Constant Contact Reviews

An excellent choice for marketing campaigns for any size mailing list

Comments: Overall, our experience has been very positive. We manage multiple client email campaigns with various features (recurring emails, drip campaigns, etc.) and Constant Contact can handle all of those without issue.

Pros:

We have had a great experience using Constant Contact. It is easy to import any size list, including very large lists and then easy to segment those lists for various marketing campaigns. We've found the email builder to be easy to use to create professional looking emails that match our branding and work well on mobile phones.

Cons:

We have not had many issues at all with Constant Contact but we have noticed that there are a few less popular integrations than some of their competitors have.

Lots of features and easy to use

Comments: Great option for organizations that want to quickly deploy email newsletter technology.

Pros:

The software for creating weekly newsletters is easy to use with drag and drop functionality. Gives me a lot of options for creating a look and feel that I like. Also easy to manage contacts.

Cons:

Some parts of the software are a bit bulky and dated looking.

Alternatives Considered: Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to Constant Contact: More functionality and options to make the newsletters exactly how we want them.

High Price and Poor Customer Service

Pros:

The email set up is fairly straight forward.

Cons:

I used Constant Contact for several years for my client e-mails. Thier prices grew steadily from $50.00 a month in the beginning to $145.00, which is quite alot for a small business that send out only minimal e-mails. When I went to cancel, they charged me for an additional month, and refused to refund that charge. Their customer service is worthless, and their prices are high.

Email Marketing Made Easy Thanks to Constant Contact

Comments: The e-mail templates are straightforward, therefore I've been able to teach others in our company who have little to no prior expertise with similar software to use them. As an email service, I couldn't be happier.

Pros:

I appreciate the variety of options for making email lists quickly and easily. There is a plethora of sample documents from which to pick. It allows you to make emails that look quite official.

Cons:

You are unable to tweet at this time. You can't add movies to share like you can on Reels, and you'll have to create individual posts if you want to tailor the text to each social network.

Is it worth the money

Pros:

The customer support is top-notch. The program itself is easy to use.

Cons:

Just to expensive for a small business when there are other programs that are as good just no phone support.

Constant Contact is good for managing your email newsletters effectively

Pros:

The design element is fairly straightforward, and there are plenty of templates that make putting together a newsletter easy. The list management is extremely useful.

Cons:

I had to spend several frustrated hours learning exactly what would and would not work with the system: attachments, images, and design elements were not always what I had hoped. However, once I learned it, it became second nature and it now doesn't take me long at all.

Easy to Use But at Great Cost

Comments: Previously, I found the support team helpful. The last call I made to support resulted in me informing them rather than vice versa.

Pros:

CC is easy to use and has a high rate of inbox access.

Cons:

I have to work in Incognito mode on the internet to have our email look normal. Otherwise, there are great gaps in the text.

Alternatives Considered: Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to Constant Contact: Ease of use. Also, some of my clients were already using CC.

A great way to start your email campaign journey!

Comments: I am happy with the ease of use and the free features on Constant Contact can get you pretty far with setting up your business. It allows you to take things at your own pace, start growing your list, and provides options to help you keep growing.

Pros:

It is easy to use for new business owners but still offers tons of features to grow. I like that you can use it to send out campaigns as infrequently or frequently as you like. It has great tools for building your readership by creating a series of emails.

Cons:

It does seem more oriented toward quick bites of information rather than structured as a newsletter. It could also use more features to plug products (if you have an online store). The templates leave something to be desired if you are not into the clean, businessy look.

Powerful tool for Email Marketing, Contact Management and handling Event Registrations

Comments: Its a powerful tool for email marketing and sending you blast emails to a listserv for an event or program

Pros:

The ability to be able to create an event page with flyers and registration links and to be able to blast it out to all the contacts at once is amazing!

Cons:

The ability to put a cap on the different registration categories for an event is missing.

This is the way to do Email Marketing

Comments: Overall I am quite happy with Constant Contact.

Pros:

What I like about Constant Contact is that it is perfectly fine tuned and I can hit the road running. There are a lot of templates and easy-to-understand information on different metrics.

Cons:

Right now I didn't find anything that I did not like about Constant Contact. It is a better product than many of the other products available in the market for the same thing.

Ease of use for Small Shop

Comments: The team was great in getting us set up as non-profit with reduced pricing. Using their analytic tools for our website and social media has been an added benefit for us.

Pros:

Constant Contact is easy to learn, use and gather reports. The functionality is great and helps eliminate duplicating work. We love the ability to drop in a you tube video, conduct surveys and gather RSVPs.

Cons:

Only frustrating part is being signed out of account, but still being able to make changes. You don't know that your time has expired until you go to save the changes.

Alternatives Considered: Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing Constant Contact: We switched from Finalsite since we did not renew our contract with them. Our new website provider does not provide email integration - Constant Contact was the perfect fit for us.

Switched From: Finalsite CMS

Reasons for Switching to Constant Contact: We choose Constant Contact based on recommendations from other schools that use it.

Clean, responsive design and intuitive list management

Comments: Customer service has always been helpful, especially when trying to figure out why specific customers are not receiving messages. There is strong automation capability, but we haven't utilized it to its potential.

Pros:

Responsive design and ability to create multiple, clean, attractive templates with varying brand elements. Simple, intuitive drag-and-drop interface. List management is user-friendly and customizable.

Cons:

Formatting of text styles is clunky and time consuming. There is the ability to apply headline and body text styles to some elements, but it is not intuitive at all. Management of bounced/suspended email addresses is not intuitive or informative.

Alternatives Considered: Mailchimp and Emma

Reasons for Choosing Constant Contact: Better responsive design and campaign automation features.

Switched From: Emma

Reasons for Switching to Constant Contact: Better responsive design and campaign automation features. Low price. Ability to create and maintain multiple responsive templates.

Constant Contact review

Pros:

Constant Contact excels in handling various groups/lists and large numbers of contacts. I've dealt with companies with a vast customer base, and Constant Contact enables you to manually eliminate subscribers and errors from more extensive groups/lists. They're coming out with a new edition of their email builders, but the existing one allows for individual CSS coding per block, which allows for a lot of customization.

Cons:

Constant Contact has several oddities that I haven't encounter with Mailchimp, especially when using external connections for photographs and URLs. The email builder's text and link editing is a little strange and has a few flaws. Also, unless you make folders for all of your emails, the new search option for past emails is quite sluggish and takes a very long time to find.

Improvements Made in Constant Contact

Comments: I am very pleased that the optimizations and new features that Constant Contact is releasing are general to the overall email marketing space. I haven't used Surveys yet, but am pleased that the option is there.

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.

We think of Constant Contact as one of our team members!

Comments: Always a great experience using Constant Contact ... and on the very rare occasion when I may have a question or concern, their Customer Support is excellent.

Pros:

Constant Contact makes it super easy to stay in touch with our association members as well as to create various marketing campaigns.

Cons:

The only negative I have is with pricing. While Constant Contact provides tremendous value, and offers fantastic savings for a subscription paid annually (which is a good thing) ... for us as a non-profit, it is easier budget-wise for us to pay monthly, so we are not able to take advantage of the bigger discount. It would be helpful if Constant Contact allowed those same savings to be applied for non-profits who pay monthly ... especially since we have been a long-time customer.

Alternatives Considered: Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing Constant Contact: At the time (about 10 years ago), we had been with cvent for a few years, and their e-mail module was not at all user-friendly. Moving to Contact Contact was the best thing we ever did for our marketing efforts.

Reasons for Switching to Constant Contact: I had heard great things about Constant Contact, so I recommended it for our association to try. No regrets ... it was the best decision, and we have no intention of switching to any other e-mail program.

Review for Constant Contact

Comments: Constant Contact has been a wonderful marketing tool and I have seen results. I love the ability to see who has opened my emails in real time, as I can immediately reach out to them while the contact is "hot".

Pros:

Very user friendly, but the most important feature is their customer service. I always get a real person right away when I have a question or need support. Helpful templates were there when I first got started, and they continue to be available. Their email functionality allows me to tract my emails and see who opens it (all in real time).

Cons:

I have been using this software for years, and I have no complaints. I am a one person business, with about 15,000 customers, so my database is not as robust as larger companies might need for marketing. I do not use Constant Contact for videos, slides, etc.

Useful, Consistent, Not Always User Friendly

Comments: In general, I prefer Constant Contact over MailChimp, but it could be because I'm used to it (been using it for 10+ years) and because it's cheaper for the amount of contacts we have. I also like that I can do surveys through it. MailChimp also didn't seem any more user-friendly than Constant Contact when I tried to work with it a few times.

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.

Its less expensive

Comments: Overall I like the tool it's easy to use and manage

Pros:

It's less expensive compared to other SAAS-based marketing software. I really like their easy drag-drop email template builder.

Cons:

On social media scheduling, they don't support Pinterest.

Alternatives Considered: Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing Constant Contact: CLickdimensions were not able to provide the service which we required

Switched From: ClickDimensions

Reasons for Switching to Constant Contact: Pricing

Invaluable Tool for A Small Business or ANY Business

Comments: Constant Contact revolutionized the way we communicate with our clients to let them know what's coming up in our issues and how they can participate (our magazine is 100 percent supported by advertising) and our readers (each month we create an email "alert" with Constant Contact which lets our readership know that our free digital issue is now available online). My whole staff knows how to use it and it can be adapted to a great variety of communication purposes. Clients can download our rate kits from a Constant Contact email; readers can link to our issues from it. It has lowered our print bills for collateral materials immensely. No more printed flyers or brochures! And no more use of snail mail — clients can receive your Constant Contact mail immediately or at a pre-scheduled time.

Pros:

Very easy to use. If you know how to upload an image or a graphic, you can create eye-catching emails or newsletter style communications very easily and modify or update them frequently and quickly. The analytics -- to see the percentage of recipients who opened your email and exactly which person did or didn't, the bounce rate which allows you to keep your lists current, and many other features are not only helpful but simple to use.

Cons:

As time has gone on, the cost has increased, but it still saves us a great deal of money because our postage costs have gone way down. We hardly ever use our postage meter anymore for marketing mailings. It's all done through Constant Contact. They used to have a free desktop "widget" that allowed you to input an email address right from your desktop, but that has now been discontinued. It was extremely convenient for the way we do business. There are now other ways (paid) you can connect directly to Constant Contact to have new email addresses input, but we have not been successful at getting them to interface for us, even though they are supposed to work. Constant Contact support was not helpful on this at all -- this happened recently and was really our only disappointment with them EVER!

Outdated service

Comments: In general, Constant Contact feels like a software built decades ago that's bolted on features over time instead of a well-designed, intentionally integrated solution. Templates are old fashioned. Automations are limited. (For example, a welcome email cannot be a series.) Old sign-up forms are maintained, but weren't migrated to the new functionality, so we'd have to rebuild each one to modernize them. Custom contact fields are limited to text or date. Missing details like this add up to each project taking more time than it should. I suspect Constant Contact was a front-runner in the early days, but there are better email marketing solutions now at a similar or lower price point that offer a coherent, simple-to-use, and modern product. This was one of the first SaaS products I replaced with another service when I took over my job.

Pros:

Drag-and-drop email builder is straightforward, and I appreciate the polling and RSVP functionalities. It's easy to collaborate with team members on the same projects (but not on a variety of projects -- see below). Overall the naming and location of items is intuitive, which makes it easy to find your way around if you've used other email marketing software. I like the ability to get a url to past email campaigns.

Cons:

The templates and functionality are outdated, and it takes time to build out customized elements that fit with a modern aesthetic. Support is so-so; other service providers (such as MailerLite) have raised the bar with quick response times that Constant Contact just doesn't offer. This product works best for a single user or two. The list, segments, and tagging attributes offer flexibility, but they get out of hand quickly when used for multiple goals or by different teams. This email marketing service has been the hardest for us to keep clean. Additionally, there is a single unsubscribe form, which doesn't make sense when different teams use the same service. The search function for past campaigns doesn't work well, so it takes time to riffle through the list to what we need. This is how many of the features work: they're probably there, but it takes time to get what you need.

It streamlines marketing campaign management and data collection.

Comments: With Constant Contact, dealing with marketing campaigns has become a pleasure, as we have been able to cooperate in designing campaigns and publications and following them up. The data collected has also helped us create a realistic perception of the extent of our success in attracting customers.

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.

Constant Contact: Still a good option for nonprofits!

Comments: Overall, despite my one negative experience, I still recommend Constant Contact as the go-to email marketing tool for nonprofits. It's affordable, widely used, looks good enough, has solid list management & analytics, and has decent customer service (aside from the one experience I described) with an instant chat option I've used many times.

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!

A dependable platform for seamlessly managing email campaigns.

Comments: Constant Contact provides us with a centralized platform for managing and tracking marketing campaigns. Creating contact lists has become a simple process, and scheduling campaign dispatch dates has led to successful results.

Pros:

Constant Contact is an excellent tool for creating and sending email campaigns and surveys to specific groups of contacts. Their capabilities are impressive, and Constant Contact offers many new features waiting to be discovered. It is great that Constant Contact provides a powerful scheduling tool to organize the dispatch times according to our choice, and it also offers a scheduling feature for resending with high efficiency. I love the fact that Constant Contact provides templates and design features to help integrate branding and links within different campaigns, and the drag-and-drop campaign block builder helps us insert images, videos, and PDFs with ease. Moreover, Constant Contact also offers SMS campaign features, as well as analytics that displays simple charts and graphs to efficiently track campaign progress.

Cons:

The difficulty in extracting data is a concern for me, and at times, the collected data may be incomprehensible due to the impractical data extraction method. Instead of downloading the information all at once, one needs to export each data set separately.

Email Marketing

Comments: Overall, it's very good. It's pretty easy to use and the emails are really nice looking. They provide lots of templates to choose from or you can design your own. You can create many contact lists so you can target your emails to the group you're trying to reach.

Pros:

Constant Contact is easy to use. You don't have to have extensive training in order to figure it out. They have lots of templates to choose from. You can talk or chat to a real person when you need help. They also offer a non-profit discount, which is very nice. The emails are very nice and professional looking. Once you have a template you like, you can copy it each time and change the colors to make it look fresh.

Cons:

The events site is set up a little different than the regular emails. So adding things to the landing page isn't quite as easy as the drag and drop method that's available for the email marketing portion. Also, the event feature is good for taking basic registrations and payments (like selling items) but not great for a full blown event. We used it for several years for our fundraising event but it was a bit cumbersome. There was no easy way to do things like offer sponsor levels with X number of guest tickets included. Eventually we moved our fundraiser to an event-specific software.

Love Constant Contact!

Comments: Overall Constant Contact gives us the opportunity to manage our email and social media marketing in the best way for a small business. The additional features that they have added are just an added bonus to what we are already using the services for.

Pros:

We love using the email marketing schedule and statistics. It gives us real feedback from our customers on what they like and click on, and what doesn't perform well with them. We also love the online booking feature that provides our clients the freedom to schedule on their own time, without the back and forth between us and the client. We are also a small business so social media management can be hard to do and Constant Contact lets us schedule out, which gives us more freedom to do our jobs.

Cons:

Customer services needs improvement. Every time we have to call, we get people who are just reading off a script and not actually helping us with our issues.

Alternatives Considered: Mailchimp