Constant Contact Review—How Does It Help You Keep Contact in 2022?

If you’re online, you’re connected not just to the internet but to everyone else on it too. What’s the best way to foster those connections?

Since the dawn of the internet up until today, the answer has been email.

Join us in our detailed Constant Contact review to learn about a service that’ll help you generate leads and stay in constant contact with them.

What Is Constant Contact

Constant Contact is an email marketing platform that’s been around for nearly 26 years. Its primary focus is to help you gather and manage subscribers and, of course, send them emails.

Recently, it has begun expanding into a full content management system. The first step of this was the creation of the Constant Contact website builder.

In this review, we focus primarily on the service’s email marketing features but touch on its website creation capability too.

Constant Contact Best Features

Constant Contact offers numerous useful tools. Not all of them are available with all plans, but more on that below.

In this section, we analyze the best features to give you a rundown of the service. Let’s get started.

Email Automation

Creating and scheduling emails is a straightforward process. It’s even easier with Constant Contact. Its workflow editor is one of the simpler ones we’ve seen. With it, you can visualize content in blocklists for easier navigation.

The Email Plus plan comes with advanced automated series. These allow you to set workflow triggers to send emails depending on the way people interact with them.

Email Segmentation

List segmentation helps you group your contacts according to their interests. That way, you ensure a better experience for your subscribers and higher open and click rates. This, in turn, will help you build trust in your email services and improve your delivery rate.

You can manually segment your lists by creating subcategories and adding subscribers to them. With automatic click segmentation, you can also add subscribers to particular sections depending on the links they’ve clicked on in your emails.

What’s more, Constant Contact lets you create survey campaigns to gather information on contacts for more in-depth segmentation.

Constant Contact Templates

Constant Contact offers great variety, with over 240 good-looking templates to choose from. They’re neatly organized by theme, so you can easily find the best one for your email campaign.

You can edit the email templates with the block-based drag-and-drop builder. The builder is quite flexible and easy to use. For example, when you drag images through the page, the text wraps around them automatically.

When editing technical details, an inbox preview block hovers above the builder. It shows you what subscribers will see as “from name,” subject, and follow-up line.

Split Testing

The Constant Contact split testing function allows you to test two variations of a subject line by sending each variant to a small percentage of your audience. After a set time, the Constant Contact email with the greater open rate is declared the winner and sent to the rest of your list.

You can choose a testing time between six and 48 hours. You can also pick what percentage of your list will receive each variation.

It’s not the most in-depth split testing capability we’ve seen. Still, it allows you to adjust variables—something many services lack.

Analytics

Constant Contact reviews the performance of your emails and provides detailed analytics reports on your campaigns. These include measures like click and open rates.

In addition to the standard statistics, Constant Contact includes the so-called industry average comparison point. This measure compares your campaign’s success to the average performance of other companies in your industry. You can also view statistics on individual emails.

If you use Constant Contact’s web-building capabilities, you’ll also get analytics reporting on your websites.

Mobile Functionality

Constant Contact has a mobile app with similar capability to that of the browser app. You can view performance stats, manage your lists, create emails, and upload images to your library.

You can also download the Constant Contact ListBuilder app, which provides an increasingly popular email automation service. It helps you generate leads by letting people sign up from your device.

It’s an excellent addition for conventions and physical stores. Plus, you don’t need WiFi to use it—the information will be synced when you have a connection.

The apps are available for iOS and Android.

Lastly, if you want to incorporate SMS marketing, you can connect Constant Contact with the EZ Texting integration. The service also integrates with Zapier, eBay, and over 350 other apps.

Constant Contact Commercial Functionality

Constant Contact provides some useful tools for ecommerce. For example, the AI ecommerce feature analyzes your visitors’ behavior to alter the content of your emails and advertisements dynamically.

Additionally, you can create a store with Constant Contact. The process is a little complicated but offers promising functionality. You can customize the storefront, upload products, set prices, and even manage your stock.

The one downside is that you can’t upload entire catalogs. Instead, you’ll have to add each product individually, which can be time-consuming.

We return to this limitation later in our Constant Contact review.

Website Building

The Constant Contact web builder allows you to create a website from scratch. Alternatively, you can use the express editor—simply type in keywords and it will automatically add suitable stock photos and a color scheme.

If that doesn’t sound good enough, you can check out our list of the top website builders.

Constant Contact also has a logo maker. It functions in a similar way, but the logos are quite generic.

Best of all, the service includes hosting. Websites created with Constant Contact are also optimized for mobile and granted SSL certification.

SEO site auditing is available for an extra $15 a month. This Constant Contact tool reviews your websites and suggests changes to boost your rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Unfortunately, you can’t link your existing website (if you have one) to a Constant Contact store. Instead, you have to create a “shoppable landing page” and link that to your site.

What We Disliked

The service ticks all the boxes so far, but what are the downsides we came across during our Constant Contact review process?

Our main complaints center on pricing and the implementation of certain features.

Pricing

Certain features cost extra, such as the SEO auditing tool. Plus, the smallest plan is more expensive than the basic packages of some other services.

What’s more, advanced automation is exclusive to the Plus Plan, which is what most people need from email marketing tools. It’d be great if Constant Contact adjusted its cost and plans for better consolidation of features.

Extra Steps

You may have to contact customer support to remove Constant Contact’s branding from your emails. This is strange, as “white labeling” is normally automatic for premium services—or at the very least can be enabled by the user.

Things like store creation can also take a lot longer than expected, even though the store builder is efficient. The fact that you can’t link Constant Contact stores to existing websites seems like another oversight.

Constant Contact Pricing Plans

Constant Contact has a simple pricing structure. It offers three different plans—Email, Email Plus, and eCommerce Pro.

Unfortunately, there is no Constant Contact free plan, but you can get a 30-day trial if you submit your billing information.

Keep an eye out, though, as Constant Contact occasionally offers longer trials without requesting your payment info. Nonprofit organizations can apply for a discount of up to 30%.

Constant Contact Customer Service

Constant Contact directs new and potential customers to the community forums. If you want more in-depth assistance, you can use the live chat function and phone line.

We found that live chat was the most efficient route for reaching the team. Constant Contact support is available Monday to Friday. When we contacted them, they were fast to respond to all our needs.

You must have an account to talk to support directly. If you’re a potential customer with questions, your best bet is to contact them over Twitter.

Constant Contact User Reviews

To get a wider view of the service, we checked out some user views. The service holds a 4-star rating on G2, a 4.3-star rating on Capterra, and a 7.8/10 on TrustRadius.

Praise for the service focuses overwhelmingly on its resources, specifically templates and educational materials like its weekly webinars. Users also appreciate the analytics reporting capability.

Some Constant Contact customers report problems with email scheduling. They say that sometimes emails don’t send on time and they can’t figure out why. Other users have similar complaints to ours in terms of pricing.

We also found a Constant Contact review or two on Reddit. For the most part, Redditors don’t seem too fond of the service, often expressing preferences for its competitors.

Is Constant Contact Worth It?

Constant Contact is a solid email automation service. Its strength lies in its ecommerce functionality and advanced workflow creation. However, these functionalities are largely restricted to the more expensive price plans.

Certain features, as we mentioned, also take a little more leg work than you might hope. Given the cost, and seeing as both plans allow for multiple users, this service is best suited for businesses.

It’s definitely worth it if you can afford one of the more advanced packages.

Constant Contact Alternatives

If you’re not sold on Constant Contact, consider some of the alternatives below. You can also take a look at our picks of the top email autoresponder tools.

Constant Contact vs MailChimp

MailChimp is the industry leader in email automation. Constant Contact offers similar capabilities, albeit not as polished. MailChimp has a lower entry price and offers a free plan, though.

Still, if you’re planning to send high volumes daily, Constant Contact is the better choice, as it doesn’t impose send limits.

GetResponse vs Constant Contact

GetResponse is slightly cheaper than Constant Contact, but it doesn’t offer website building and hosting.

The choice between these two depends on one thing—do you need web-building tools? If so, Constant Contact is the all-inclusive choice.

Constant Contact vs AWeber

AWeber and Constant Contact offer very similar features. The difference comes in their pricing structures.

AWeber is more inclusive and cheaper than Constant Contact. It’s the more economical option unless something specific about Constant Contact appeals to you.

Our Final Verdict

Our Constant Contact review process included testing the service’s automation and ecommerce abilities, checking its pricing in 2022, contacting support, and reading user opinions online.

After that thorough evaluation, we can conclude it’s best for businesses with teams of three to ten people working together on email automation.

While it’s not the most expensive solution, it might be beyond what an individual is looking for.