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Constant Contact Email Review: ‘Effective Email Marketing’. We Find Out The Truth.
Read a full expert review of Constant Contact, and see ratings from real users on Twitter. Find out if Constant Contact is the right email marketing tool for your business.
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Say Hello To Constant Contact
With more than 600,000 customers, Constant Contact is one of the largest email marketing software providers in the world. It’s known for its versatility, attractive templates, and a broad feature set. Constant Contact goes beyond simple email marketing to include surveys, deals, social media, and event marketing tools.
If you run a business, you need a solid email marketing software provider that gives you room to grow. Pricing starts from 20.00 per month, and there’s a generous 60-day free trial.
For our expert Constant Contact review by a real user, keep reading.
Constant Contact was founded by Randy Parker in 1998. The company is based in Waltham, MA, in the United States. It offers all the basic tools for creating and managing successful email marketing campaigns, with lots of extras.
The platform’s strongest suits include easy navigation, plenty of templates, advanced analytics and tracking tools, email previewing capabilities, and convenient auto-responders.
Constant Contact is arguably the most versatile email marketing platform around. Some platforms focus exclusively on the basics, and that works well. But with Constant Contact, you can:
Create surveys
Launch custom deals
Engage in social media campaigns
Send birthday greetings
Receive reports
Have access to advanced analytics
Engage in live event curation
Create coupons
Use drag-and-drop to create your e-mail templates
Have access to a simple management system
Versatile Contact Management
Gathering emails is the first step in starting your email marketing activity. Constant Contact helps you manage your contacts list efficiently, even if your contacts are on a different email marketing system right now.
You can import contacts from a text file or spreadsheet, or bring them indirectly from an email provider like Gmail or Microsoft Outlook.
Transferring Contacts
Constant Contact also allows you to transfer contacts from online customer management services such as QuickBooks, ACT! (formerly known as Sage ACT), and Salesforce.
Despite being extremely comprehensive, this is a quick and easy process. As you open your account, you can get your contacts set up, and rapidly move on to the next steps. If you don’t already have an email marketing contact list, don’t worry. You can enter contacts manually, which is a longer process, but equally effective.
Learning Materials
New Constant Contact customers have various resources at their disposal to make it easier to get started with the platform.
All users are provided with a simple user guide, live webinars, product tutorials, and archives. They all include instructions, tips, and short-cuts that help you to quickly get up to speed with the pros.
Constant Contact may be a dinosaur in the game, but it’s certainly a dinosaur which evolved to survive and compete.
Constant Contact provides customers with more than 400 hundred templates for various types of messages. On its site, they are divided into categories, so you can quickly locate a template for the type of newsletter you want to build.
Examples include welcome emails, informational messages, holiday greetings, and general business promotion templates.
Build From Scratch, Too
If you prefer to build your own templates from scratch, Constant Contact provides a very easy-to-use template editor that you can use for complete customization.
Easily Add Calls-to-Action
Constant Contact’s templates make it easy to include calls to action (CTAs) in your email campaigns, you can drive customers to your social media platforms, run a poll or offer coupons.
Contact Management
Like most email marketing services, Constant Contact’s list management interface allows you to segment users into categories based on certain criteria.
You can also assign tags to contacts. For example, you can tag contacts that have been signed up to your list the longest, and then send those contacts special coupons.
Use tags to track loyalty, response rate, or any other relevant metric.
What Do I Need to Know About Their Customer Support?
The technical support department at Constant Contact is available during the following times:
Mon-Thu 8 am – 10 pm ET
Fri 8am-9pm ET
There is no live support on weekends.
If you’re in another time zone, you may find that these support hours are not entirely convenient. Additionally, you might get stuck without help on a weekend. (There’s a community forum, but no support provision from the company itself.)
Consider whether the limited support hours could be an inconvenience to your business, or whether you could live with a couple of days’ delay.
Improve Results with Reporting and Analytics
Detailed information is essential if you’re to continuously improve your communication and marketing.
Constant Contact offers arguably the most comprehensive reporting tools that an email marketing system could offer. Their reports have real-time analytics. You can even tell what kind of device your email is opened on.
The full feature set includes:
Engagement reports
Campaign comparisons
User heat-tracking maps
Click segmentation
Mobile open rate
User ratios of device usage
Open rates
Click rates
Analytics by specific groups
Social Media Tracking
In addition to the usual reports offered by most email marketing services (number of emails sent, opened, forwarded, bounced, etc.), Constant Contact also tracks and reports on social media stats. Tracked metrics clearly illustrate the number of likes, tweets, shares, views, and more than your emails receive.
Reports also include the number of click-throughs and complaints that your messages have generated on social media.
Host Events and Product Launches: EventSpot Service
If your business hosts events and product launches, you’ll find Constant Contact’s EventSpot feature to be very useful.
You can create invites using pre-made templates, and build a branding theme for your event. The materials that Constant Contact providers work for many themes, from educational and charity events to auctions and sports competitions.
No Need For New Lists
The feature utilizes your existing contact list, so there’s no need to maintain a separate event list just for contacts that respond.
EventSpot also lets you:
Attach registration forms to email invites
Take payment for admission
Create a corresponding event home page where people can go to find out more about the event.
You can also include links to the event’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Let’s look at the best reasons to try Constant Contact:
Templates are beautifully designed and professional in appearance.
Entry level plans are suitable for small businesses with just 500 subscribers. There’s room to grow to as many as 50,000 contacts.
The free trial lasts for 60 days, and there’s also a 30-day money back guarantee on all packages.
Features are extensive and go beyond what most competitors offer. Constant Contact offers a well-integrated set of tools that are not too challenging to get to grips with.
Constant Contact stands out from the other email marketing service providers. Its core email marketing provision is excellent, but it’s the additional features that make it stand out.
How Do I Choose a Plan?
Let’s take a look at the difference between the two price plans, which are Email and Email Plus: