Constant Contact Review for 2023, When is it appropriate to use the best email marketing tool that isn’t just an email promotional tool? When its features set develops to include much more than email marketing.
Constant Contact began as a wholly owned email marketing platform, but it soon followed in the footsteps of competitors like Mailchimp and extended to include advertising platforms like Facebook and Google ads.
Constant Contact, such as most email marketing firms, will claim to be the finest. It’s supposed to become the only tool you’ll ever need to sell your goods or services via email, SMS, and maybe social media.
What would that signify for advertisers who are exclusively interested in email marketing? Is it up to the task, or has it scrimped on quality in order to be a one-stop store for all advertisers? To learn more, read my review.
For whom is Constant Contact designed?
Constant Contact provides a lot of advanced functionalities, such as monitoring and contact management, but they’re simple to comprehend and use. Therefore, even if you possess no prior expertise with email marketing tools.
You can immediately get started with constant contact and feel confident that you are taking full advantage of all of the functionalities.
It is better ideal for enterprises with higher budgets due to the absence of a free version as well as the high rates.
Features of Constant Contact
Constant Contact stands out for its analytics and contact management capabilities, but its all-around email marketing system has no flaws.
Make an email
One useful feature is the option to modify emails to match your brand’s colours and designs by manually opening the website’s URL. You can utilise Constant Contact’s constructed template and drag-and-drop email editor to get started if you don’t like to do that.
You can change the styles and background of the newsletter as a whole and the components of each content block. You can make your email entirely personalised in minutes because it’s so simple to use so everything is self-explanatory.
You may even select to offer different content to certain contacts based on any criteria you desire, whether it’s demographic data like age or region, purchasing history, or even an email section, with the dynamic content option. This is a quick yet efficient technique for sending highly relevant information to specific contact groups.
Ensuring that every element of the consumer experience is technically right is among the most basic, but also most critical, aspects of developing a great user experience. Constant Contact can assist you in this area by analysing for missing links, errors, copywriter issues, and dates, among other things.
Whenever it comes to evaluating how your emails will appear to recipients, you can test it by sending it to your email beforehand to check the structure and ensure that your email will look well on both mobile and desktop devices. You must pay for an add-on if you’d like to preview a newsletter across all email applications – Gmail, Yahoo, and so on.
You could choose from a variety of scheduling choices when sending emails to help maximise open rates based on prior customer behaviour, as well as resending to customers who won’t open the very first time to improve open rates.
Instead of waiting for all the emails to be delivered, you can gain early access to campaign statistics allowing you to make modifications mid-campaign if you notice an issue.
Management of contacts
Constant Contact allows you to transfer contacts from other major email services and workplace apps in addition to manually entering them or uploading them from a file. This is especially helpful for marketers that are currently using another email marketing service and wish to switch to Constant Contact swiftly and easily.
Constant Contact not only helps you maintain contacts, but it also assists you in building your email list, which really is especially important if you are just getting started but don’t have a great deal of time to devote to this function.
Constant Contact walks you through the procedure instead of leaving you to figure it all out on your own, which is especially helpful for inexperienced email marketers just getting started.
These are some of the actions:
• Creating a sign-up web page for your webpage in order to gather more email addresses.
• Allowing users to connect your email marketing strategy by sending a text message.
• Connecting to other apps.
Designs
Constant Contact has a larger number of design themes. Mailchimp, on the other hand, allows for greater customisation, making it much easier to use. Users will have more layout options and picture placement possibilities as a result of this.
Segmentation
You can only build segments in Constant Contact depending on whether or not a user has received, viewed, or opened your email. Other email marketing software, on the other hand, allows you to categorise clients based on variables like the last time they pulled an email and whether or not they have made the purchase.
Connecting with Shopify and using information directly through your online marketplace to build segments is a helpful segmentation capability. This enables you to send relevant campaigns to customers at various phases of their customer journey, increasing the possibility that they will buy your goods or services or reconnect with your company.
Constant Contact also has minimal automation features, albeit there are just a few trigger possibilities. These are the possibilities:
• Emails are opened.
• Clicks on links.
• A new subscriber joins a mailing list.
Options such as “buy the product” or “withdraw from a list” are available in other software of emails.
When a contact performs one of the three activities listed above, the sole workflow choice is to send emails. There is no way to move them to a different list, categorize them, or give them a confirmation email or SMS.
Because of the absence of automation, you’ll have to take any action manually when clients act in a particular way, and you won’t be able to easily detect links that will help you to understand the many paths people take when buying products.
Automation
Constant Contact just includes a smattering of automation features.
Landing Pages
Whenever you want to sell somebody on a single product or service all at once, landing pages are ideal.
Constant Contact’s landing page is adequate, but it, like the automation, is lacking. Let me try if I can come up with a better way to express this. There were five different templates available. Yes, only five.
Reporting
One of the most valuable features of Constant Contact is the ability to view the effectiveness of several emails (tries to send, bounce, click, and open) on a single graph, allowing you to evaluate the accomplishments of each measure side by side and track growth over time.
For instance, if you notice a substantial reduction in your messages over time, you realize you need to dig deeper to figure out why and take action.
You can examine additional precise statistics about each campaign’s performance, such as at what time it was sent and the activity of particular members.
Integrations
With integration, your email marketing activities will be more successful. Which integration solutions, on the other hand, genuinely improve the effectiveness of email marketing?
Ecommerce platforms allow you to segment your target group based on key customer data and transmit appropriate marketing, customer feedback requests, membership reminders, and anniversary and birthday reminder messages.
Forms of registration
You must collect users’ contact details through the registration form on your website if you’d like to develop and maintain their email list. Based on your business’s requirements, Constant Contact allows you to generate pop-ups, integrated forms, and customizable landing pages.
You can change the style attributes and background pictures on the signup and landing web pages to fit your brand.
Constant Contact’s Advantages
Constant Contact has a slew of capabilities that help marketers send eye-catching emails, enhance contact management, categorize contacts for better engagement, and measure and report on statistics to accomplish campaign objectives.
With Constant Contact, businesses can look into the effectiveness of their emails to see what’s performing and for whom – all together in a visual format. This knowledge can help you improve not only your marketing but as well as the way you categorize your mailing list.
Using Constant Contact’s assistance
Constant Contact includes a Help option in its horizontal menu, allowing you to access it regardless of what you’re doing or which page you’re on.
You can utilise this Help option to live chat, call, or email Constant Contact in addition to searching its knowledge library for in-depth publications and step-by-step instructions.
The opportunity to ask the questions of many other members in the forum, which aids in the discovery of remedies for even more specific concerns, is one beneficial support feature.
Constant Contact can be reached at the time scheduled:
- 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. ET Monday through Thursday.
- From 8 a.m. until 9 p.m. ET on Friday.
- From 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET on Saturday.
There are three main ways to contact help, as well as a handful of streaming channels to try if the first three wouldn’t work.
Chat in real-time
I inquired as to whether or not actual email content and layout could be A/B tested. I received a prompt response, and everything went perfectly. You’re aware. You can’t do it. Nonetheless, the actual encounter was quick and provided me with the information I required, which is how the support staff is evaluated.
Support over the phone
Then I called phone support and inquired if I could send out my email campaigns via SMS and social networks at the very same time as they were sent out via email. I instantly spoke with a professional, polite employee and received my response. In terms of phone calls, it was easy and efficient.
To be truthful, the email support was a touch underwhelming. I specifically inquired about support for right-to-left languages such as Arabic and other similar languages. Well, I had to look for the data elsewhere because a technology representative utterly misunderstood my query in this situation. Oh, and getting an answer took over 20 hours.
Pricing for Constant Contact
The 1-month free trial of Constant Contact needs you to provide your credit card information. The firm makes it exceedingly tough to terminate your free trial (or your accounts in general) during the trial period. On the internet, there really is no way to cancel.
Instead, you’ll have to look up how to cancel in the Body Of Knowledge because there’s no data about that on the My Customer account. Then you must contact the billing department during regular business hours to finish the transaction. If you want to close your subscription, you must offer a reason for doing so.
Because cancelling Constant Contact is indeed a time-consuming and difficult process, make sure you would like to join the plan before hitting the free trial.
Constant Contact’s price is determined by the number of connections you have, as it is with most email marketing software. There really are two paid pricing plans to choose from:
• Email: Prices start at $20 monthly for 500 or fewer contacts, and go up to $45 per month for 501-2,500 contacts.
• Email Plus: $45 per month for 500 connections or less; $70 per month for 501-2,500 connections.
If you pay for 6 or 12 months in advance, you will receive a 15% discount, and non-profits will receive a 30% voucher.
Constant Contact is comparably rather pricey, especially since it only offers basic functions in some sectors, such as categorization and landing page capabilities when comparable email marketing technology includes free plans for firms with fewer than 1,000 connections.
Pros and Cons Constant Contact
Pros
- It also has handy native features such as a surveys and coupons function, removing the need for third-party integrations.
- This has a long list of prohibited domains and has rigorous affiliate link regulations.
- Email editor with drag-and-drop functionality.
- Maintaining a contact list.
- Automated email.
- It includes a number of useful tools that assist us in creating newsletters better mobile-friendly and convenient for users on a daily basis.
- It allows us the most creative freedom when it comes to building dynamic and appealing marketing strategies.
- This all-encompassing platform greatly aids me in finishing marketing initiatives.
- The most important feature of this application is its efficient monitoring and statistics.
- Contact metrics are simple to keep track of, It’s a fantastic option for data management.
Cons
- Constant Contact’s effectiveness is restricted by its lack of automation, A/B analysis, and monitoring requirements.
- The user experience needs to be more user-friendly.
- It took me a long time to figure out how to use the social networking publishing widget, for example.
- The requirement for improved integration with third-party software applications.
- Monitoring variables isn’t always the most straightforward.
- Unfortunately, this email campaign software does not yet support spam screening.
Bottom Line
Constant Contact offers video tutorials to assist you get started with each function, as well as in-app suggestions for improving your email marketing campaigns. For instance, it suggests that you develop a pop-up to invite users to register to your newsletter so that you may grow your email list while you’re in the contact menu.
With its well-designated menus, Constant Contact is simple to browse, albeit certain capabilities can be difficult to discover at times. Email automated tools and landing pages aren’t mentioned anywhere else in the menus, so you’ll have to go back to the home screen and start over.
Constant Contact takes a long time to load, which is inconvenient when you’re trying to do activities or switch between features rapidly.
Constant Contact provides a good set of fundamental functions, but there are a lot of sophisticated capabilities that are either unfinished or missing. This is unfortunate because the UI is simple to use, and my entire user experience was quick and straightforward. The majority of the assistance was also excellent.
Beginners will find the majority of what they require on this platform, although they may rapidly exceed the present limitations.
Constant Contact is the one to keep a close eye on, in my opinion. There’s great potential here, but potential won’t pay all the bills before this company gets its functionality in line. Sendinblue or GetResponse offer more extensive options for the same price.
FAQs
Is Constant Contact a better email marketing service than Mailchimp?
With even more – and better – themes and a much more user-friendly editing interface, Constant Contact is the superior solution for beginners and small company owners. Although Mailchimp has better statistics and A/B testing, its fundamental functionalities fall short of Constant Contact.
Is there a free version of Constant Contact?
No, however, if you’re in the United States, there’s a free 2-month Constant Contact trial and a 1-month trial for everyone else. You’ll have access to all of the functions of the standard Email plan, and you’ll have to provide your payment details to begin the trial when you’re not in the United States.
What is the cost of Constant Contact?
The standard Email plan costs $1476 per month, while the Email Plus plan costs $3321 per month. Constant Contact costs increase in proportion to the number of subscriptions, although there are reductions for longer commitment and non-profit organizations, and you can also save cash with our Constant Contact coupons.
What are some of the advantages of Constant Contact?
It’s a simple tool for novices and anyone who doesn’t have a lot of free time. Website creation and online marketplace creation are bundled in the same platform, providing it with an all-in-one digital advertising tool. You’ll also have access to numerous fantastic email templates as well as responsive customer service.