Constant Contact Conclusion

Constant Contact received 22 out of 25 stars. They have great Contact Management and incredibly knowledgeable Customer Support. However, they only allow you to host five images. Constant Contact scored well on Analyzing Reports, as well as Email Deliverability for having a spam checker.

Constant Contact: Email Creation

Constant Contact received 4 out of 5 stars for Email Creation. While initially only allowing you to host five images, Constant Contact does allow you to custom edit your uploaded graphics and, for an additional $5.00 per month, you may host up to 50 MB of images. They provide 443 premade email templates, and we found these templates to be rather flexible. You can add or delete blocks from the template as well as edit and replace images. However, Constant Contact does not allow the addition of more than two columns per email, which may be problematic for certain users. Constant Contact offers point-and-click WYSIWYG editing. A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor enables you to easily edit your email campaign while seeing what it will look like to your readers.  It allows you to simply drag and drop both images and content blocks for easy content manipulation. Constant Contact even integrates with social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn allowing you to maximize your marketing outreach. They also offer a mobile application for iPhone users.

Constant Contact: Contact Management

Constant Contact received 5 out of 5 stars for Contact Management. Constant Contact offers a variety of ways in which to import contacts, including direct contact importation from Excel, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce and Gmail. We found the management of these contacts to be highly intuitive. They provide autoresponders as well as automatically remove unsubscribes and bounces. Additionally, Constant Contact is one of the few providers that allows unsubscribers to provide feedback to you on why they unsubscribed.

Constant Contact: Email Deliverability

Constant Contact received 4 out of 5 stars for Email Deliverability. Constant Contact successfully delivered our test emails to 100% of recipients while correctly reporting bounces on bad email addresses we intentionally used in our test. They also have a spam checking too, which fits our Industry Benchmark. When scheduling campaigns for immediate delivery, we were pleased to find that Constant Contact delivered our messages within five to 10 minutes. They do not, however, allow you to edit an email that has been scheduled to send without cancelling the send.

Constant Contact: Analyzing Reports

Constant Contact received 4 out of 5 stars for Analyzing Reports. They provide very detailed reports, giving the user statistics on opens, forwards, number of clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, top performing links, and spam reports. We found Constant Contact to accurately reflect a recipient's actions. An activity tab logs contact additions, updates, removals and exports. Constant Contact graphically reports these statistics online in the user's account. They also allow the user to customize a spreadsheet for exporting whatever statistics they desire. You can also export a “clean” list of active subscribers into a spreadsheet in order to eliminate extraneous contacts from your records. Although Constant Contact does not offer an automatic A/B testing feature, you can manually create an A/B test campaign by segmenting your contact list. Constant Contact's reports do not integrate with Google Analytics.

Constant Contact: Customer Support

Constant Contact received 5 out of 5 stars for Customer Support. They offer phone, live chat, and email support from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET on Monday through Friday, but their phone support is solely for paying customers between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. ET. Additionally they extend email support to the weekends from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET. We found their support to be rather thorough and knowledgeable while experiencing negligible wait times. Constant Contact's text and video tutorials are great alternatives to learning their service by pure trial and error or through customer service correspondence. In addition, Constant Contact's online FAQ is searchable, which makes it easy to access pertinent information.

Constant Contact: Pricing

Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial period in which an unlimited amount of emails may be sent to as many as 100 contacts. Their pricing is contact-based as opposed to email based and allows you to send unlimited emails to all of the email addresses in your contact list. Contact-based pricing is advantageous if you intend to send more than one email per month to the same list of contacts. Among a few of their plans, a user can pay a monthly fee of $15 per month for 500 contacts, $30 per month for 2500 contacts, and more.