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.

Easy to use but has limited design functions.

Pros

Constant Contact is intuitive and makes building professional-looking emails straightforward. It also facilitates event registrations and syncs well with our other platforms and accounts. I like the new "check for errors" function that verifies there are no broken links in the email.

Cons

Within the body of the emails, there are limits to how one can arrange text and images; and, oftentimes it requires dragging the item to the same spot repeatedly until it lands in the right place. At least once per each email built, I need to log out of Constant Contact and log back in in order to correctly edit the email layout.

Well-Organized for Massive Customer Outreach

All in all, Constant Contact is really valuable for businesses to interact with their customers. With the variety of services they offer, you have a lot of freedom in how you engage with your audience. The organization of multiple emailing lists, the scheduling feature, analytics, etc. all make using Constant Contact a great experience.

Pros

A lot of the design and pre-built functionality works great. I like having the responsive layout already thought-through for the most part. The Action Blocks are wonderful additions and allow your emails to be a more interactive method of reaching out which I think always feels more valuable. The image upload is pretty easy and simple to use. The reporting and analytic information is really helpful too, especially when you have multiple types of email outreach happening. It's important to know what content your customers respond to and when. The recorded responses for when people participate in a poll displays quickly and updates regularly. The save functionality is really nice especially if you accidentally step away for a bit and your session times out. It's nice to know you won't lose the work you just put in.

Cons

I have noticed that sometimes the preview of an email diplays differently in Constant Contact, than it does when the email is received. Details like rounded edges on clickable buttons, font choice, and line spacing. While it's never drastically impacted our email systems, it would be nice to have universal options available and feel comfortable that all those minor details are going to carry over to the final output.

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.

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.