Constant Contact Conclusion

Constant Contact is a well-known email marketing brand name that is "best practices"-oriented. Constant Contact scores high on email creation, contact management, deliverability and customer support. Although they are the only provider to have industry benchmarks against which you can measure the performance of your campaign, the reporting interface lacks some features that many of the other services offer.

Constant Contact: Email Creation

Constant Contact is best for people who will primarily use the email templates in their email campaigns and don’t need to do a lot of customization. Constant Contact features 358 email templates in 16 categories. They offer a WSYWIG/point-and-click editor, which is a simple, drag-and-drop system. You can include your own HTML code in any section of a template. A drawback to email creation is the fact that you are limited to 5 hosted images; however, you can circumvent this drawback by hosting your images on a free site, such as Photobucket.com, or by upgrading to 25MB of space with access to 3400 stock images for an extra $5/month. Following best practices, Constant Contact automatically includes a “permission reminder” at the top of your email which informs recipients of why they’ve received the email. You are also able to create a total of 15 auto-responder emails that can be sent to new signups, although only 5 can be active at once. When you sign up for a paid account, Constant Contact gives you the ability to remove their brand logo for free from your emails. They also offer “Email Archive,” a cool add-on feature that lets you put your email archive on a webpage that people can view online.

Constant Contact: Contact Management

Constant Contact has a great contact management system that allows you to import directly from ACT! By Sage, Quickbooks, Outlook or Outlook Express, TXT, CSV and Excel files, in addition to manually adding contacts and copying/pasting multiple contacts at one time. List cleanup is a manual process with checkbox categories (ex: non-existent address, undeliverable, blocked, etc) that you can easily check and delete. List segmentation is manual as well. Creating a sign-up form for your website is easy and highly customizable), and you can opt to receive an email report lists all of your new contacts and unsubscribed contacts regularly. Constant Contact follows “best practices” for handling unsubscribes; clearly marked “SafeUnsubscribe” links are automatically inserted at the top and bottom of each email sent. When a person unsubscribes via the link, he/she will be taken to a page where they can confirm the unsubscribe and fill out an optional feedback box. Constant Contact also automatically deletes unsubscribes from your mailing list.

Constant Contact: Email Deliverability

Email sent using Constant Contact had a 100% deliverability rate to all major email servers that we tested. Most emails are sent within 5 to 15 minutes from the time of your selection, however, on busy days or for large lists it may take up to 60 minutes for your email to be sent. Constant Contact labels your email campaign as "scheduled" if you click "send now." In order to edit the email, you must reset it to Draft status. Our deliverability test showed that emails were successfully delivered to all major email servers, which is probably related to Constant Contacts’ relationship with email servers, as well as Constant Contact’s spam checker that scores your email in relation to spam filter triggers. Again, although Constant Contact does not offer any guarantees, they do claim to follow industry “best practices.”

Constant Contact: Analyzing Reports

Constant Contact shows you the basic stats in tracking and reporting. You are able to view bounces, spam reports, opt-outs, opens, clicks and forwards; however, you can only view the data numerically (instead of graphically). Constant Contact does give you the ability to view average open rates, click-through rates and bounce rates of other email campaigns sent by Constant Contact customers, so you can compare the performance of your campaign with others. Although Constant Contact claims “real-time tracking,” we noticed a lag time in report updates that is rather common for most email marketing services. Constant Contact does not offer A/B (split) testing, nor does it integrate with Google Analytics. Although, depending on your situation, you may not necessarily need these features. (See our Provider Reviews page to read about other email marketing providers who offer these features).

Constant Contact: Customer Support

Constant Contact’s support is available seven days a week. Their phone and chat support hours are M-F 9a-9p ET, and their email support is available M-F 9a-9p and Sat-Sun 9a-5p ET. Constant Contact’s site also features a searchable FAQ section that helps answer common questions and problems. An account rep contacted us the same day we signed up for a free trial, but he was quite personable and didn’t try to up-sell.

Constant Contact: Pricing

Constant Contact charges a monthly fee, based on the number of contacts you add to your list. You can also choose to prepay for either 6 months of service and receive a 10% discount, or 12 months of service and receive a 15% discount. Nonprofits are eligible to receive 20% off a 6 month prepayment or 30% a 12 month prepayment. If you sign up for a free trial, you can test all of Constant Contact’s email marketing features for 60 days, but you are limited to only 100 contacts on your email list.