Top Constant Contact Alternatives and Overview

Good: Easy to use interface. Almost 20 years of experience. 400+ email templates to choose from and dedicated support on weekdays.

Bad: Imported templates are not guaranteed to look the same, free version only stores upto five images, no inbox preview, split A/B testing or trigger messaging capability.

Overall: All in all, Constant Contact is user friendly and practical e-marketing solution with a varied selection of email templates. It is a great choice for new industry entrants and start-up firms alike.

Constant Contact is Waltham, Massachusetts based email marketing service provider. The platform was founded in 1995 as Roving Software. Today they have offices in 7 different locations in US and UK.

Their initial motive was to create a valuable marketing tool that would help the SMB’s and young entrepreneur level-up against the large scale businesses. Present day, more than 500,000 non-profits, small businesses and other global associations rely on Constant Contact to help create and retain customer relationships using emails.

Pricing and Plans

Constant Contact offers two different Toolkits. Email and Email Plus. Email comes with basic features while Email Plus comes with many advanced features.

The company offers a 60 day no-contract test drive where you can send unlimited emails to 100 contacts. Pricing starts from $20 / month for up to 500 contacts and then goes up to $35, $55 and Special Quote for up to 2,500, 5,000 and larger email lists respectively. There are bulk pay discount options for half-yearly or yearly subscribers and there are bigger discounts for NPO’s and Charitable institutions.

Email Templates

Though other services in the same field offer a larger template pool, but the 400 templates that come bundled with program are comprehensive in their own reach. The search feature makes the application very intuitive as it gives the ability to narrow down on a set of templates by defining the objectives like general purpose, season’s greetings, promotional messages etc. Constant Contact also offers a ‘build-from-scratch’ feature for those who want to make their own templates on the fly.

Ways for Importing Contact Lists

The application offers a versatile feature that allows users to collate all their contacts from different databases into a single list in minimal clicks. It’s easy to import contacts from email lists, CSV files, Gmail database or Ms Outlook etc. Constant Contact offers a good collection of contact management and list administering tools, making it easier to segregate your lists into different groups and shortlist them when need be.

Social Media Integration

Setting up email campaigns that drives traffic to your social profiles and gets them engaged in various activities is a breeze with Constant Contact. The Social Media tools offered by Constant Contact have a number of tutorials that can get a beginner ready to run his first social media campaign. Once the campaign is running, it is easy to keep track of the progress as the program gives real time stats of likes, shares and engagement generated by each and every email.

Event Management Tools

The EventSpot feature of Constant Contact is a feature for people looking to drive the audience to a particular event. This feature allows users to create welcome emails along with corresponding event homepages and sign-up forms for event subscribers. This not only allows building a re-targeting list for the event, but also enables users to send other news and information about the event to people who are interested. Another feature that sets Constant Contact apart from all its competitors is the ability to integrate various payment options (in case the events have an admission fee) directly into the body of the email. Along with the social media integration features of the program, EventSpot is an appropriate choice for businesses and individuals looking for event management.

Final Verdict

Constant Contact is a great email marketing tool to get fast and efficient email campaigns and events running without any hassles and they offer some great templates and features to design professional loosing emails. One easy thing to overlook while signing up for Constant Contact is that users need to pay according to the size of their email lists. So it’s important to keep the mailing lists clean at all times. Shortlist any fillers and inactive people from the list so that you can save both time and money! The interface is also great for managing and segregating contacts and their statistics features makes it easy to see the effectiveness of the campaigns.

Company Name: Constant Contact, Inc.

Company Address: Reservoir Place 1601 Trapelo Road, Waltham, MA, USA

Founded in: 1998