Constant Contact is a well-known email marketing provider, directed towards small businesses. This offers a strong set of the basic feature of the email marketing tool along with some of the advanced features. Constant contact is very useful for small businesses, non-profit organizations, and entrepreneurs to exhibit their marketing ideas while selling their products.
Try Constant Contact For Free for 10 minutes & comeback to this page. So that it will help you to understand this review quickly and then decide whether Constant Contact is the right choice for you.
Constant Contact is one of the oldest players in the email marketing game and has been in existence since 1995, currently, having over 650,000 users in their customer base. Recently they added a lot of features such as digital product downloads, event management, appointment scheduling and social campaigns.
They offer integration with over 400 applications to provide flexibility to their customers. Also provide integration with Zapier which in turn gives more flexibility to integrate with 2000+ applications. They are more inclined towards small and medium-sized enterprises, however, their prices are more towards the higher end.
What is Constant Contact used for?
Constant Contact is an online marketing company, it is used to create websites, email marketing campaigns and analyzing marketing campaigns.
Does Constant Contact Email Go To Spam?
Spam rate depends on your email content as well as ip origin & email provider. Constant Contact ip addresses are fully isolated. It has the highest email deliverability and its most of the users are from USA. In the USA, Constant Contact spam rate is lower than other email providers.
Where Contact Contact Is Popular?
Constant Contact is popular all over the world, but it is highly popular in North America. It’s website 87% traffic from USA.
This is an established and trusted platform which personalizes your email marketing to an extreme level, which will encourage your online sales. you can sell more in very little time. Constant Contact will allow sending the right messages at the right time so your customers will be offered more of what they need.
Constant Contact stands at the #1 position in Effective email marketing, as it does all predictive analytics using artificial intelligence. This has a robust data security framework. Constant Contact helps to create professional emails, which promotes your customer growth and drives up your sales.
With Constant Contact you can also build websites, They provide website builders using this you can easily build your custom-designed website in no time. You can even create your own an online store or fully fledged eCommerce website just for $10/month. You can have your own domain name. Also design your logos for free, which has hundreds of customizable options, you can create your logos in seconds even though if you are not pro at UX design.
Pricing
Constant contact looks pricy, for the features they are providing. They don’t offer any free plan but they have a first-month free offer you can avail of that to get into Constant contact. However, you will not get all the features in free trial.
They have 2 plans Email and Email Plus. $20/month plan give you upto 500 contacts. You can send unlimited emails to your contacts. If you prepaid for 6 month. then the cost will reduce from $20 to $13/month.
Constant contact offers discounts when you prepaid for the plans for 6 months and 12 months.
For 6 months they offer a 10% discount plus one month of free use.
For 12 months they offer a 15% discount plus one month of free use.
If you choose 6-Month plan, you can save 10% + 1 month free. That is $90 for 7 months. Then Email plan costs you $90/7 months = $12.86/month
Non-profit organizations will get extra discounts they can avail up to 30% discounts on their pre-paid plans. To get that, sign up for free here Constant Contact and contact the Constant Contact support team. For more information on non-profit discounts visit here
You can downgrade your plan without losing your deposited money. Just one click and one second is enough to downgrade the plan.
They also provide 30 days money back guarantee & You can’t try automation feature for free. So I suggest you to buy the plan, try all the features, if you don’t like, just get your money back.
Features Review
- Simple Email Builder & editor that most likely go to inbox than promotion or spam folder
- Easy Automation, (but limited trigger combination)
- Split Testing or A/B testing with auto selector.
- Social Marketing with auto poster.
- 400+ Integrations such as Wix, Shopify, Gmail, Office etc & Zapier Integrations with 2000+ apps such as event calendar, booking, shipping etc,
- Reporting such as location based, eCommerce sales, visitors frequency
- Website Builder & eCommerce
Additional features : Sell Anywhere, Polls, RSVP, donations, Coupons & more, AI (Artificial Intelligence) Predictive Analysis, AI Landing page etc, Chat, Phone support & personal assistance for free.
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Email Builder
Constant Contact offers hundreds of templates that are easily customizable and responsive in nature. It has AI where you are allowed to scan your website and Constant contact will autogenerate the template of your website color and image!, this is really a useful feature and less time taking.
Constant Contact templates are easily customizable, and editable as it has drag-and-drop layouts. If you want a unique and completely different template you can add your custom code template.
Using Constant Contact you can easily add a poll, Donation, and coupons for your email templates, you can select pre-designed layouts that will help conserve time and provide the proper structure to your template on all devices.
Constant Contact has an easy builder but it has a downside, its email builder editor options are basic not advanced. I wish they provide some more latest web options such as click to call button on mobile, different shapes for the blocks etc. However you can use custom codes to make anything. But disadvantage is you have to create a separate email template. You can’t insert html, css codes within the ready made email templates. Whenever you put phone number, it will automatically clickable in the email. Just add button and put phone number for click to call feature.
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Automation
Automation in constant contact is based on user engagement. And this is the feature which is extensively helpful in saving your time and increasing your sales their by. This has a different way of automating your emails, and you can create them with very little time. Before it was been called an autoresponder.
It’s very easy to create Email automation in Constant Contact, to create automated series you have to select from campaign options, then you will be having many options, like automation series, welcome emails, birthday, and anniversary emails.
To start with you can select email triggers
- Click any link
- Open email
- Click on a specific link
- Audience willing to join the list
This can be followed with a new email or existing campaign, once you select that step forward to adjust the time(the gap between your email and the next follow-up emails). you can adjust or edit according to your need or you can send that immediately, you can go on adding your emails as many as you want.
You can schedule the series to send at a particular time to a specific set of contacts, you are allowed to segment your contacts based on attributes, and keep them in a different folder, then match them with the automated series you created triggers your initial email.
Automation series is only available in the Email plus plan, Constant contact is not offering either email behavioral series/ email welcome series to the email plan. To make use of this feature one needs to add on or choose the Email plus plan.
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Split Testing (A/B Test)
Split testing or A/B Testing helps to send a different variation of emails, which helps to find which variation is highly opened or clicked so that you can reach your customer with a graded email. Constant Contact provides A/B testing with very little feature, where you can test your variation with the subject line.
Subject lines are the expressive part of the email, if your subject line is neat and clear you will get more openings, here variation A is will reach 50% of the audience/contacts, likewise variation B. You need to have an email plus version to avail of this feature completely.
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Social Marketing
Successive business or organization is directly proportional to the impact they have made on social media. Social media are the easiest and powerful way to reach more people with less time span. that’s why it’s very essential to make a mark on social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linked-in.
According to Forbes, 78% of customers will purchase products because they have got impacted by the appearance of social media.
Constant Contacts allows you to post your product, newsletter, or anything related to your business. You can post on different social media like Facebook and Instagram. you can create a variation of your advertisement or post, with different content for Instagram and Facebook. you can add images as well to showcase the product and to attract the visitor. you can schedule the time to post, this is automated. once you’re ready with all your content, you are all to post.
once you connect your business account and have posted you can see all lists in the social inbox, you can see all mentions, posts, comments in Constant contact, and you are allowed replay to their comment. So it’s a one-stand social marketing space.
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Integrations
Integration helps to add extra features and functionalities with third-party tools. Constant Contact provides an integration option with number of plugins and tools like Shopify, woo commerce, salesforce, and google analytics. If Apps are plugged into Constant Contact will help in the improvement of market traffic. once those Apps are integrated that will connect business with contacts.
Constant Contact integrates with all basic and necessary app, it also has Zapier integrations.
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Reporting
You can view your visitors states by states!
Reporting always helps in growth, Constant Contact provides the pictorial way to get track of business. You can have an accurate figure of open rate, click rate, recipients, and unsubscribers. It will also provide the detail of the open rate on devices.
Constant Contact has expanded the reporting where it provides spam and bounce reports too. along with this overview reports like trends, successful subject lines, click heat maps, and you can even compare your campaigns so that you can plan for improvement on your next campaign. But Constant Contact will not provide e-commerce tracking.
eCommerce Reporting
Its eCommerce tools and reporting are advanced.
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Website Builder
Constant contact offers you to create your website with less time. This provides an AI-powered website builder. Artificial Intelligence is always helpful in getting accurate website design templates that need the utmost few changes. you have to provide your details so that within no time Constant contact website builder will build a website template related to your business. you can create a personalized website on your passion.
It provides a free SSL certificate for your website which created under Constant Contact, Built-in SEO improves web search, mobile optimization, website analytics, and easily connects with a custom domain.
Logo Making: You can design your own logo which creates a brand in the market. Without any designing knowledge, you can create awesome logos, which have hundreds of customizable options.
Online Stores: With the free setup, you can launch your stores and make your visitors repeat customers, this can achieved by constant contact. Provides coupons and discounts, online payments, tax management, eCommerce SEO, Notification, and many more store features.
Constant Contact Pros and Cons
Pros
- Easy to set up compared with other tools in the market
- Most Popular Tool in Market
- Provides great support and security
- We can keep old templates for further use
- best list segmentation
- Can put contacts into multiple categories
- Resend option to those who have not seen the first email/ message
- The reporting dashboard has many information that is a plus point
- Consistent on high deliverability rate
- Social media campaigning is an additional plus feature
Cons
- No Free version only the Email Plus version has all the features
- A/B testing is only for the subject line
- Limited automation flexibility
- Additional users are an extra charge
- Improvements need on campaign builder
- Templates look a little outdated
- Limited Tag features
- Could have recent images feature and to create Template via API
- No Standout features are available, looks too simple.
- Could have a better pricing structure.
Final Thoughts: Should You Pay for Constant Contact?
With more than 650,000 customers served over 15 years, Constant Contact has become a leader in small business marketing. They offer a special blend of expert knowledge, efficient core competency as well as strong support system.
Personally, having used a few email marketing platforms before, Constant Contact feels pretty good. It has all the facilities (and more) that a professional site would offer while at the same time having a simplified user interface that won’t overly intimidate. Once you factor in that solid support system, I’d say that this is a real winner.
Constant Contact FAQs
Can I get a discount on my Constant Contact plan?
Yes! Anyone can save money on their Constant Contact plan by choosing a six-month or 12-month subscription instead of paying month-by-month. In addition to this, nonprofits can save either 20% or 30% when they choose a six-month or 12-month plan – you just need to send in your Federal government Letter of Determination to qualify.
Can I integrate a CRM system, since Constant Contact doesn’t have one in-house?
Yes! You can integrate with certain CRM systems via Constant Contact’s app market – however, it’s worth checking that your CRM is compatible before committing to a paid plan.
How does Constant Contact compare to other email marketing tools?
Constant Contact comes fifth in our list of the six best email marketing platforms. So it’s not the best, but it is one of the best. It scored particularly well in value for money and help and support, but on the whole, it was less impressive than platforms like GetResponse and Mailchimp.
