Constant Contact demystifies email marketing with its easy-to-use, professional-looking user interface. However, it was a bit glitchy in testing and somewhat stingy for the price.
Email marketing is important for growing your business, but it’s also easy to do incorrectly. The best tools and platforms are designed to take the mystery out of email marketing. Constant Contact (which begins at $15 per month) can definitely help, as it is versatile, easy to use, and suitable for small businesses. You can sign up for a 60-day free trial to access all of the features before making a commitment. This review looks at the Basic plan for 500 contacts. If it weren’t for a handful of weird moments, Constant Contact could easily have been the Editors’ Choice, either joining or replacing Campaigner and MailChimp for PCMag’s top honors. It also does a respectable job at marketing automation if you’re willing to be flexible on the definition (see below) .
How does Constant Contact stack up against the competition for businesses with 2,500 contacts in its marketing database? It carries a high $35-per-month price tag. Many email marketing tools also have a cap on how many messages you can send in a month but Constant Contact doesn’t.
Since our last look, Constant Contact has added email auto-responders beyond those triggered by signups, including birthdays and anniversaries. You can also send an email series to a specific set of contacts, such as a day-by-day guide to getting started with your service or follow-ups to an event. This works by segmenting your contacts into different folders and matching them up with auto-responders. The image library now allows 2 GB of storage, with a maximum file size of 5 MB. Users can also access free and paid stock photos directly through Constant Contact. Finally, you can now interact with support via Twitter.
Constant Contact offers a number of plans depending on the size of your subscriber base. The cheapest plan is $15 per month for up to 500 subscribers and $35 for up to 2,500. A mid-tier plan costs $85 for 10,000 subscribers and $295 for 50,000. Price-wise, it’s not too different from Campaigner. You can sign up for other add-on services, such as EventSpot ($20 per month for one event; $25 for up to five events) for event registrations, aSocial Campaigns ($20 per month) for engaging on social media, Survey ($10 per month) to run surveys, and Single Platform to host all related pages ($79 per month) . The Basic account comes with a Library to store images used in the email campaigns but it lets you keep only five images, which is quite stingy. MyLibrary Plus ($5 per month) expands your storage to 1 GB. Email Archive ($5 per month) creates a website in which you can display up to 250 emails as part of an archive. This is a handy add-on if you want your customers to be able to see your older messages.
The free trial gives you access to all of these features for 60 days but with very strict limitations. For example, you can upload contacts to your account but there is a 10-subscriber cap. The trial is a great way to get used to the platform with a smaller list. Once you are sure about the platform, upgrade to the paid version and then upload your entire contact database. There is also a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is unusual in this space.
Registration is straightforward. You enter your name and email address to get started. You specify the features you want to try and then set up the account. The dashboard is just as straightforward, with three action buttons at the top: Create an Email, Add Contacts, and Schedule a Call. I found it more appealing and easier to use than MailChimp in this case.
There are several ways to add contacts to Constant Contact: copy-and-paste, manually type addresses into a form, upload a file (CSV, XLS, XLSX, TXT) , import from Gmail, or pull from Outlook and other customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
When I used the form to manually add an address, I repeatedly received an error message, but it didn’t say what had gone wrong. I was prompted to hit the Previous button to go back and fix the problem, but I couldn’t because the page had expired from my browser (Firefox) cache. After a few tries, the entire page crashed. This was an odd experience, to say the least.
The file upload, Gmail import, and CRM migration options, on the other hand, were easy to use and stable. I think most people would wind up using one of these options. I tracked the upload progress under Contacts: Activity and was notified when the import was complete. Like Campaigner, Constant Contact allows Mailinator and other disposable addresses. It’s too bad most services don’t follow the example of GetResponse, which filters out known disposable domains. This would be especially nice for services like Constant
Segments are initially based on which list you choose when saving the contacts, but it’s also really easy to go back and change the list. From the Contact Manager, I just clicked on the addresses I wanted to add to a different list. Constant Contact lets you assign tags to contacts, which is helpful if you need to track things such as how they signed up, if they are loyalty members, or whatever else you might want to track. My only quibble with the Contact Manager is that it’s a pain to edit the user records. When I cut and pasted my list, I just dropped in email addresses. I didn’t have other fields, such as name or address. To add this, I had to load each individual record and update the fields. This wasn’t that straightforward, because the pages were slow to load in my testing. Since I could see the whole list in Contact Manager, it would have been nice to be able to just click on the missing field, enter, and just keep going straight down the page. So, lesson learned: have all the relevant fields populated in the list before uploading the names.
Constant Contact also lets you create forms that customers can use to sign up for emails and newsletters. These forms can be hosted either on your own site or on Constant Contact’s servers. You can segment the users based on whether they used the signup form or other methods, which can be useful.
Constant Contact requires you to verify that you already have consent from each person added to the account—no bought lists allowed! You also cannot use group addresses such as sales@ or marketing@ addresses or distribution lists, since there is no way to verify you have consent from every person receiving messages sent to that address.
You can also create auto-responders, listed under the Email tab, to send automatically when a user is added to a list. I used the templates to build a special Welcome newsletter to new subscribers. I like auto-responders, but I was disappointed I couldn’t create auto-responders for other situations, such as if the customer clicked on a link, to wish a customer happy birthday, or if the customer responded to a request. GetResponse and MailChimp both offer this functionality.
When you’re ready to create a newsletter you can use the template to get started. The editing tool lets you tweak text, images, and even colors. There is a Spam test that checks to see if the message will get flagged as spam. There’s also a media library where you can store your own assets, such as company logos and other images, but it’s limited to a meager five images. You should expect to upgrade to the 1 GB of storage offered by Constant Contact’s MyLibrary Plus for $5.
Newsletters default to showing your full contact information in the footer, but you can turn that off. Once you’re satisfied with your newsletter, you can send it right away or schedule it for later (in 5-minute intervals, such as 3: 05AM, 3: 10AM, and so on) . I couldn’t find a recurring schedule to send messages on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis the way Campaigner does, or to send messages based on the local time at the recipient’s location, as GetResponse can.
