parsonal review on Constant Contact

In the realm of digital marketing, where strategies and platforms are continually evolving, email marketing remains a steadfast and potent tool for businesses to engage with their audience. Constant Contact, a leading player in the email marketing space, has emerged as a go-to platform for businesses of all sizes. In this comprehensive review, we'll delve into the features, benefits, and nuances of Constant Contact to understand how it can be a game-changer for your email marketing efforts.

What is Constant Contact?

ConstantContact email marketing software helps you understand your audience’s response, so you can plan your next marketing move. Our email marketing is easy, affordable, and proven to get results; that’s why we’re ranked number 1 in Website Magazine’s list of the top 50 email marketing solutions.

In general, Constant Contact offers an all-around solid tool 📧 for email marketing. It has all the key features that most businesses need. These include a visual email builder, pre-made templates, marketing automation, and more.

Who Is Constant Contact Ideal For?

Constant Contact is a great choice for any of the following users:

  • Small to medium-sized businesses in need of an affordable marketing solution to build their lists
  • Small businesses with under 50,000 email contacts
  • Anyone who wants to try a new risk-free email marketing service
  • Businesses looking for a platform with pricing plans that allow users to upgrade services as they grow
  • Companies looking for a platform planning to integrate other types of marketing besides email into their current campaigns, like e-commerce and social media
  • Anyone with limited email design knowledge or marketing resources in need of ready-to-use templates to easily start their email campaigns

So it’s worth evaluating the platform for these users.

Hands-on with the key features in Constant Contact 🙌

Pre-made email templates

While you’re always free to design completely custom emails from scratch using the visual builder that we’ll show you in the next section, Constant Contact also gives you access to a large library of pre-made email templates.

You can choose these templates when you’re creating an email and then still customize everything using the visual builder.

While you do get access to a lot of different templates (a “pro”), some of the templates can look a bit dated and/or basic (a “con”).

Overall, while not all of the designs will amaze you, you should be able to find a good-looking template to use as the base for your emails.

Visual, drag-and-drop email builder

To help you design your emails, Constant Contact offers a visual, drag-and-drop email builder.

You are still free to use your own custom HTML templates if you prefer that approach. But for most non-technical users, using the visual builder (and maybe one of the pre-made templates) offers a much easier way to customize your emails.

In general, we found the Constant Contact visual builder to be very easy to use.

To add content/design elements to your emails, you can just drag them over from the sidebar.

For text email content, you can then just click and type on the page, much like you’re working in a Word document. You can also add merge tags to insert information dynamically, such as each subscriber’s first name.

To control layouts, you can also rearrange everything in the visual preview just by dragging elements around.

To configure each block, you’ll see a toolbar appear in the editor when you select it. For example, text blocks get a text formatting toolbar, as you can see in the screenshot above.

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To see what your designs will look like on different devices, you can open the preview pop-up to see both desktop and mobile previews.

Visual automation builder

If you want to get the most from your email marketing efforts, you’ll probably want to set up different types of automatic email sequences or more advanced marketing strategies.

The simplest option to get started is a basic autoresponder, wherein every subscriber receives the same sequence of emails on the same schedule.

However, you might want to also implement more advanced types of automations, which is where Constant Contact’s visual automation builder comes in really handy.

For example, you could have different branching series of emails based on the actions that users take. You might send one email to a person who engaged with the previous email in the series, while sending a different email to a person who didn’t open the previous email.

To help you do this more easily, Constant Contact offers pre-built automation templates called “automation paths,” which include templates for abandoned cart emails, birthdays, and more.

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Email analytics and A/B testing

To help you understand the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts, Constant Contact comes with built-in email analytics for important engagement metrics including the following:

  • Opens
  • Clicks
  • Unsubscribes
  • Bounces

You can even see a heat map view of your email so that you can see the exact elements that your users clicked on in a visual preview.

Beyond giving you access to this important data, Constant Contact also includes A/B testing so that you can optimize those metrics. With Constant Contact’s A/B testing tool, you can easily A/B test your emails’ subject lines to find the best-performing variant

Opt-in form builder

To collect new subscribers and grow your email lists, you have two high-level options:

  1. You can use Constant Contact’s built-in opt-in form builder to create forms and popups that you can embed on your site.
  2. You can use a dedicated list-building tool that integrates with Constant Contact, such as a pop-up plugin or a form plugin. Sumo and OptinMonster are two popular options, but there are lots of others.

If you want the most flexibility for customizing and targeting your forms, you’ll probably want to use the third-party list-building tool approach.

However, if you just want to embed a simple newsletter subscribe form on your site, Constant Contact’s built-in form builder is more than capable of getting the job done.

👉 You can create the following:

  • Popup
  • Flyout
  • Banner
  • Inline form
  • Text to join
  • Landing page

The opt-in form builder is not drag-and-drop like the email builder, but it is still quite easy to use.

Constant Contact pricing explained 💰

No Constant Contact review can be considered thorough if it doesn’t cover the pricing. That is often the determining factor for many readers so let’s get into it.

To begin with, unlike some other email marketing tools, Constant Contact does not offer a forever-free plan. However, you can test out all of its functionality with a 14-day free trial. Certain geographic areas also get access to longer trial periods.

Once your free trial expires, you can choose from one of three plans for email marketing. All three plans use tier-based pricing, with your pricing going up based on the number of contacts that you have.

 

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Constant Contact Pros and Cons

Even though Constant Contact is a great email marketing tool, it has its fair share of pros and cons. Let’s recap them so that you can decide if this is the tool for you.

Pros Cons
60-day free trial Pricing plans can get expensive as the number of contacts grows
Beginner-friendly user interface Ideal for small businesses focused on email list building
Great collection of email templates Lacks more sophisticated automation and advanced features
Easy-to-use drag-and-drop email creator A/B testing is limited to only email subject lines
A high deliverability rate (97%) means that your emails are less likely to land in the spam folder Lacks advanced reporting capabilities
Discounts available for nonprofits The landing page builder is basic
Social media integration allows you to connect with social media users and create Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns

Conclusion:

Constant Contact’s hands-on experience showcases its user-friendly nature and robust feature set. Whether you’re creating engaging campaigns, managing contacts, or automating responses, Constant Contact provides the tools you need to elevate your email marketing strategy. As you navigate through the platform, you’ll appreciate its versatility and the ability to adapt to your unique marketing needs.