Constant Contact is a well-known email marketing provider directed towards small businesses. This offers a strong set of the email marketing tool’s basic features and some advanced features. Constant contact is beneficial for small businesses, non-profit organizations, and entrepreneurs to exhibit their marketing ideas while selling their products.
Constant Contact is a well-known email marketing provider directed towards small businesses. This offers a strong set of the email marketing tool’s basic features and some advanced features. Constant contact is beneficial for small businesses, non-profit organizations, and entrepreneurs to exhibit their marketing ideas while selling their products.
Constant Contact is one of the oldest players in the email marketing game and has been in existence since 1995, currently having over 650,000 users in their customer base. Recently, they added many features such as digital product downloads, event management, appointment scheduling, and social campaigns.
They offer integration with over 400 applications to provide flexibility to their customers. They also provide integration with Zapier, which in turn gives more flexibility to integrate with 2000+ applications. They are more inclined towards small and medium-sized enterprises. However, their prices are more towards the higher end.
Table of Contents
What is Constant Contact used for?
Constant Contact is an online marketing company used to create websites, email marketing campaigns, and analyse marketing campaigns.
Is Constant Contact Email Go To Spam?
The spam rate depends on your email content as well as in origin & email provider. Constant Contact IP addresses are fully isolated. Therefore, it has the highest email deliverability, and most of its users are from the USA. In the USA, the Constant Contact spam rate is lower than other email providers.
Where Contact Contact Is Popular?
Constant Contact is popular all over the world, but it is trendy in North America. Its website has 87% traffic from the USA.
This is an established and trusted platform that personalizes your email marketing to an extreme level, encouraging your online sales. You can sell more in very little time. Constant Contact will allow sending the right messages at the right time so your customers will be offered more of what they need.
Constant Contact stands at the #1 position in Effective email marketing, as it does all predictive analytics using artificial intelligence. In addition, this has a robust data security framework. Constant Contact helps to create professional emails, which promotes your customer growth and drives up your sales.
With Constant Contact, you can also build websites; They provide website builders. Using this, you can easily build your custom-designed website in no time. You can even create your own online store or fully-fledged eCommerce website just for $10/month. In addition, you can have your own domain name. You can also design your logos for free, which has hundreds of customizable options; you can create your logos in seconds even if you are not pro at UX design.
Pricing.
Constant contact looks pricy for the features they are providing. Unfortunately, they don’t offer any free plan, but they have a first-month free offer you can avail of that to get into Constant contact. However, you will not get all the features in the free trial.
They have 2 plans Email and Email Plus. $20/month plan give you up to 500 contacts. You can send unlimited emails to your contacts if you prepaid for 6 months. Then the cost will reduce from $20 to $13/month.
Constant contact offers discounts when you prepaid for the plans for 6 months and 12 months.
For 6 months they offer a 10% discount plus one month of free use.
For 12 months they offer a 15% discount plus one month of free use.
If you choose a 6-Month plan, you can save 10% + 1 month free. That is $90 for 7 months. So then Email plan costs you $90/7 months = $12.86/month.
Non-profit organizations will get extra discounts. They can avail of up to 30% discounts on their pre-paid plans. To get that, sign up for free here at Constant Contact and contact the Constant Contact support team. For more information on non-profit discounts, visit here
You can downgrade your plan without losing your deposited money. Just one click and one second are enough to downgrade the plan.
They also provide 30 days money-back guarantee.
Features Highlights.
- Email Builder
- Automation
- Split Testing
- Social Marketing
- 400+ Integrations such as Wix, Shopify, Gmail, Office etc. & Zapier Integrations with 2000+ apps such as event calendar, booking, shipping etc.,
- Reporting
- Website Builder & eCommerce
Additional features: Sell Anywhere, Polls, RSVP, donations, Coupons & more, AI (Artificial Intelligence) Predictive Analysis, AI Landing page, Chat, Phone support & personal assistance for free.
1. Email Builder:
Constant Contact offers hundreds of templates that are easily customizable and responsive in nature. It has AI to scan your website, and Constant contact will autogenerate the template of your website colour and image! This is really a useful feature and less time taking.
Constant Contact templates are easily customizable, and editable as it has drag-and-drop layouts. If you want a unique and completely different template, you can add your custom code template.
Using Constant Contact, you can easily add a poll, Donation, and coupons for your email templates; you can select pre-designed layouts that will help conserve time and provide the proper structure to your template on all devices.
Constant Contact has an easy builder, but it has a downside; its email builder editor options are basic, not advanced. I wish they provide some of more latest web options such as click to call button on mobile, different shapes for the blocks etc. However, you can use custom codes to make anything. But the disadvantage is you have to create a separate email template. You can’t insert HTML, CSS codes within the ready-made email templates. Whenever you put a phone number, it will be automatically clickable in the email. Just add a button and put a phone number for the click to call feature.
2. Automation:
Automation in constant contact is based on user engagement. And this is the feature that is extensively helpful in saving your time and increasing your sales. This has a different way of automating your emails, and you can create them with very little time before it was called an autoresponder.
It’s straightforward to create Email automation in Constant Contact. To create automated series, you have to select from campaign options; then, you will be having many options, like automation series, welcome emails, birthday, and anniversary emails.
To start with, you can select email triggers
- Click any link
- Open email
- Click on a specific link
- Audience willing to join the list
This can be followed with a new email or existing campaign; once you select that, step forward to adjust the time(the gap between your email and the next follow-up emails). You can adjust or edit according to your need, or you can send that immediately; you can go on adding your emails as many as you want.
You can schedule the series to send at a particular time to a specific set of contacts; you are allowed to segment your contacts based on attributes, and keep them in a different folder, then match them with the automated series you created triggers your initial email.
Automation series is only available in the Email plus plan; Constant contact is not offering either email behavioural series/ email welcome series to the email plan. So to make use of this feature, one needs to add on or choose the Email plus plan.
3. Split Testing (A/B Test):
Split testing or A/B Testing helps send a different variation of emails, which helps find which variation is highly opened or clicked so that you can reach your customer with a graded email. Unfortunately, constant Contact provides A/B testing with the minimal feature, where you can test your variation with the subject line.
Subject lines are the expressive part of the email; if your subject line is neat and clear, you will get more openings; here, variation A is will reach 50% of the audience/contacts, likewise variation B. You need to have an email plus version to avail of this feature completely.
4. Social Marketing:
Successive business or organization is directly proportional to the impact they have made on social media. Social media are the easiest and powerful way to reach more people with less time span. That’s why it’s essential to make a mark on social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linked-in.
According to Forbes, 78% of customers will purchase products because social media’s appearance has impacted them.
Constant Contacts allows you to post your product, newsletter, or anything related to your business. You can post on different social media like Facebook and Instagram. You can create a variation of your advertisement or post with different content for Instagram and Facebook. You can add images as well to showcase the product and to attract the visitor. You can schedule the time to post; this is automated. Once you’re ready with all your content, you are all to post.
Once you connect your business account and have posted, you can see all lists in the social inbox; you can see all mentions, posts, comments in Constant contact, and you are allowed replay to their comment. So it’s a one-stand social marketing space.
5. Integrations:
Integration helps to add extra features and functionalities with third-party tools. Constant Contact provides an integration option with several plugins and tools like Shopify, woo commerce, salesforce, and google analytics. If Apps are plugged into Constant Contact will help in the improvement of market traffic once those Apps are integrated, which will connect business with contacts.
Constant Contact integrates with all basic and necessary app; it also has Zapier integrations.
6. Reporting:
You can view your visitor’s states by state!
Reporting always helps in growth; Constant Contact provides the pictorial way to get track of business. You can have an accurate figure of open rate, click rate, recipients, and unsubscribers. It will also provide the detail of the open rate on devices.
Its eCommerce tools and reporting are advanced.
7. Website Builder:
Constant contact offers you to create your website in less time. This provides an AI-powered website builder. Artificial Intelligence is always helpful in getting accurate website design templates that need the utmost few changes. You have to provide your details so that Constant contact website builder will build a website template related to your business within no time. You can create a personalized website on your passion.
It provides a free SSL certificate for your website, created under Constant Contact; Built-in SEO improves web search, mobile optimization, website analytics and easily connects with a custom domain.
Logo Making: You can design your own logo, which creates a brand in the market. Without any designing knowledge, you can create awesome logos, which have hundreds of customizable options.
Online Stores: With the free setup, you can launch your stores and make your visitors repeat customers; this can be achieved by constant contact. Provides coupons and discounts, online payments, tax management, eCommerce SEO, Notification, and more store features.
Constant Contact Pros and Con’s.
The deliverability rate on MAR 2021 is 91.5% comparatively higher than Aweber and Mailchimp:
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Easy to set up compared with other tools in the market | No Free version. Only the Email Plus version has all the features |
| Most Popular Tool in Market | A/B testing is only for the subject line |
| Provides great support and security | Limited automation flexibility |
| We can keep old templates for further use | Additional users are an extra charge |
| best list segmentation | Improvements need on campaign builder |
| Can put contacts into multiple categories | Templates look a little outdated |
| Resend option to those who have not seen the first email/ message | Limited Tag features |
| The reporting dashboard has any information that is a plus point | Could have recent images feature and to create Template via API |
| Consistent on high deliverability rate | No Standout features are available; it looks too simple. |
| Social media campaigning is an additional plus feature | Could have a better pricing structure. |
Conclusion.
Constant Contact can be really beneficial for small and medium-sized enterprises. Their easy interface and tools can be of great benefit to beginners. They have a large number of templates pre-built for ease of use. However, more customization options can be included to make it more robust. The other automation features are also helpful in setting up drip/email series campaigns but can be extended by including more advanced features.