Constant Contact

I'm pretty familiar with email software, having used four different options extensively. Constant contact was the slickest interface, the most intuitive programming, and all of the features I wanted, without being too expensive or difficult to use.

I have nothing but good things to say about constant contact. If I had to find a thing I like least, it would be the confusion between campaigns and programming.

Just like any other email marketing tool, they can do the job. No complaints. Email creation for fast email campaign is a breeze. Templates are as well handfuls to choose from. Drag and drop features as well. And it seems that they have much more responsive email system compared to other clients.

Besides, you can use there service for user registration, A/B Testing and surveys.

First off, Constant Contact can do the job. No Problem. The problem comes when you deep dive into there system - technically taxing, not so user friendly interface, hard to implement branding etc...

Bugs, of course. When you drag a widget, it won't appear on the canvass. Exporting HTML version of the email is also a pain.

It integrates with our database, Donor Perfect, and syncs each night, which is helpful. The ability to segment and create lists is good and I appreciate that you cannot accidentally duplicate contacts. It's also nice to be able to schedule social media posts as well off the emails.

Designing emails in Constant Contact is such a pain. It always does SUPER weird things, which I suspect has to do with the way the emails auto code. Back in the day, you used to be able to manually go into the code and change it, which we would do regularly. But then they changed to this "simpler" format, and while it is more user friendly, they took away the option to manually change the code. When we asked them about getting that functionality back, we basically receive a big shrug. So now you have to deal with things like if you copy text from ANYWHERE (even Notepad, which has no formatting) and paste it into your email, the actual font, font color, and font size are NOWHERE NEAR the actual font, font color, and font size you have already in your email, so then you have to select that entire patch of text and redo it so that it matches whatever text you have, and sometimes it randomly bolds things too. It is such a pain. This happens too if God forbid you decide to actually TYPE in the box, the font attributes will all completely change, unless you type in the middle of your paragraph and then delete around it. It's maddening. Additionally, when you send tests to yourself and then forward them, the spacing completely changes, so I have to tell my bosses that no the actual email is not actually going to have giant spaces in it. And when you send an email from Constant Contact that has a background color and forward it (this is in Outlook), the background color comes with it, so you have to manually change the page color of your email, which is difficult for me to teach some of the older staff on our team to do.

As a digital marketer, I have used Constant Contact with multiple clients and companies over the past 2+ years, and have always found it to be extremely helpful. The majority of my program usage has been for email marketing, although I have heard from team members that it is excellent for social media marketing and other areas of digital marketing as well. For email marketing, I have done it all from creating a company's very first email blast to creating contact lists to monitoring the performance of email campaigns. I recall the first time I used Constant Contact to write an email newsletter for a small business, and was immediately impressed at how simple the interface was for a then-beginner like myself. I was able to change up the imagery (including font and color scheme) and add my photos and infographics. To this day, I love how Constant Contact allows users to create different contact lists for other purposes and campaigns, and the program makes it very clear when sending out emails who exactly that email will be going out to. Though I don't have as much experience with campaign analytics using Constant Contact as I do with some of the other features, I do know that it's reporting of metrics/KPIs is extremely helpful when observing the performance of a particular email and of a campaign as a whole. I look forward to using additional features offered by Constant Contact in the future, including its tools for social media marketing.

Thus far, the only issue I have with Constant Contact is related to the different features available with the three pricing plans. Although Constant Contact's pricing is good when compared to its competitors, the selection of features available with the cheapest pricing plan, Lite, is rather limited. With this plan, only one user is allowed, and not much storage is given. With email marketing, there is neither A/B testing nor segmentation, which I find to be quite frustrating. Features related to ads, SEO, and scheduling social media posts in advance are not available either. With the Standard pricing plan, there are some more ads, segmentation, and email marketing features available, but users cannot see the full scope of all that Constant Contact has to offer unless they pay for the most expensive plan. Free trials are available, which is helpful, but there is also no free plan. Some of your competitors offer free plans (albeit with limited features) in which at least the basics of the program can be used.