Constant Contact Review 2021
Marketing is no easy job. A lot of processes go into each marketing campaign and if you’re hoping to maximize success, you need marketing automation software to help you market smarter. This type of software helps you design campaigns, identify the demographics of your target leads, track and report the real-time performance of marketing efforts, and create an automated workflow for follow-ups. Among many marketing automation products, Constant Contact is a popular brand for many small business owners.
In this Constant Contact review, we’re going to walk you through what Constant Contact is, the pros and cons of using it, how we arrived at our rating of the software, different packages available, and some product details.
What’s on This Page
Constant Contact
4.5/5
- Advanced email marketing automation
- 200+ templates to choose from
- Tailored content created by AI
What is Constant Contact?
With over 650,000 customers, Constant Contact is one of the most used marketing automation tools since 1995. It’s part of the EIG family to which big brands like Bluehost and HostGator belong. Constant Contact is particularly sought after for its diverse email marketing services, on top of automation and recurring newsletters. It also supports integrations with over 400 apps so it sounds like there’s something for everyone!
Why Use Constant Contact?
Constant Contact is tailored for small businesses and nonprofit organizations. Its email marketing tools allow you to manage event invitations, registrations, and tickets, which are great if holding events is part of your business. And Constant Contact isn’t just talk — they have great deliverability rates as well as ample social media integrations, helping you reach as many people as possible.
Constant Contact Pros and Cons
Pros
- Great deliverability rates
- Easy to navigate — you can get to most places within a couple of clicks
- 200+ website and email templates to choose from
Cons
- Automation tool is difficult to navigate
- Nearly no customization with the email registration form
- Spam testing isn’t available
How to Use Constant Contact?
Depending on your company size and needs, you may or may not need all the functionalities that Constant Contact offers. They’re the most well-known for email marketing tools, but they also offer a website builder, online store, social media ads, and marketing automation tools. You can choose from over 200 templates to customize your own website and add your company logo to boost your brand identity. Get your customers to interact with you by adding RSVP forms and joining your email list. Their reporting tool will then show you your open and click rates, plus all the details that you need to improve your marketing strategy.
Our Rating Process
To take a more holistic look at Constant Contact’s features, we’ve assessed the software based on how well it helps you design email campaigns and landing pages, generate leads, automate workflows, and handle customer relationship management. We scored each criterion out of 5 points to help you with your decision-making process.
Campaign Templates 4.5/5
As mentioned above, Constant Contact offers more than 200 templates for websites and emails. They also have a powerful editor where you can change the font and colors of the site. Since Constant Contact has integrated Unsplash directly into their image library, you have 550,000+ free professional-quality images to choose from. Of course, you can also personalize your site by adding your own photos. All plans come with unlimited storage.
Lead Generation – 4/5
A marketing campaign has to target the right people in order to be successful. With Constant Contact, you can select contacts from any of your account’s existing lists to build a new segment, then create email marketing campaigns tailored specifically for them. If your business is new and you don’t have a lot of customers, you can use Constant Contact’s sign-up forms and list-building tools like Facebook and Instagram ads. Save and update your contact lists anytime to strengthen your campaigns. You can also tell Constant Contact your criteria in identifying and grouping contacts that are similar in demographics. When you target the right people, Constant Contact says you can double your email open rates!
Workflow Customization – 5/5
Constant Contact makes sure you don’t spend too much time on repetitive tasks. You can easily set up workflow automation for your email campaigns. For example, you’ll send a single welcome email to new customers, then build a contact list and send targeted messages to specific contacts. When people don’t open your emails, Constant Contact will pick that up and automatically resend the email to them.
This way, you can automate your entire email series and not have to worry about when to follow up with whom. This ability is also available on many of Constant Contact’s competitors.
CRM – 4.5/5
Customers like to know that they’re special. This means companies should remember their interaction points with customers and store information between the two parties. Luckily, with Constant Contact, the keyword is artificial intelligence.
Using AI and predictive analytics, Constant Contact uses past information to help companies create the best content for their customers and automate the messages so that they get sent out at a time most likely to get customers’ attention. If you’re willing to pay more, you can even get recommended subject lines for your email campaigns.
Besides AI, Constant Contact does a great job managing large lists of customers. You can manually remove people who unsubscribed to your emails and tackle any errors that happened during a campaign.
Their email builder tool also lets you custom the CSS coding per block, encouraging you to create personalized emails for your customers.
Package Comparison
Product Details
Website Builder
Ecommerce Pro
Price per month
$10
$20
$195
Email Marketing
No
Yes
Yes
Automated email to non-openers
No
Yes
Yes
Subject line recommender
No
No
Yes
Dynamic content
No
No
Yes
Live phone and chat support
Yes
Yes
Yes
Social media marketing
Yes
Yes
Yes
Technical / Product Details
Product Details
Specs
Supported Languages
English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Castilian Spanish, Latin American Spanish, and Swedish
Compatibility
Google Chrome – version 70 and higher, Apple Safari – version 12 and higher, Mozilla Firefox – version 61 and higher, Microsoft Edge – version 18 and higher.
Restricted Countries
Cuba, Crimea, Iran, North Korea, and Syria
Customer Support
1 (866) 289-2101
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Constant Contact better than Mailchimp?
We will have to look at both software from different angles to give you a holistic answer. First, both Mailchimp and Constant Contact are great for beginners since they both offer easy navigation and clear sections. Mailchimp does offer more advanced features, including better automation, reporting, email templates, and a free plan for sending 10,000 emails to up to 2,000 contacts per month — that’s already more bang for your buck. That said, Constant Contact has 200 templates in its library, which is 100 more than what Mailchimp has. Constant Contact doesn’t have a free plan, but they offer a 30-day free trial. Looking at the plan costs though, you do get a lot more out of Mailchimp’s plans than of Constant Contact’s.
What CRM works best with Constant Contact?
Since Constant Contact isn’t a CRM system, it needs to be integrated with a CRM to store data. Some brands that integrate well with Constant Contact include Salesforce Sales Cloud, Copper, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Keap, Zendesk Sell, Hubspot CRM, and Insightly — to name a few.
How much does Constant Contact cost for nonprofits?
Constant Contact doesn’t have a special plan for nonprofits. Nonprofit organizations will have to choose from the same plans ($10, $20, $45, $195/month) but they will be able to enjoy nonprofit discounts.