Constant Contact Review – Pros & Cons [2023]

Constant Contact lets you reach your audience with highly professional emails to quickly grab their attention. While it is a popular email marketing tool, the platform also boasts event marketing tools, SMS marketing capabilities, and can help with social media marketing. And you can highly customize the platform to your preference. Constant Contact also offers marketing automation to let you focus on other aspects of your business. But how does it compare to other email marketing platforms? Let’s dive in!

Constant Contact Features

Constant Contact has been around for ages, which means they have a huge list of features. Here are the most notable features of Constant Contact:

Email Marketing

Constant Contact started its journey a few decades ago and reached its place today with excellent email marketing services. It offers advanced features like marketing automation to take your email marketing to the next level.

  • 100’s of Design Templates – Constant Contact has a vast collection of professional email templates designed by veteran designers to meet all your business needs. These emails will help you convert better, regardless of your industry. On top of that, you have the ultimate flexibility to customize the templates to match your brand’s style and tone. Be it a monthly newsletter or promotional offer; you will always find suitable templates from hundreds of exclusive designs on Constant Contact.
  • Marketing Automation – Catering the right email to your audience once they show interest in your brand is crucial. But it can be challenging to manually track the behavior of your audiences and send them the right email. Constant Contact offers marketing automation where you can easily segment contacts based on their behavior and send the correct email at the right time. You can also create and customize a series of triggers so that your audience gets a valid email depending on their course of action.
  • Email A/B Testing – This intelligent tool will suggest multiple subject lines depending on the email content so that you can test them before sending the email to the audience. It will automatically determine the most effective subject line in terms of click-through or open rates and then choose that subject for sending the email to the rest of the audience. So, you basically get to send attractive emails with compelling subject lines and CTAs to maximize conversion.

Landing Pages

Besides sending exciting offers, you should also provide them with a place to visit and shop easily. Creating a landing page is absolutely easy with Constant Contact. The drag-and-drop page editor lets you create stunning pages for better lead generation.

Sharing the pages across different platforms is also easy and boosts your traffic. You can also measure the performance metrics of your landing pages on this platform. Detailed analytics about your pages will guide you on which direction to steer. Besides offering a suitable shopping place for existing contacts, you can capture new leads there.

Reporting

Designing and sending the email isn’t the end of your marketing. You need to know whether your audiences are opening and clicking through those emails to identify prospects down the lane. Constant Contact does the analysis for you and provides you with a detailed insight of how your emails are performing.

Besides having a look at the most valuable metrics, you can also optimize your marketing plans accordingly to engage more audiences. And the engagement report isn’t everything here. You can even compare your campaigns to identify which performed better. Click tracking and segmentation is also possible with this tool.

Event Marketing Tools

Online or offline events can be a great way to gather like-minded audiences who resonate with your brand. You can now create custom landing pages for your events, send emails containing promotional coupons, and sell different items using Constant Contact.

Tracking RSVPs and getting all the registrant information will also be a few clicks away. You can even create email series regarding events and set them to be triggered upon different events. It will make event marketing much easier than ever before.

SMS Marketing

Emails may often look too formal, and it becomes much more challenging for your audiences to concentrate on a large email on the move. SMS marketing can be an effective strategy to reach your audiences and hook them with concise messages. The open rate is also higher than emails.

You will get a dedicated phone number to send your SMS without any extra cost. The SMS editor is easy to use, and you can also use link shorteners to keep your message short. Detailed reporting is available for SMS, too, so you can see how those messages perform.

Social Media Marketing

Reaching your email contacts may not be sufficient in this era of social media. You can multiply your reach by connecting Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter accounts to Constant Contact. This platform lets you create posts and update them on social handles with just one click. So, you can save a lot of time and hassle required for posting on different platforms separately.

You can even respond to messages and comments on your social profiles from your Constant Contact account. Scheduling posts for those social media will also save you time as you don’t need to go to other platforms every time you need to post something.

Mobile Apps

Keeping an eye on how is your email marketing going on is now much easier with the mobile app of Constant Contact. Adding new contacts to your email lists and updating them is also possible on the app. But the best thing is probably the mobile editor to create emails on the move.

You can use this intuitive editor to design any email that you can create on a PC. So, your email marketing will never pause, even if you are in the middle of nowhere. This much flexibility on an email marketing platform is appreciable.

Pros & Cons of Constant Contact

Like all software, there are advantages and disadvantages to using Constant Contact. Let’s take a look:

Pros

  • Hundreds of pre-made templates
  • 60-day free trial period (wow!)
  • Excellent deliverability with high open rates
  • Email marketing automation and A/B testing
  • SMS and social media marketing capabilities

Cons

  • The Plus plan is a bit pricey
  • Fewer integrations than other platforms

Plans & Pricing

Constant Contact has three different plans, with different features depending on your needs.

  • Core – starting at $9.99/mo – includes hundreds of email templates, embeddable sign-up forms, the ability to automatically post to social media, and support via live chat and phone.
  • Plus – starting at $45/mo – includes all of the features of Core, plus tools to grow your email list (like Google Ads integration), automated communications, in-depth reporting, and personalized consultation.
  • Marketing Automation+ – starting at $449/mo – built with enterprise needs in mind, this addon brings advanced automation and workflows to your setup, which includes lead scoring, opportunity management, and CRM tools.

Constant Contact offers custom pricing if your list is larger than 50,000 contacts. Simply contact their sales team for more information.

Summary & Our Recommendation

Constant Contact is an efficient tool to handle your email marketing, SMS marketing, social media marketing, and marketing automation. It lets you create intriguing emails and send them in the proper sequences without you focusing much on the process. You get a mobile app to control all your email marketing facets on the go. From intelligent segmentation to workflow customization, everything your business needs for digital marketing is at your fingertips. With an impressive 60-day free trial, you can try the platform without cost, with upgrades starting at $9.99/mo depending on the size of your list. Contact Contact is a great deal for small businesses looking to automate their email marketing campaigns.