Constant Contact helps me and my clients stay in touch and generate sales

I've attended several Constant Contact classes, and as a result of what I learned, was able to set up a monthly e-magazine for a client that had 6000 recipients and between 5-10 paid advertisers each month. For another client, we set up a monthly email with coupons for returning customers that was very effective at generating repeat business. The data collection features have helped me and my clients grow our client databases. Another corporate client has used Constant Contact to send notifications and newsletters to their employees.

Pros

There are quite a few things to like about Constant Contact, including the number of available, local classes. The vast number of templates available make the process of setting up email campaigns fast and easy, as does having a library of graphics.

Cons

I've been very happy with Constant Content over the years. While there have been a few glitches, they were easily solved with help from customer service. There is always a representative available to help by chat or phone.

We think of Constant Contact as one of our team members!

Always a great experience using Constant Contact ... and on the very rare occasion when I may have a question or concern, their Customer Support is excellent.

Pros

Constant Contact makes it super easy to stay in touch with our association members as well as to create various marketing campaigns.

Cons

The only negative I have is with pricing. While Constant Contact provides tremendous value, and offers fantastic savings for a subscription paid annually (which is a good thing) ... for us as a non-profit, it is easier budget-wise for us to pay monthly, so we are not able to take advantage of the bigger discount. It would be helpful if Constant Contact allowed those same savings to be applied for non-profits who pay monthly ... especially since we have been a long-time customer.

Great For Large Contact Base

Pros

Constant Contact does a great job of managing multiple groups/list and lots of contacts. I've worked with clients who have a large customer base and Constant Contact allows managing large amounts of group/lists and allows you to manual remove unsubscribers and errors. They are rolling out a new version of their email builder, but the older version does allow custom css coding per block which really allows customizing their templates.

Cons

There are a lot of quirks within Constant Contact that I haven't seen in Mailchimp, specifically with using external links for photos and links. The actual editing of text and links within the email builder is quirky and has some issues. Also, the new search feature for previous emails is really slow and takes a long time to find previous emails unless you create folders for all your emails.

Get up and running easily

Overall, I like their niche. They are not trying to be something they are not and they have made huge improvements over the years to the GUI Interface.

Pros

The ease of making a custom email was exactly what we were looking for. We send out a Holiday greeting each year (we buy 2 months worth of CC every year). Once we have made a solid contacts.csv file the rest is really drag and drop. Also, a CC representative threw in a sample email that looks like our website...it was pretty neat, but not Holiday appropriate. Overall, our Holiday email goes out without a hitch and we get some nice reporting on the back-end that helps us for next year.

Cons

My only pet-peeve is if you want to cancel the subscription, you have to go through a sales rep. Slightly annoying in our case. However, all the reps were friendly and low pressure. We were able to cancel in one phone call.

A simple and robust solution for Email marketing

Constant Contact is a great solution for smaller organizations that have simple email marketing needs. They do what they do very well and offer a solution that is easy to learn and adopt within smaller organizations. I would definitely recommend it to small businesses or non-profits.

Pros

Constant Contact has a very clean interface and a dashboard that makes it easy to navigate and learn. When compared to other solutions like Mailchimp, I found Constant Contact to be more intuitive and simpler. Our client was able to adopt it quickly where they struggled with other solutions.

Cons

Constant Contact's List set up is not very robust and is somewhat limiting. Their email builder is very structured as well, which can be good for some, but can be difficult to navigate for more custom email builds or email builds that leverage dynamic content.