after that happened. They were borderline rude and treated us like we were intentionally spamming people, when it was clearly the result of either our small, overworked staff not having the knowledge of best practices in list management (e.g., not removing bounces regularly enough) or the fact that we simply had a somewhat ornery, older donor base who tend to report emails as spam rather than just unsubscribing. (Ugh.) I felt it was clear what had happened given the kinds of emails we sent (monthly e-newsletters and occasional event invitations and donation campaigns, no more than 1x week) and there was no justification for treating us like we were the same as scammers sending spam about Viagra to unsolicited lists. They didn't offer us any flexibility or even sympathy, and temporarily shut down our CC account until we did an opt-in campaign to confirm we had permission to send emails (even though we did only send emails to folks who had opted in previously). It was about a month before our largest fundraising event of the year, so this was a huge issue. I understand they must follow anti-spam rules, but the experience really sucked. A little kindness would've gone a long way here!

Pros

Constant Contact provides many, many capabilities that enhance our ability to prepare and publish comprehensive and distinctive advertising campaigns. It is really great that all the settings are easy, as it does not require much effort, as there are ready-made easy-to-customize templates, and the contacts are easily set up. Constant Contact enables us with high efficiency to design the content of the advertisement as we wish, and drag and drop helps in that, and enables us to deal flexibly with all components and add images, texts and links with ease. Scheduling is also excellent, as we can easily organize publishing times on different platforms. It is also great that Constant Contact enables us to capture a lot of data that expresses the extent of customer response to advertising campaigns, and it is great that this data can be easily exported to different analysis platforms.

Cons

I haven't experienced any complications with Constant Contact, especially when dealing with email campaigns, and it's great that Constant Contact always provides us with newsletters with updates and lots of good ideas.

Pros

Constant Contact makes it easy to create and manage email campaigns and customer satisfaction surveys from one central area. I like how the contact lists are prepared and the same campaign is customized to suit the interests of each list, which exempts us from preparing separate campaigns for each list as it is enough to take a copy of the main campaign and make adjustments easily. I also like that Constant Contact has a lot of powerful features, especially ready-made templates that can be modified easily, and I love how they add animations that catch customers' eyes. Scheduling is very efficient and enables us to set exact posting times. It also helps us a lot in managing posts on social media. Reports and dashboards are useful; through them, we can track openings and clicks, which gives us an informed view of the success of our campaigns.

Cons

There is nothing to dislike about Constant Contact; I just want more templates and ready-made components to be able to improve the quality of our campaigns, and some restrictions need to be removed so that we can export the data we need at once.

Pros

The amount of new customers we brought in was awesome, we kept in touch with past or current customers, meaning they're more likely to become repeat customers.
Email tracking and email automation, surveys (or polls), high deliverability rate, click tracking, insights, and ease of use are all pros. Customer service is very responsive.

Cons

Constant contact costs more and provides less for the price than most of the other email marketing software I've used. I'm absolutely fine with paying more to get more but it doesn't make sense to pay more to get less. Business 101...
Depending on who the recipient has their email address with, more or less of the emails from constant contact may to wind up in the promotions label vs primary.

Pros

I use CC to to manage our large contact database and to send out email updates. It is great for segmenting our list -- from general interest to communications to fundraising. The automated features are great, especially that it will not allow the same email to appear in the same inbox twice. It also merges duplicate contacts. We use it across the entire organization. Constant contact is great for merging duplicate contacts, updating your address book, giving a reliable open rate and thorough reports, and allowing you to segment large email lists.

Cons

When uploading additional contacts, CC wants to see how they actively subscribed. This can be problematic when uploading an older email list (i.e. you may just have a spreadsheet of The List and they want to see more evidence). Additionally, it is a little pricey compared to competitors such as MailChimp. It would be great to be able to export email campaigns as HTML.Be extremely careful when importing contacts. Constant Contact wants to see how they actively subscribed. Sometimes it is hard to prove this when you have entered information for people you have an established relationship with, or if they verbally requested to be added. Constant Contact wants to actually see the (paper) sign-up sheet. This is unachievable for businesses/groups that have been around long enough to have established an email list based on personal relationships or when importing business cards. As for the design, sizing images can be difficult when you are using a self-designed template. As for the contact management services, representatives have very little technical knowledge and don't seem to understand marketing techniques used within certain industries.

Pros

1)Easy to use: Constant Contact has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for users to create and send emails, even if they have little to no experience with email marketing.2)Customizable templates: Constant Contact offers a wide range of customizable templates that users can use to create professional-looking emails.3)Advanced features: Constant Contact offers advanced features such as A/B testing, segmentation, and automation, which can help users fine-tune their email campaigns and improve their results.4)Integration with social media: Constant Contact allows users to easily integrate their email campaigns with social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, making it easier to reach a wider audience.5)Excellent customer support: Constant Contact has a reputation for providing excellent customer support, with a team of experts available to help users with any questions or issues they may have.

Cons

1)Expensive: Constant Contact can be more expensive than some other email marketing tools, especially for users with large email lists or those who need advanced features.2)Limited customization options: While Constant Contact allows users to customize their templates, the options for customization may be limited compared to other email marketing tools.3)No free plan: Constant Contact does not offer a free plan, which may be a drawback for users on a tight budget or those who are just starting out with email marketing.4)Lack of integrations: Constant Contact does not offer as many integrations with other tools and platforms as some other email marketing tools.5)Poor deliverability: Some users have reported issues with email deliverability with Constant Contact, which can be a major issue for any email marketing campaign.

Pros

Constant Contact makes it really easy to make attractive, functional emails and to conduct email campaigns with sequencing. Building emails is done via a drag-and-drop interface (WYSIWYG), so you don't have to have any coding experience with html or css. It's really easy to schedule your campaigns, too. If you can use Outlook and Word, you should be able to get comfortable with Constant Contact pretty quickly. It's also really easy to build and manage contact lists, including importing from csv files. And Constant Contact does a good job of tracking bad email addresses and removing them from your lists, which is important because you are charged by the number of contacts you have. I also like that you can send yourself previews so you can try the messages out on different mail programs and tweak them to your liking. Once you've sent out the messages, Constant Contact offers reporting to let you know how successful your campaign was, including the click-through rate. It also sends you reports about who is being added to and removed from your contact lists. Its integration with several WordPress form plugins means it's easy to convert web traffic to email marketing recipients.

Cons

Permissions. There are basically two levels of permissions besides the account owner: campaign creator and account manager. It would be nice to have more granular control over what users can do, because account manager gives users a lot of freedom, but is necessary to work with contacts, schedule a send, etc. The other thing I don't like is how quickly the cost ramps up. Having used Emma and MailChimp, I feel like Constant Contact is the most robust platform. But it is expensive.

Pros

Constant Contact has a smooth feel and almost always gives back more than I put into it. It's simple, solid, and scores big with me in mass management of details, as well as private and public listings. From crafting a simple update, to publishing an intricate periodical, it does the trick. The better your skills in composition and design, the better this suite will engage your craft. If you're not really into complex "back end" matters, like analytics, CTA, efficiency, and delivery success, that's ok. You'll still be able to feel the "pulse"; and like many things, the rest will come with time. The best part is that it grows on you over time, instead of impressing you upfront, and then disappointing. This "work-on-it-anywhere" app is chock full of tools for social marketing, surveys and campaigns, monitoring, scheduling, automation and similar workflows, to design, custom templates, storage, libraries, and hosting, etc. However, don't ease up on your final proof, because that's where I make the "best" mistakes! The more polished it is, the more embarrassing that typo will be! Constant Contact is a multi-level mobile tool, with plans that meet well.

Cons

While I don't always anticipate maintenance down-times, a more diverse notification system of maintenance times would be nice. I also believe a "pay-per-use" option for a reasonable time-frame would be great for businesses with less predictable budgets, trying to get off the ground. Also, sometimes design tools aren't as pliable as I'd like sometimes (I'm a so-so perfectionist). But for the price, that's ok!

Pros

Emails through constant contact look great, it's easy to use and customize and building email lists is very simple.

Cons

The survey feature was huge for us for the past few years, but they recently re-did this into "survey pages" which is terrible, very limited, and the exported data is always wonky. Support has been no help. This will cause me to look at other email platforms upon my renewal to look for a better "one-size-fits-all" solution.

Alternatives Considered

SurveyMonkey and Mailchimp

Pros

We love how easy it is to organize and manage all the different contacts we have. It allows us to send a lot of targeted emails and dive deep into A|B Testing

Cons

I wish the creation side of email designs were a bit better. Also, many times, images lose their high quality.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp