Is Constant Contact the Right Choice for Your Business? Find Out in This Ultimate Review

Are you considering adding an email marketing tool to your business? You’ve probably heard of this highly popular platform: Constant Contact.

As one of the industry's oldest email marketing platforms, Constant Contact offers many services, including SMS marketing, CRM, email marketing, and automation. Additionally, it can assist you with your ads and meet your needs for social media posting.

However, with so many competitors in the market who offer similar features, how does it stand out? We've gone over everything you need to know in our Constant Contact review. 

What is Constant Contact?

Constant Contact is a platform designed to assist businesses in creating and implementing email campaigns to convert leads into customers. Back in 1995, when it was initially established, email was everything. It is still most recognized today as an email marketing software option.

Despite having started as an email marketing provider, the business now offers a wider range of services related to marketing. With over 650,000 users, Constant Contact has added a ton of new capabilities, such as SMS marketing, social network marketing, event management tools, and more. 

At this moment, it essentially functions as an all-in-one digital marketing platform that has all you need to manage and operate online multi-channel campaigns for businesses end-to-end. Now, the platform even offers artificial intelligence capabilities that can save you time when drafting emails, texts, and social media campaigns.

Is Constant Contact Trustworthy?

You might be wondering if Constant Contact is still a tool you should consider using. Well, it has a 4.3 rating on Capterra, with thousands of reviews stating:

• Constant Contact has a simple user interface, with an affordable pricing structure and a responsive support team. Out of the other email platforms the user tested, Constant Contact had the smoothest UI and all the functionality they were looking for—all without being overly complicated or costly.
• It's easy to create emails for quick email campaigns. There are also many templates to select from. Additionally, it appears that their email system is far more responsive than that of other clients. You can use their service for surveys, A/B testing, and user registration.
• Even with a small team without a dedicated marketing department, every employee could easily use Constant Contact's tools for scheduling and analysis.

And there are more positive reviews (and some negative ones) regarding Constant Contact all over the internet, from small start-ups to larger enterprises. So it’s safe to say you can trust Constant Contact will do the job for you.

Is It Easy to Sign Up to Constant Contact?

If you’re looking to sign up for Constant Contact, go to their website and select the "Get Started" or "Sign Up for Free" option. 

You’ll be prompted to enter your email address and password here, then select whether or not you want to receive emails from them about their goods and services. You’ll also have to include your and your business’s name, which is required to prevent any spam accounts.

Unfortunately, Constant Contact does not provide a fully free plan; instead, it only provides a 30-day free trial. So, you’ll have to decide which plan you want to test out and submit your information.

After selecting your preferred plan and completing your order, or the sign-up process, you'll be sent to the dashboard of your Constant Contact account.

It’s simple to navigate and create a Constant Contact account, and it only takes a few minutes. However, it can be tiresome to share many details during the sign-up process.

How Does Constant Contact Work? Features You Should Know About

Let's take a closer look at the most important features of Constant Contact.

Email editor & designer

Constant Contact has a drag-and-drop email editor and allows you to build eye-catching, compelling emails. There are a ton of pre-built, mobile-friendly themes available that look fantastic on all kinds of devices. So, you won't need to start your email newsletter creation from scratch every time.

With over 200 pre-made templates included with Constant Contact, you can select the ideal email template and customize it to your specifications, saving you time. 

It’s easy to find the ideal design with these templates since they cover a wide range of campaigns, industries, and email types. 

All you have to do is drag and drop elements onto the email canvas from the left column. Just click on a section to make any changes. You can add your unique logo and header image, alter the font size, and more.

Want to send out blog post notifications to subscribers? Just add the "Read more" block to your design and insert a link to the article you want to highlight.

There’s even a 'Check for Errors' option. You can use it to identify mistakes in your email, such as lengthy subject lines, broken or missing links, small button sizes for mobile devices, and more. This ensures you’re sending out a perfect email that’ll reach your subscriber’s inbox.

You can also design a custom-branded email template based on your current website. All you need to do is provide the URL, and Constant Contact will generate a template based on the colors, graphics, and logos from your WordPress blog or website.

It might get a little overwhelming to have so many options within the email builder, but Constant Contact has an extensive knowledge base where you can watch video tutorials to learn how to use it.

Email marketing automation

Based on your preference, you can use both one-stage and multi-stage email automation on Constant Contact.

With single-step automation, you can send a single email, such as a welcome note to new subscribers. On the other hand, you can send a sequence of emails with multi-step automation. For example, you can send a follow-up email a few days after your welcome note to find out if the subscriber has read your newsletter.

Depending on your subscriber's actions—or lack thereof— you can also nudge them with emails to go to a product link or read a particular message.

Choose an email trigger to get started, such as getting a new contact to sign up for a list or click a link. You can either create your automation path or use one from an existing template (as shown below). Depending on your choice, you’re able to add as many of these auto-generated emails as you wish, and you can choose how long to wait before sending the follow-up email.

You can then select the type of content based on the recipient's age, geography, past purchases, and other data. As a result, your customers get more relevant material, which leads to a personalized user experience. 

Constant Contact’s premium plan also comes with dynamic content capability. So, customizing an email can include more than just changing the text or font color. You can add photos, videos, surveys, social media sharing, and donation options. 

Landing page builder

Using the landing page function of Constant Contact, you can make your own little web pages that house your sign-up forms, products, coupons, and more. Once you go to the landing page option, you’ll see that you can either create a single, targeted page with an opt-in form or build your own unique landing page.

With the custom option, you can start from scratch or choose one of Constant Contact's landing page templates. Here, however, the options are limited compared to the email template catalog.

It is straightforward to use the drag-and-drop page builder since it has the same interface as the newsletter editor. You can easily edit your content in the main preview window by simply dragging and dropping blocks, widgets, and photos from the left.

There are options to add a title, description, custom URL, and even an expiration date to your landing page in the page settings window. Additionally, provide a Google tracking ID to enable analytics tracking or a Meta pixel to retarget users on Facebook Ads.

Once your landing page is set up, you can increase lead generation and boost conversion rates.

Contact management & segmentation

Managing clients and customers is a crucial part of any business. You can manage all of your client data, including contacts, lists, segments, and tags using Constant Contact.

All you have to do is import or export your contacts from CRM programs such as HubSpot, Pipedrive, Nutshell, etc. to Gmail or Microsoft Outlook. You can even upload files in different formats, including TXT, XLSX, XLS, and CSV.

The software will remove all duplicate contacts, and you can then add tags to subscribers and separate your list by various categories. This makes it easy to send the right message to the right people.

For example, you can send exclusive discounts as a thank you to your most engaged contacts or win back your least engaged contacts with a special promotion. You can easily email each category directly. 

Bonus fact: You can reuse or update your list categories before each send so you're always emailing the most updated set of contacts.

By installing the Constant Contact mobile app, you can also maintain your contacts from any location. 

Creating forms & surveys

The opt-in form builder that comes with Constant Contact can be used to make popups, flyouts, and inline forms that you can embed on your website. You can easily embed a basic newsletter subscription form on your website with the built-in form builder. 

But if you require a complex but flexible form, there are form-plugin options such as OptinMonster, Sumo, and many more, making it easy to scale.

Want to gather feedback from your customers? Constant Contact also offers surveys or polls you can easily customize and send to your users.

AI capabilities

Constant Contact has recently added artificial intelligence (AI) to its email marketing platform, similar to its competitors in the market. One of the standout features is their email and social media post content generator (which we’ve used in our screenshot below). With only a few keywords, you can use simple instructions to help you produce the copy. It can be a good starting point for your emails or posts, but it’ll probably need more editing before you publish.

Aside from this, there are some other features such as Constant Contact’s AI spam detection tool. It’s an algorithm that goes through every email in the system to check if any malware or suspicious attachments are being sent. This contributed to their near-perfect 97% delivery rate.

Reporting & analytics dashboard

You can see how well your email marketing efforts are doing with Constant Contact thanks to its real-time reporting and analytics features. On its dashboard, you can view metrics like open and click-through rates, bounce rates, delivery, and unsubscribes. 

This report allows you to monitor the effectiveness of your current email campaigns. If you want insights into what worked previously, the reporting dashboard also provides plenty of data on the performance and growth trends of your past campaigns.

To determine which email campaign had the most opens and clicks, you can compare how well they performed. Then, modify your strategy based on this data to enhance the campaign's effectiveness. With filters, you can look at which metric was higher compared to others.

Constant Contact offers a heatmap option that tracks clicks, showing you where buttons should be placed to get the highest CTR. From the analytics and reporting dashboard, you can keep an eye on how well your social media and email campaigns are performing too. With real-time updates, you can make more informed decisions about your marketing initiatives based on data.

Running an ecommerce business? If you've connected your ecommerce storefront, you can examine comprehensive insights about your contacts, email campaigns, and orders and sales. No matter what data you want to look at, you can view your performance over time by selecting the desired period.

Want to keep records of your campaigns? You can download and export your reports as a PDF or spreadsheet.

Scheduling & testing

If you don’t want to send an email at this very moment, you can schedule it for a later time and date, and if you have connected your social accounts then you can schedule posts on those too (more on that later). You can view everything that has been posted or is still to come using the calendar view in the “Campaign” tab. 

Another key features of Constant Contact is the ability to A/B test your emails. A/B testing means sending the same email to different segments of your audience with different headlines to test out which performs better. You generally A/B test a small portion of your audience, see which headline had the better results, then send the email to the remainder of your audience with the winning headline.

Social media marketing

By now, you’re probably thinking that Constant Contact is only good for email marketing, but it turns out that it can help manage your social campaigns in addition to emails. 

You can post to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram without ever having to exit the website/app. All you have to do is choose your profile and connect your social media accounts. Next, write your content, adding any images, hashtags, tags, etc.

Depending on where you want to post, you can make variants for each social network if you don't want to post the same thing everywhere. When you're done, you have the option to either publish it now or later.

After publishing your content, you can monitor your performance through your reporting dashboard (as we mentioned before). What’s great is that you can reply to any comments you've gotten right from your dashboard, you don’t have to go to the social site again.

Constant Contact doesn’t support all the platforms out there, but if social networking isn't your main priority and you don't require any extra features, it can be a good option. 

SMS marketing

Unfortunately, the SMS marketing option is only available for US customers as of yet. You’ll have access to an editor with a built-in link shortener and live preview so you can swiftly create messages. The editor also includes counters showing character and recipient counts.

Something that makes Constant Contact useful is that you can send texts from a virtual phone number they assign you to. You get the same area code as your business number.

Additionally, there are options to create SMS message reminders for abandoned carts on third-party apps such as Shopify and Wix, to help improve sales. 

In addition to checking your email and social media performance, you can see what works for your SMS campaigns by monitoring clicks, views, unsubscribes, income generated, and other metrics.

Event marketing

Using Constant Contact, you can easily develop and advertise your events. First, go to the “Events” tab and add details about your event, including the title, location, date, description time, and names of the guests (if it’s a private event). 

The next step is to select the kind of event you are hosting (in our case, we used a webinar, but you can choose what you like such as workshops, classes, store openings, and product launches). You can also specify the maximum number of registrations and the registration ending date.

After that, you can use the app to make a landing page for the event, personalize the form used for registration, change the alerts sent to registrants upon signup, and much more. You can also sell items and easily handle registrations, check-ins, and ticket sales.

Then it’s time to pay, so choose which payment method works best (either PayPal or Stripe) so you can charge what you want (or not). There are even options to offer discounts or promos, accept donations, and more. All that’s left is to publish your event and track how it’s doing using the reporting dashboard. 

Integrations with third-party apps

With over 7,000 integrations available on Constant Contact, you can automate your workflows and connect the program with all of your favorite apps. You can sort them by categories, such as CRM, ecommerce, scheduling, and more. 

You can integrate with all of the main website builders and ecommerce platforms, including eBay, Etsy, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, and WooCommerce. You can probably find any service you can think of: accounting, event management, sales CRM, scheduling, human resources (HR), and more.

In order to link a product to your account, just find the software you want to connect, click on it, and then follow the instructions. It's simple because Constant Contact guides you through the process and there’s support available if you have any problems.

With all of the features you’ve gone over in our Constant Contact review, you’ve probably found which ones fit best with your business strategy. However, there’s more you need to know before you make your decision.

How Much Does Constant Contact Cost?

Now that we've explored the main features of Constant Contact, you're probably wondering how much all of this costs. The price of a platform can make or break your decision to invest in it.

With Constant Contact, you’re offered a free 30-day trial where you can check out the features you’re more likely to use. And then, you can go ahead and pick from any one of their paid plans, listed below:

Lite: Priced at $12/month, this is the basic plan that offers 10 times your contact limit in monthly emails in addition to 1 GB of storage. However, it offers only one user, so you can’t collaborate with a team.
Other than that, you'll receive access to reach and engagement metrics, AI recommendations, an automated welcome email, and professionally created email templates. You can also work on your social media marketing and event planning if needed. Since the plan doesn’t include any more sophisticated features, this plan is best suited for beginners or small organizations.

Standard: The recommended plan costs $35/month and includes 10 GB storage and a monthly email restriction equal to twelve times your contact list. You can use features such as topic line personalization, subject line recommendations, and A/B testing. With its segmentation tools, you can deliver more targeted emails depending on who your customers are.

This could work wonders for a business with a small contact list and online retailers looking to increase engagement and turn leads into paying consumers. However, it could get expensive for a large contact list of 5,000 customers, so it’s better to choose an alternative option.

Premium: Allows for up to 500 contacts for $80/month. You’ll also receive 25 GB of storage and a monthly email capacity equal to 24 times your contact list. If you’re in the US, you have the option to have a monthly limit of 500 SMS messages to send.

With a dedicated manager, this package offers enhanced SEO, advanced ads, dynamic email content, and personalized automation. What’s extra in reporting are heat maps used to track email engagement and other comprehensive tracking. Along with a focus on automation, this plan also supports contact activity segmentation and unique automation paths. 

So if you have a company with a sizable email list, use Premium for creating highly focused ads. Moreover, this is a great option for those who wish to manage all aspects of their digital marketing from a single platform.

Bonus tip: You can pre-pay for your plans 6 months or a year in advance to receive a discount of 10% or 15% respectively. If you’re a registered non-profit, you can get a 20-30% discount.

How Helpful is Constant Contact’s Customer Support?

Regardless of what platform you’re using, customer support is essential when it comes to onboarding, resolving any issues, billing, and more.

Luckily, most customers have given Constant Contact’s live chat and phone support options excellent ratings. The fact that phone help isn't available around the clock is a drawback, but the hours are still ample. It's accessible Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET.

If talking on the phone isn't convenient for you, you can communicate with customer service via Twitter and live chat. Some reviews highlighted that the team is vigilant on Twitter and responds to complaints as soon as they can.

Apart from that, Constant Contact has a vast library of Knowledge Base (KB) articles, which cover most topics and provide guides for beginners as well. 

In terms of onboarding, a sales representative usually calls you a day after you’ve signed up for the trial. The initial call helps with setting up your account and addresses any queries. If you have particularly technical questions, you will be referred to tech support for assistance. After that, you may receive another call to upgrade your plan to one of the paid ones.

Unfortunately, even canceling the plan has to be done via phone call, so if you don’t like speaking on the phone, you’ll have to find an alternative. 

Pros & Cons of Constant Contact

By now, you know what Constant Contact is, its features, how much it costs, and if they’re responsive. So, let’s go through the most important part of our Constant Contact review: The pros and cons list.

All in all, Constant Contact is a strong tool email marketing tool with all the features that most businesses need.

Is Constant Contact the Right Marketing Tool for Your Business?

Of course, every platform has its advantages and disadvantages but we can say that Constant Contact is a great marketing tool for online retailers and smaller companies.

With its robust automation and segmentation features, it offers a single place from which companies can look at how they can increase email opens, clicks, and engagement rates. For those who are just starting with email list creation, the Lite plan can help generate an automatic welcome email that will give more value to customers.

You can consider the Standard package if you currently have an email list and would like to increase engagement rates. With personalization and A/B testing included, it gives all the tools you need to craft attention-grabbing subject lines; however, you can’t go beyond that in terms of testing.

Finally, the Premium plan can be good for companies that have big email lists and want to target users without spending a lot of time and effort. However, as your contact list grows so does your price point, and it can turn out that you’re spending more than you anticipated.

It appears Constant Contact is working to make the product better, as seen by the most recent improvements to reporting and automation, as well as the addition of new features like an AI content generator. However, their lack of sophisticated features makes it hard to suggest them to larger companies whose needs are more complex.

For the most part, Constant Contact is a reliable tool that performs well in managing essential functions required by most users. So, based on your unique requirements and data, Constant Contact may be a great choice for your business if you can stay within their plan's limits.

• Constant Contact vs Mailchimp: Which Email Marketing Platform Is Best for You?

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