Do you have a hard time finding the best email system for your specific situation? I get that! Finding an email system that fits your business can be hard since there are many options and it should perfectly fit with what you want out of your list.
What you want out of an email system is mostly creating a connection with your customers in the most simple way possible. You want it to be fast, easy, and effortless. It should for sure NOT cost any extra time here.
Set it and forget it would be the ideal strategy, where you can simply automate once and that’s it.
Currently, I’m focused on growing my email list because I’ve realized the benefits of a quality email list can be amazing.
If you focus on growing your email list you get more pageviews, more engaged clients, and eventually more profit. That’s what everyone is telling me. But how do you get there?
One of the easiest ways is to send out a lead magnet, like a freebie, a cheat sheet, or a free email course like I created.
Sign up for my email course if you want to get the exact tips on how to get a hold of your finances!
Since the beginning of my blog, I’ve used MailChimp as an email provider. BUT more and more competitors are entering the field.
A big email system that has been around for over 25 years, with over 650.000 clients, is Constant Contact.
In this article, we will focus on Constant Contact review. More specifically, we will discuss the Constant Contact features, the pros and cons, and determine if it is the right fit for you. Lastly, we will compare Constant Contact with MailChimp, the email future a lot of fellow bloggers use.
Short Intro Into Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a big email system with over 650.000 customers from many different countries around the world. Their platform is primarily focused on getting and maintaining a connection with your customers and subscribers.
Constant Contact makes it incredibly easy to send and create customized emails to your customers, with the drag and drop features they offer plus their focus on mobile optimization. We all know mobile optimization is getting more and more important, so focusing on that could give you a real competitive advantage!
Constant Contact goes beyond email services, by also offering things like event marketing and social media content management.
Constant Contact Features
The diverse features that Constant Contact is offering make it stand out among their competitors and it does what it should do: help you with maintaining and getting new customers.
This is what the dashboard looks like:
Set Up Emails
The great thing with Constant Contact is that you can customize the email as much as you want. You can use brand colors and brand style, or you can completely take their templates and drag-and-drop.
If you choose to use their templates, there are still a lot of options for editing images, polls, donations options, and more.
They make it incredibly easy for you to set up emails, besides their pre-made templates they also offer a drag and drop system for customizing your emails.
You can use their platform as a complete event management tool with options like invitations, registrations, RSVPs, and more.
With their dynamic content option, there is even the possibility to show people something specific based on their demographic information, purchase history, or email group.
When you’re thinking: this is great, it gets better! They help you with ensuring there are no missing links, typos, or incorrect dates, by auto-suggesting corrections.
Further opportunities are with the open rate, where you can optimize email sending time to increase the open rate or you can resend the email to your subscribers who did not read the email the first time sending.
Constant Contact allows you to import contacts from other email services or apps. This is very useful for the ones among us who are already in the email marketing game for a while and want to switch from their current email provider to Constant Contact.
Another major thing it does: it helps you grow your email list. That’s what you are here for right?! They suggest actions to take to guide you through the process of getting more email subscribers. Examples of this are building a sign-up page or linking to other apps like Instagram.
When you have sent several emails to your customers, you can segment them based on whether or not a customer has opened or clicked on your email.
Another great thing to do is to link Constant Contact with Shopify, to use that data as input to create segments in your email list. This means you can target customers really specifically based on what they have already bought and thus improve the likelihood of them buying again with you.
There is basic automation possible within this when you can send someone an email if they opened an email, linked on a link, or subscribed to your list. Unfortunately, there is no option to put them in a specific segment after that.
One of the most-used features of Constant Contact is the option to see how different emails have performed in one simple graph. You can see your sends, clicks, opens, unsubscribes, spam, and more.
This data is great, as you can take action on it. When you see that your opens have dropped over the last two months, you should find out what could be a reason for that to bring them up again.
With every campaign that you are sending out, you can look at the details of your campaign and how that might affect the opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. It might be the time sent or the preferences of a group of subscribers. Once you find that out, you can take action like for example segmenting that group of people.
Contact Contact is a great help if you want to grow your email list. It helps you creating popups, embedded forms, and landing pages. That’s great for an email marketing tool!
You can customize these forms how you want, depending on the style of your website and the branding that you want to display.
Constant Contact’s Support Team
Constant Contact has a ‘Help’ option available at all times on their website – no matter what you’re doing on their website.
They offer a really detailed FAQ format with entire articles, videos, and tutorials on how you should do things. Besides that, you can contact them on email, by phone, and on live chat.
If you have any more specific questions, you can visit the Help Center directly to ask them.
Constant Contact Pricing
Constant Contact offers two plans, where a free plan is not an option but it DOES offer a free trial. Yes!
They have two pricing plans: Email and Email Plus.
With the Email plan, pricing starts at $20 per month if you have up to 500 contacts. If you have 501-2,500 contacts, pricing comes down to $45.
This lets you choose from email templates, create your own, and send unlimited emails. Yes, you can email your customers all day!
This plan offers the main features, like: reports, scheduling emails, segmentation, contact management, and further building your list.
If you are just starting with your business and want to mainly build your list with the basic tools, this plan is for you.
The Email Plus plan starts a $45 per month if you have up to 500 contacts. If you have 501-2000 contacts, pricing comes down to $70.
Everything included in the Email plan is also included here. Additional features include multiple users (very convenient if you are working with a team), A/B headline testing, online donations, and event marketing.
If you are growing your business and are looking for a more powerful email marketing tool, this plan is for you!
The FREE Trial
Constant Contact offers a 30-day free trial with access to the most important features.
If you want to try out their service and see how much time you will save with your email marketing, go for it!Try it out for FREE
Besides that, there is a 10% discount if you choose to pay for 6 months or a 15% discount for 12 months. PLUS if you’re working for a non-profit, you will get a staggering 30% discount. This is a great way to save money on the monthly overhead of your business.
Pros Of Constant Contact
1. It’s Easy To Use
Upon first-time use, Constant Contact asks you all kinds of questions in order to create the dashboard and optimize your user experience.
With their drag and drop editor, creating emails becomes incredibly easy. Especially if you’re a beginner, you’ll get the hang of it in no time!
2. Great Niche-Specific Features
They have some interesting niche features, like event management, surveys, online donations, and polls. This may come in very handy for businesses in specific niches.
3. Specific Insight In Results
Constant Contact tracks every single thing about the emails that you send out. You can see who opens, clicks, or unsubscribes from your email.
With this information, you can take action and make an email strategy.
You can, for example, resend emails to the subscribers that didn’t open them or change the subject line with A/B testing for higher open rates.
4. High Deliverability Rates
Constant Contact has hight deliverability rates, meaning that more people get your emails.
5. Free Templates And Images
Constant Contact is offering countless free templates for building up your emails, forms, and landing pages within minutes. To assist you even more, they offer an image library included with your subscription.
6. The Free Trial
Who doesn’t love free trials?
If you want to test out their service before committing to a specific plan, take the free trial and roll with it. Try it out and determine after the first free month if this is something that will help you and your business.
Cons Of Constant Contact
1. The Price
If you’re looking for an email marketing service, this is one of the best. Constant Contact will deliver and get you great results. BUT compared to competitors the price is a little steep.
2. Flexibility In Design
Even though there are templates that you can use, the designs that are offered are not that flexible. You can not do anything you want in terms of making email campaigns and landing pages.
Constant Contact offers basic automation, making workflows and more advanced automation desirable to develop for the more advanced user.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is There A Free Version Of Constant Contact?
At this moment there is no free version of Constant Contact. They do offer a 30-day free trial to any of the two of their packages.
What Are The Benefits Of Constant Contact?
The platform is easy to use, it has niche-specific features like even management and surveys, it gives you a detailed insight into your results, it has high deliverability rates, they provide free templates and images, and they offer a 30-day FREE trial.
How Does Constant Contact Compare To MailChimp?
|Live chat||Limited hours||With paid plans|
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Both platforms have their pros and cons, as you can see.
MailChimp is currently the leading email marketing provider, but Constant Contact is an alternative on the rise that is a great solution for the ones who are starting out with their own business.
Is Constant Contact For Me?
Constant Contact is a good marketing solution for anyone who is just starting out or want to grow their business to the next level.
If you’re someone who can’t spend a lot of time on email marketing, Constant Contact may be the solution.
Constant Contact helps you to maintain and grow the relationship with your customers. They offer email automation, statistical reporting tools, contact management, different templates, free images, basic segmentation, and more.
Their software is easy to use, has high deliverability rates, and gives you insights into your campaign. These campaign insights you can take to the next level by improving campaigns over time!
What kind of email marketing system do you use?