Conclusion:
Constant Contact scored 5 out 5 stars for Ease of Use and Customer Service. It is especially easy to import contacts into your Constant Contact account as their software is compatible with Excel, Outlook, Salesforce, and many others. However, their image hosting is below our Market Standard. Such shortcomings are outshined by excellent customer service, detailed graphical reports, and other features.
Ease of Use
Constant Contact received 4 out of 5 stars for Ease of Use. They offer more than 400 flexible email templates that allow you to edit and replace images. Constant Contact templates contain one or two columns of text (the most anyone in our survey offers is three columns). Unfortunately, they only offer roughly 1.7 MB of image hosting space, which is under our Market Standard of 5 MB, but they will allow you access 4,000 additional images and save up to 50MB of your own image files for an additional charge of $5.00 per month. Constant contact also offers WYSIWYG editing. A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor is an email creation tool that shows what the final content of your email campaign will look like to your readers as you are editing it. Constant Contact will remove branding for free. “Branding” is when your email marketing service puts their logo at the bottom of your email.
Features
Constant Contact provides a spam checking computer program to monitor each outbound campaign. Constant Contact also provides autoresponders, which allow you to send a standard welcome message to your new subscribers confirming their sign-up. They provide integration with social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in order to maximize your email marketing efforts. Constant Contact does not offer an automatic A/B testing feature, but you can manually develop an A/B test by segmenting your contact list. They also do not integrate with Google Analytics, which is a tool that tracks the traffic of your readers from your email campaign to (and throughout) your site. Constant Contact offers a mobile application for iPhone users.
Managing Contacts
Constant Contact scored 5 out of 5 stars for Managing Contacts. They allow you to import contacts from Excel, email accounts, Outlook, and Salesforce. Constant Contact also automatically removes both unsubscribed readers and bounced emails (emails that were deemed undeliverable) from your contact list, making it easy to manage your list effectively.
Customer Service
Constant Contact received 5 out of 5 stars for Customer Service. They offer phone, live chat, and email support. Phone support is available Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. EST. Live chat support is available Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. EST. Email support is available Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. EST, as well as Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST. Under testing, customer support had very short wait times and was very thorough and knowledgeable.
Campaign Reports
Constant Contact received 4 out of 5 stars for Campaign Reports. All reports were found to accurately reflect user actions. Their reports display opens, forwards, number of clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, top performing links and spam reports. While you cannot have a report automatically emailed to you, Constant Contact’s reports are available in an online interface displayed in graphical form. In addition, you can export your reports into an Excel spreadsheet.
Pricing
Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial for up to 100 contacts. Their pricing model is contact-based as opposed to email-based. Contact-based pricing is advantageous if you intend to send more than one email per month to the same list of contacts. They charge $15.00 per month for 500 contacts and $30.00 per month for 2500 contacts, among other pricing plans.
Constant Contact News
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Constant Contact Adds Ning.com Integration
Constant Contact announced this week their newest partnership with Ning.com, a company that allows you to build your own social website quickly without needing coding skills. Ning.com integration allows you to automatically add new members who have joined your network to a specific list in your Constant Contact account. It will even allow you to create a specific profile question to let members opt into your Constant Contact list.
“You are already reaching your customers or members very effectively with Constant Contact. A Ning Network would enable you to add a rich social experience where your customers could engage in a two-way dialogue with you and other customers,” says Jonathan Hull from Ning.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Constant Contact Adds Social Stats
Constant Contact, a popular well-known email marketing provider, announced this month the addition of new features that track the social reach of email campaigns, allowing customers to easily track and monitor their social media marketing reach.
Social Stats gives customers a quick, clear snapshot of where their emails have been shared socially, with what frequency, and to what degree of success, -- taking the guesswork out of social media marketing.
Social Stats tracks Facebook® Likes and Shares, Twitter tweets, and LinkedIn posts -- along with the number of additional email page views generated through social media channels -- to help small businesses determine campaign value, reach, and effectiveness with a single click.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Constant Contact Adds New Facebook and Twitter Functions
Constant Contact, a popular email marketing provider, announced this week the addition of new features that integrate with Facebook and Twitter, making it easier to create more social marketing campaigns. Now with the combined power of email marketing and social media, Constant Contact users can share their email campaigns via the largest social networks and expand the reach of their campaigns while attracting new clients and generating buzz.
Users can include a Facebook “Like” button that allows Friends and Followers to share messages easily on the Internet. The new “Tweet and Share” function allows Constant Contact subscribers to automatically post their eNewsletter to their Twitter feed after it is sent. Constant Contact is the first email marketing provider to make Twitter’s new Tweet button available for email sharing.
"Adding social share features to Constant Contact's already robust offerings gives our customers the ability to effortlessly leverage the network effect of social media," says Ellen Brezniak, senior vice president, product strategy, Constant Contact. "By enabling their subscribers, event registrants, Friends, and Followers to spread the word and share our customers' content on Facebook, Twitter, and other channels, we're removing barriers and making it simple to get real value from social media marketing."
Additional features include:
- Share Buttons: Point-and-click functionality allows users to add social media links to the header of their email newsletters without the hassle of cutting and pasting, making it easy to extend the reach of their email campaigns beyond their subscriber list.
- Facebook "Like" Button: Adds the most popular Facebook sharing feature, the "Like" button, to email campaigns, making it possible for users to gain a network effect, generate more buzz, and increase exposure as people "Like" their campaigns, and by doing so, share it with their social network.
- Tweet Button: This new feature makes it even easier for email campaigns sent through Constant Contact to go viral on Twitter. Users viewing a shared email campaign can retweet the link without leaving the email.
- Share this Email /Survey/Event: With the click of a button, users can promote their emails, surveys, and events on social networks.The simple one-click posting to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn(R), and other social sharing sites allows users to expand the reach of their communications.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Constant Contact Wins Stevie Award for Outstanding Customer Service
Last month Constant Contact, a leading email marketing service, was presented with a Stevie Award at the fourth annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.
"Providing outstanding customer support is a key component of our mission to delight our customers," said Gail Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact, in a press release. "Our goal is to provide the best possible experience, resources, and personal support to ensure that each customer achieves success with our email marketing, event marketing, and online survey products.”
Members of the Awards' Board of Distinguished Judges & Advisors and their staffs selected Stevie Award winners from among the finalists. Finalists were chosen by business professionals worldwide during preliminary judging.
Nicknamed the Stevies for the Greek word for "crowned," winners were announced during a gala banquet on Monday, February 22, at the Eden Roc Renaissance Hotel in Miami Beach. Details about the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service and the list of honorees in all categories are available at www.stevieawards.com/sales.
An email marketing service with more than 350,000 customers, Constant Contact is a top provider of email marketing for small businesses and nonprofits. Along with their strong customer service, Constant Contact also offers a step-by-step email wizard, an email auto-responder and more than 400 email templates.
