It’s very likely you’ve encountered Constant Contact if you’ve looked into email marketing providers. It started life in 1995 as a pure email marketing solution.
Over the years, they added other features that other players in this space don’t offer such as surveys. There’s even a built-in event management tool that makes Constant Contact stand out from the crowd.
Constant Contact is targeting small businesses. In its quest to level the playing field against larger companies, it has tools to extend your email marketing to social media and ads. It’s a very versatile marketing software.
- Pros and cons of Constant Contact
- Constant Contact user interface
- Campaigns
- Events
- Website builder
- Sign up forms and landing pages
- List management, segmentation, and personalisation
- Automation
- Constant Contact integrations
- Constant Contact reporting
- Support
- Pricing
- Is Constant Contact right for you?
Pros and cons of Constant Contact
As an all-in-one marketing provider, you can send create email and social media marketing campaigns to acquire, convert and retain customers. Its dashboard is the cockpit in which you schedule and share content, create automation workflows, and track the results of your marketing efforts.
Pros
- Intuitive interface that’s great for beginners and business owners who have more on their plate than just email campaigns
- Wide variety of templates for emails and landing pages
- Nifty events tool
- Email builder that scans your website or a PDF for colours and logo
Cons
- No free forever plan
- Compared to others who also cater to small and mid-sized business, it’s more expensive
- Long loading times and unresponsive interface at times
- Surveys only available for the top-level plan
- Pop-up forms limited to the top-level plan
- Segmentation options are limited
- Basic automation, more like autoresponder capabilities
- Cancelling your account is cumbersome
Who is Constant Contact for?
Constant Contact themselves describes its service is meant for small businesses. As you’ll see under pricing, its plans start at $20 per month. This means you’d need deeper pockets to budget for it.
Although Constant Contact has a ton of features, the interface is well designed and the features themselves are easy to use. Even if are starting with email and social media marketing, it’s easy to learn and work with it.
Constant Contact user interface
Constant Contact’s interface is straightforward and uncluttered which makes it great for beginners. Even if you’re more advanced, you’d still appreciate the intuitive interface that lets you quickly complete the task at hand.
Campaigns
In Constant Contact, you’re not limited to creating email campaigns. You can create also create social posts and ads. Constant Contact also lists websites and online stores under campaigns.
As Constant Contact started out with emails, we’ll look at how easy it is to set up an email campaign. Swimming against the industry standard, in Constant Contact, you start a new email campaign by first selecting your email template.
Not only does Constant Contact provide you with a ton of pre-designed templates, but you can also create your own template with
- Brand Templates, where you give Constant Contact your website and it will scan it and create a template according to the design (colours etc) it found
- Custom code, where you create your email in HTML
- Import PDF to email, which works similarly to Brand Templates albeit with a PDF
Should you decide to use a predesigned template, you’re taken to the drag-and-drop editor, so that you can add your content and customise the email. There’s even a built-in Error Checker to prevent any carrels mistakes.
In the last step, select the recipients, set configure the campaign info and send it. Even if the steps to set up a campaign are a bit different, creating an email campaign is a walk in the park.
Events
Being able to hold events can be an important part of your marketing. You can schedule all kinds of events with Constant Contact, from conferences to webinars. If you wish, people who sign up for your event are automatically added to your mailing list.
Constant Contact creates an online form that you can add to your communications or social media. You also can create a landing page for the event registration. In both cases, you get to add your logo and customise the design.
You can set up the event to be free or collect a fee. Should you want to collect a fee, you need to connect your Constant Contact account with Paypal or Wepay, its payment gateway partner.
Website builder
Similar to Mailchimp, you can also build websites with Constant Contact. It couldn’t be simpler to build a website: You’re asked what niche your site is about and if you want to have a blog and an online store. Then you go through a guided step-by-step process to choose your design, layout, color scheme, fonts, and more.
Sign up forms and landing pages
If you want to acquire new customers and leads, you have the choice to display a
- Pop-up form (limited to the top-level plan)
- Inline form
- Landing page
- Facebook lead ad
Following the entire interface, the form builder and landing page builder are just as easy to use.
List management, segmentation, and personalisation
Once you’ve captured the emails, you’ll want to manage and segment your list into categories based on different criteria. Of course, you can add contacts manually or upload them from a file. If you were already working with other popular email services, you can also import your contacts. It’s nice that you can sort your contacts by email address, first name, last name, company name, source, and date added.
You can segment your list based on whether a user has received, opened, or clicked on your email. If you’re using Shopify, you can connect it with Constant Contact and use data directly from your online shop to create segments.
Automation
With Constant Contact, you can set up
- Automated series
- Welcome email sequences
- Birthday email
- Anniversary email
These are more like an autoresponder that is automatically sent to your contacts based on their actions (similar to Aweber).
Constant Contact integrations
With a marketplace with over 400 apps and integrations, you’ll surely find what you need. If not, Constant Contact integrates with Zapier to make up for it.
Constant Contact reporting
You’ll find basic stats like open and click rates in the dashboard to help you optimise your campaigns.
Support
There are several ways, in which you can contact Constant Contact. Although it doesn’t offer 24/7 support, you reach out to the support team via live chat, email, phone, and Twitter. There’s also a knowledge base with guides and tutorials.
Pricing
There’s no forever free plan, but you can still test out Constant Contact with its free for 30 day trial. You need to enter your credit card details though. Also, we found it quite cumbersome to cancel the free trial. There’s no “Cancel here” button anywhere and you have to google or search the knowledge base. Then you’re made to contact the Billing Team for Constant Contact.
The pricing depends on the number of contacts you have and you can choose between Email and Email Plus. The basic plan is Email that includes the bare basics you need for email marketing such as email campaigns and in-line signup forms.
Is Constant Contact right for you?
It’s a good service overall albeit on the expensive side. On top of that, nowadays, there are more performant email marketing providers such as Moosend, MailerLite, or Sendinblue that over more – for less. If you’re a more experienced marketer and want or need advanced options, you may feel let down.
However, should your business depend on events such as webinars, then Constant Contact excels. It gives you all the tools to set up and track an event, while also allowing you to collect payments.
Original post here: Constant Contact review
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