Constant Contact Review

Constant Contact is an e-commerce-focused email marketing solution with high deliverability rates.3.5GoodBy Gadjo Sevilla Updated June 24, 2021

THE BOTTOM LINE

Constant Contact has done a lot of work since we last tested it, expanding its marketing automation capabilities and adding new integrations for e-commerce and social media marketing. Per Month, Starts at $20.00 Per Month Constant ContactSee ItPCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing. Learn more.

PROS

Intuitive and elegant UI
Wide range of third-party integrations
Superior email deliverability rate

CONS

Templates don’t offer much flexibility
Pricing will add up once you have thousands of contacts
No multi-channel automation

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CONSTANT CONTACT SPECS

ALL SPECS

Since we last tested it, Constant Contact has grown its email marketing solution to cover e-commerce-focused marketing in addition to straight brand marketing. You’ll find a good mix of starter features, a nice list of third-party integrations, and a generous 60-day free trial. But while it’s easy to use and integrate with other web services, its feature set is definitely aimed at small businesses, which means it’s necessarily behind our more flexible and well-rounded Editors’ Choice winners, Campaigner and Mailchimp.

Constant Contact Pricing

Constant Contact offers a wider range of plans since we last reviewed it. For one thing, there’s a Website Builder Only Plan for $10 a month. This is for businesses just looking to build a website and landing page for which Constant Contact throws in free hosting as part of the price. You’ll also have access to list-building tools, an e-commerce store, and the social media marketing features available with the other plans (see below).

For email marketing, the starting tier is the Email plan, which starts at $20 per month for up to three users with unlimited monthly email sends, and basic marketing automation (list building tools, automated email resend to non-openers, and subject line A/B testing). Those features will tick all the boxes that most small to midsized businesses (SMBs) will need, though with an emphasis on smaller organizations.

Next is the Email Plus plan which will run you $45 a month for up to 10 users with all the features of the Email plan but also adding automation, e-commerce segmentation, customizable pop-up forms, online surveys, coupons, and online consultation for new customers–another very nice feature for those just getting their feet wet in digital marketing.

Up from Email Plus is the new eCommerce Pro Plan. This tier starts at $195 per month and is based on the number of contacts you’ve got with a minimum of 2,500. As the name implies, this plan is meant for businesses who want to sell online in addition to marketing, which is why the pricing is based on the number of contacts. If you fit that description, you’ll find a well-featured platform with lots of integrations to third-party store sites. It also has artificial intelligence-powered personalization, good automation workflows, and an e-commerce-focused set of analytics.

The upper tiers are nice, but the Email plan offers all the features that most small businesses need to start an email marketing campaign. That includes list management, template building and customization, and audience segmentation. Email Plus is for companies with more sophisticated needs, offering A/B testing, automated email series, event marketing, and registration, online donations, online surveys, and more.

Ranking it against the competition, Constant Contact is only on the edge of being competitive. At $45 per month for 2,500 contacts at its basic tier, it’s actually a little better than Campaign Monitor, which will charge you $49 per month for the same number. However, it’s well short of Editors’ Choice winner, Campaigner, which charges only $59 per month for 5,000 contacts.

What really makes Constant Contact competitive is the 60-day free trial. That’s well beyond what the competition offers and it’s also got most of the service’s features as well as an easy path to upgrading to a paid tier. The free trial doesn’t automatically roll over and you can still access your data without signing up. There is also a 60-day money-back guarantee, which is also generous compared to most of the other players we reviewed.

Creating a Subscriber List

There are several ways to get your subscriber lists into Constant Contact: copy and paste, manually typing addresses into a form, uploading a file (CSV, TXT, XLS, or XLSX), directly importing them from a Gmail or Microsoft Outlook address book, or importing them from several compatible customer relationship management (CRM) tools, including HubSpot CRM, Nutshell, and Pipedrive.

We uploaded four Microsoft Excel and CSV documents with overlapping contacts and the uploads were fast and mostly accurate. Constant Contact recognized most of our data fields and even merged duplicate contacts. We had to map a few fields and add a new custom field, which was easy and on par with most of our small business-focused competitors, like Campaign Monitor.

Our only quibble with Constant Contact here is that it’s a pain to edit user records. If you want to add more detail to several contacts, then you have to load each record individually and update the fields. We would prefer doing a quick edit from the main contact list, as you can with Editors’ Choice winner, Sendinblue since it would make the process much less tedious. Of course, the best way to avoid this is to have a spreadsheet with complete information in the first place, but that’s rarely the case.

Another way you can grow your subscriber list is by creating web forms that let your customers sign up for newsletters and other promotional emails. Constant Contact also offers landing pages and it integrates with OptinMonster, Facebook Lead Ads, and the Facebook Join My List app. You can segment new contacts based on which of these methods they used for opting in, which is also useful when segmenting your lists.

Like its competitors, Constant Contact requires you to verify that you already have consent from your entire list—no bought lists allowed! You also cannot use group addresses such as sales@ or marketing@ addresses or distribution lists since there is no way to verify you have consent from every person receiving messages sent to such addresses.

However, since we last tested it, Constant Contact has improved its ability to monitor fraudulent activity. You want this because it keeps your emails from dropping into your customers’ spam folders. It also contributes to Constant Contact’s claim of a 90 percent email delivery rate. The company’s updated Spaminator algorithm now detects and prevents fraudulent behavior, and the company says that’s resulted in a 77% drop in malicious emails from March to December 2020.

Campaign Creation

Creating a campaign is as easy as choosing among the Email, Email Automation, Event, and Survey buttons. If you want to revisit a campaign or copy it, you can search for campaigns by date or keywords or view the Recents tab. Constant Contact also has an integrated marketing calendar so you can schedule emails based on holidays or other events.

For an email campaign, you can use a template to get started. Constant Contact has redesigned its drag-and-drop editor from the last time we looked at it, such that it now provides a variety of layout options and fewer restrictions. The editing tool lets you tweak text with access to Google fonts as well as images and colors. You can add a blog post teaser and import PDFs that transform into interactive emails. Constant Contact also has a branded template builder that can grab your company’s logo, color scheme, and social media links, and incorporate it all into your emails.

Constant Contact’s mobile options are a little weak. It has mobile-aware templates, but not all templates have this feature. The preview capability for mobile-oriented emails also isn’t as flexible as it is in other packages, especially top-tier players like Editors’ Choice winner, Mailchimp. On the other hand, if you really can’t find anything that works for you in Constant Contact’s bundled library, the company offers a custom email template design service that’ll craft anything you need, though this is an added cost option.

You’ll have a media library available for storing your company’s assets, such as logos and other images. The image library now has 2GB of space but with a maximum file size of 5MB. Also similar to Campaign Monitor, you’ll have one-click access to free and paid stock photos.

Once a newsletter is ready to go, you can send it right away or schedule it for later (in five-minute intervals, such as 3:05 a.m., 3:10 a.m., and so on). You can also send recurring emails for birthdays and anniversaries, though there’s no option to send messages on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis like Campaigner offers or to send messages based on the local time at the recipient’s location, as GetResponse does.

Improved Integrations

One of the Constant Contact’s draws is that it has a wide variety of integration options for a product aimed at smaller businesses. This includes e-commerce partnerships with Etsy, eBay, Shopify, and Vimeo as well as Eventbrite. The Eventbrite integration lets subscribers RSVP, respond to polls, download coupons, and make donations right from the email rather than having to go to a landing page. The same goes for product descriptions and buy buttons. There’s also the ability to create Abandoned Shopping Cart emails that you can use to follow up with potential customers, a feature that’s important for direct-to-consumer (DTC) retailers and re-sellers.

Constant Contact has an array of other integrations focused on things like SEO and social media marketing. There’s in-app Facebook and Instagram ad creation and a decent selection of social media monitoring tools, though not as full-featured as tools dedicated to that purpose. There’s also access to Google My Business and an SEO tool for optimizing things like keyword usage. Again, for a tool aimed at smaller companies, that’s a lot of power under the hood.

Campaign Tracking

Once you’ve sent your email, you can track its success by using the redesigned Reporting tab. The dashboard displays the basics, including opens, click-throughs, bounces, and unsubscribe requests. You can also see your most engaged subject line as well as opens on desktop versus mobile.

Constant Contact has video tutorials that walk you through what all your reports mean, and a wealth of information about things like crafting effective subject lines and other ways to improve your open rate. The mobile application is handy if you need to see how your campaign is performing while you’re on the go.

The Report page is also where you can see the results of subject line A/B tests, which comes up as a heat map that shows where subscribers are interacting. However, just as with Campaign Monitor, what you won’t find here is the ability to build custom reports. The canned reports, while useful, are all you’ll get unless you export your data to another reporting tool.

Email Automation

To create an automated series (previously called an “autoresponder”), select Email Automation from the Campaign options view. Start by selecting an email trigger. These are subscriber actions, like opening the email, clicking any link, clicking a specific link, or having a new contact join a list. Then you can create a new email or use one from an existing campaign and this will be sent automatically in response to the action. You’ve got flexibility when it comes to how long you want to wait until the follow-up email is sent and you can add as many of these automatic emails as you’d like to a particular campaign.

Where Constant Contact comes up a little short in automation is that it’s focused solely on email marketing. Other players, like Mailchimp and the HubSpot Marketing Hub, have multi-channel automation features that can create workflows for not only emails but also social media and SMS activity.

Customer Support Options

Constant Contact is easy to use and has plenty of help options, beginning with the Information icons that are located next to the Options tab in most dashboard views. You can also access an extensive collection of Knowledge Base (KB) articles and there are even coaches available at a toll-free number.

A small downside is that phone support isn’t available 24/7, but the hours are still generous. It’s available from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday to Thursday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Fridays, and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. If the phone doesn’t suit, you can use live chat and you can also interact with customer support via Twitter.

An Ideal Marketing Solution for SMBs

For small and even most midsized businesses, Constant Contact is a solid email marketing choice that’s especially friendly to companies just getting started as e-commerce retailers. The wide range of templates will easily satisfy most beginners, though more advanced creative designers might find them lacking a bit when it comes to customization. It’s definitely edging closer to what’s available in our email marketing Editors’ Choice winners, Campaigner, Mailchimp, and Sendinblue.