Constant Contact Software

Pros

I've been using constant contact daily for the last 3 years. Overall, it is what you want out of a email marketing system. The automation functionalities are fine, and the templates that you can choose form are pretty vast. It's an easy to learn platform that gets the job done.

Cons

I often run into an issue where my template and my test emails look different. Sometimes there is a space that cannot be fixed, or a gap that I can't delete. It can be very frustrating when you want something to look a certain way.

Pros

Constant Contact is very easy to use even for beginners. You can produce a good visual product without a lot of problems.

Cons

There is a monthly fee to take into consideration. It can sometimes be difficult to edit imported images to fit the templates.

Pros

Constant Contact is easy to use and provides lots of good marketing feedback. It takes very little time to design a template and have it scheduled for publication.

Cons

Sometimes it is difficult to get the email to look the way you want. You can edit the HTML to fix it, but that is not easy for everyone.

Pros

This email software has all the basics and has satisfied all of our needs. From design to analytics, we have not run into any issues.

Cons

When going through to delete customers that have no opened their email in a certain period of time - it was difficult to check to see who had opened and who had not over a course of time and we would have to go through and individually select hundreds of contacts to delete them. Would love to have a feature that listed the 'last opened email' date next to the contacts name.

Pros

Easy to manage lists, easy to use templates, good customer service, good tools. Easy to keep branded image. Trusted by our constituents. Connects to my donor database.

Cons

Sometimes people get unsubscribed and it seems to be a mystery. Sometimes the templates degrade after too much copying. Sometimes strange spacing issues or other formatting issues occur. Sometimes forwarded emails develop formatting issues. Sometimes email sent differs slightly from preview.

Pros

Contact Contact was easy to setup and get going in the beginning and we did not have any deliver-ability issues.

Cons

Once we start integrating custom variables and other advanced concepts, the system seemed to get overly complicated and slow at some points.

Constant outreach to my client base

Pros

I love that the system is easy to use and is flexible enough to allow me to create dynamic messages quickly

Cons

Sometimes the messages do not look the same when they are delivered as they do when I am creating them. It could be the result from the individual email platform the user has.

Easy to setup and get going without requiring a huge marketing budget or team. Templates made it easy to send out professional communications without a design background.

Pros

Easy to use and set up. Didn't take much time to get up and running on the product and begin sending out communications quickly and easily. Provided basic templates out of the box so we didn't need much design work initially.

Cons

At the time, integration with our ERP was nonexistent. Not sure if this was on the Constant Contact side or the ERP side. We never could figure out a great way to do any A/B testing through Constant Contact. Also couldn't send an email based on an open or click on a previous message. We knew that heading in but it became a bigger issue than we thought.

Keeping my clients in the know on whatever was going on is very important.

Pros

As a graphic designer and marketing manager, I love how easy it is to send a promo flyer to my existing customers. I also used this software if we had phone outages so our customers knew what was going on .

Cons

A way to import contacts from email address or from another list would be helpful. And the customer service is great, but they can be a little pushy.

A great, cheap way to increase your marketing presence. Trackable links show which recipients are actively reading and interacting with your newsletters.

Pros

I like the built-in templates. It's hard to choose which one to use sometimes because there are so many great options. The templates are eye-catching, and open rates are pretty high. Also, the trackable links are a great addition; being able to see how active readers are helps with design of future newsletters. For example, we put our latest 5 blog entries on each of our newsletters, and we can see who is actively reading and clicking into our site from the newsletter.

Cons

Sometimes you can accidentally back out of the editor and lose your work. You need to make sure you save every time you add a section.

Pros

Constant Contact offers marketing tools via email for both users and administration. Constant Contact supplies users and administrators customization of emails. Constant Contact provides various options such as reporting, registering, campaigning, and customer feedback. Constant Contact has integration of software applications such as Word Press, Formstack, Facebook, MindBody, Outlook, HootSuite, and Salesforce. Constant Contact offers email marketing templates.

Cons

Plans of services not provided on the Constant Contact site. Variations of information may not appear as clearly in the mobile application as oppose to the windows application. Within the editor tool, inserting inline images may not appear depending on the file type. As an administrator or user, attempting to cancel services may not transpire as quickly but the Constant Contact team is working towards a resolution. Constant Contact displays a limited number of archived reports as it relates to email analytics.

Pros

I enjoy the ability to compile multiple sending lists. This is beneficial to my company and allows me to target various markets.

Cons

Customization of emails could be improved, definitely a good resource, but full customization of layouts, colors, and imagery could be improved.

Pros

It's easy to upload lists of contacts and the customer services is very good. The reports also are little easy to understand.

Cons

What I like the least is that older campaigns get deleted with the time. It could use a refresh on its look & feel.

Pros

It is easy to use and it gives you opportunity to reach a huge audience. We have many different operations and we use Constant Contact for all of them.

Cons

I would like more incentives for being a loyal customer. The pricing is competitive but after as many years as we have been using Constant Contact I feel we she be rewarded to some degree.

Easy to create and manage basic email lists and campaigns.

Pros

Relatively easy to use for basic functionality. I can easily set up multiple email lists and create email campaigns. To their credit, Constant Contact has improved the layout and library tools over the years (I've been using the product for almost 10 years). However, the contact management tools are lacking (see below).

Cons

Two key drawbacks. First, they keep raising the price without adding any real additional value. Yes, the layout and library tools have improved. But really those improvements should be to keep up with technology and competition. Also, storage is always getting cheaper. So why the price increases? Worse, they experimented with ads to users a few times. Second, they lack good tools to manage your contact database to minimize your total contacts and save money. You pay by how many total contacts you have. Unfortunately, CC makes it difficult to cull the contacts who have not been opening your emails. Why is there no simple tool "Show me anyone who has not opening my emails during the last year?" Instead, I have to tediously cull my contact list by hand, or download misc. lists into Excel. I don't know if the competitor (Mail Chimp) is better, but I'm getting very tempted to check...

Pros

I can keep my contact lists up to date and at my fingertips, plus it's backed up in the cloud. I am able to tag contacts and customize lists and schedule posts. The designer is easy to use and looks professional. We love using it for our email campaigns and also for posting newsletters on social media.

Cons

Sometimes the getting the mobile view to line up correcting can be difficult, but eventually you will figure out tricks to set it up in the browser view correctly to where mobile comes out correctly every time. Would like a little more customization options on the borders without paying for a higher subscription.

Pros

Sending out monthly newsletters is very easy and you can track open rates and click rates amongst all your contacts.

Cons

Pricing is higher than others and extra features often cost extra money, and some of the emails can look dated.

Pros

I like that it's got all the tools I could need and comes with templates to make everything look professional.

Cons

The only complaint I have is that you have to pay for some add-ons and the price point isn't beginner friendly. There are cheaper alternatives.

Pros

Great for a small business person looking to start and grow an email list of clients.

They have a WYSIWYG editor to easily make designs, but also access to the HTML of you need it for any reason.

They're heavy into marketing, which is why people hear about them more than some of the other options on the market.

I used it for a small business that already had an account, and it worked fine but it wasn't anything outstanding.

Cons

Ultimately I would not recommend this program for a small business to use as there are better and cheaper options on the market.

It's definitely not powerful enough to be a marketing solution for a large corporation so it seems possibly most suited for medium sized businesses who have a decent budget.

Pros

I love how user-friendly it is. As a person who hadn't had much experience with using programs with mass emails, scheduling, etc- I was super happy with how easy it was to navigate. I loved how I could pull up my past emails- and then just edit them in the same format for future ones.

Cons

The thing I liked least about this software was the limited graphics and fonts included in the subscription.