Constant Contact Email Marketing Review and Pricing

Why We Chose Constant Contact as the Best for Small Businesses

We chose Constant Contact as the best email marketing software for small businesses because it’s easy to use and offers all of the most valuable features, like A/B testing, an autoresponder, deliverability tools, and a drag-and-drop email editor. These are staples that all businesses need in their email marketing software. Additionally, Constant Contact provides email templates, list management, and robust reporting and analytics. You get all of these features for an affordable price, starting at just $9.99 per month, making it a great fit for small businesses with limited budgets.

Ease of Use

Small business owners who are tackling their own marketing need tools that are easy to learn and use. Constant Contact fits the bill with its outstanding email editor. We were impressed with how this tool automatically scrubs your website to find your logo, colors and social media profiles, making it simple to apply your branding to email campaigns. With this information loaded into Constant Contact’s editor, you can easily customize one of its dozens of templates, which can be saved as a “favorite” for future use. Not all of the other email marketing services we examined offered this functionality.

Constant Contact integrates with numerous business products – including Excel, Salesforce and Outlook – to help build your email lists. We found that it’s straightforward to sync your data from these tools to capture contact information, which can be a big time-saver. Constant Contact also recently formed a partnership with Vimeo to give users the ability to create, host and manage video within the Constant Contact platform. Many other vendors don’t offer this video option, which can add a valuable element to your marketing efforts.

Constant Contact’s automation features are also uncomplicated for small businesses to use. You can configure the service to automatically send emails triggered by specific customer actions to ensure you reach out to consumers at precisely the right time.

The automation features of Constant Contact are also easy for small businesses to use. You can configure your service to automatically send emails triggered by specific customer actions, to ensure you reach out to consumers at precisely the right time.

Constant Contact Features

Here are some of Constant Contact’s most beneficial features for small businesses.

Drag-and-Drop Email Editor

Our analysis found that Constant Contact’s email editor makes it easy to add your brand’s colors, logo and social media accounts simply by allowing the tool to scrub your website. Once your branding is loaded into Constant Contact, you can select a template and edit it using the drag-and-drop function. First-time users will see a tutorial video to help them navigate the email editor, a touch we really appreciated.

Email Templates

Constant Contact users can peruse the platform’s library of well-designed email marketing templates built for desktop and mobile devices. We found dozens of templates across a range of topics. Each template is fully customizable to your brand, increasing its appeal.

Source: Constant Contact

A/B Testing

A useful feature of modern email marketing software, A/B split testing allows you to send two versions of the same campaign to different segments of your audience to gauge which version performs better. Constant Contact’s A/B testing feature lets you alter subject lines when sending campaigns to two test contact groups. After the test period, the better-performing subject line is automatically sent to the rest of your audience. This tool can be helpful when you’re trying to target your campaign to ensure it’s hitting all the right notes. Unfortunately, however, Constant Contact’s A/B testing is limited to subject lines; you can’t use it to test other components of a message.

Autoresponder

Constant Contact’s autoresponder lets you create a series of personalized, automated emails to send when certain trigger behaviors or dates occur. For example, these emails may include welcome messages for new subscribers, birthday and anniversary emails for existing customers, and reminders about unused discounts.

Deliverability

Constant Contact’s 97% email delivery rate is impressive, and the vendor’s website offers numerous resources on email best practices, as well as information on phrases that may land your campaigns in spam folders.

List Management

With Constant Contact, building your email list is as simple as syncing the program with Outlook, Salesforce or Excel. We like that you can use tags, such as “past client” or “prospect,” to categorize your imported contacts. While list management is a standard email marketing software feature, Constant Contact makes the import process easier by automatically removing duplicates and unsubscribed contacts. This isn’t something we found in all email marketing software.

Source: Constant Contact

Reporting and Analytics

An email marketing campaign is only as good as the number of people who received, opened and clicked through it. Fortunately, Constant Contact offers comprehensive reporting and analytics tools that display campaign results almost immediately after an email has been sent. You can view email open rates, click-through rates, the number of emails sent, bounce rates, successful deliveries, unsubscribes, spam reports and did-not-opens. You can also see which links were clicked, social media statistics and poll responses. In addition, the reporting dashboard gives you the option to resend an email.

Sales Accelerator

Separate from its email marketing platform, Constant Contact also offers a “Sales Accelerator” customer relationship management (CRM) platform. This tool helps small businesses find and convert leads and manage customer data. Prices for small businesses start at $449 per month, though the vendor offers a free demo for anyone interested in trying the system.

Constant Contact Pricing

Source: Constant Contact

Constant Contact’s two digital marketing plans, Core and Plus, begin at $9.99 and $45 per month, respectively. These affordable options can fit into the budgets of most small businesses. Both plans include all of the necessary tools to create professional digital marketing campaigns.

The packages can accommodate unlimited emails and come with 300 customizable templates, contact management and list-building tools, pop-up forms, tracking and reporting features, an image library, and a mobile app. The difference between Core and Plus lies in the advanced features offered in the latter. The Plus plan comes with additional growth tools, automated emails, auto-generated segments and a personalized kickoff call.

The price of each plan scales according to the total number of contacts on your list, with a maximum contact limit of 500 for the lower-priced plan. For example, if a business with a Core plan has more than 500 contacts, its monthly fee increases. Companies with more than 50,000 subscribers must reach out to the vendor for a custom quote.

Although there is no free version of Constant Contact, it does offer a 60-day free trial – the longest trial period of any email marketing service we reviewed. This free trial, which maxes out at 100 contacts, includes all of Constant Contact’s tools, including templates, images, an email editor, contact management, reporting and live support.

Implementation and Onboarding

Simply provide your email address, phone number and company information to sign up for the 60-day free trial and start using Constant Contact right away – no payment information is required. Once you create your account, you can immediately begin crafting your first email campaign by clicking the “Create an email” option.

Next, you can import your fonts, logo, brand colors and social profiles from your website. From there, you can choose an email template that best suits your needs, such as a newsletter or a product announcement. Once you’re happy with the email’s components and content, you’re ready to build your email list and send your first message. The entire process, from signup to send, can take as little as 10 minutes. This is important for small business owners, especially those who wear many hats and might not have a lot of time to create email marketing campaigns.

At the end of your trial period, you have the option to enter your credit card information and sign up for one of Constant Contact’s paid plans.

Customer Service

Constant Contact has numerous resources to help its customers achieve success with its email marketing campaigns. The platform’s extensive knowledge base and videos are great for self-service, but if you need one-on-one assistance, you can reach out to a representative via live chat or phone. The vendor also provides free webinars and blog resources for user education.

You can reach Constant Contact by phone Monday through Saturday, with varying hours depending on the department, or by live chat Monday through Friday. When we reached out to Constant Contact to test its support, the customer service rep was friendly and helpful and answered all of our questions.

Limitations

One downside of partnering with Constant Contact is that the vendor doesn’t offer a free plan like many of its competitors do. While it does have a 60-day free trial, some small businesses with basic email marketing needs and small contact lists may find it more cost-effective to sign up for a forever-free plan with another provider. If a free plan is what you need, Benchmark might be a better option. Learn why in our full review of Benchmark.

Another drawback is Constant Contact’s A/B testing feature, which is limited to email subject lines. Rival email marketing platforms allow you to test other elements, like images and layouts, giving you better insight into your email campaigns’ effectiveness.

Methodology

To identify the best email marketing services, we first compiled a list of popular email marketing platforms based on online research. We carefully examined each service’s reputation and narrowed down our list to some finalists. We then spent several weeks researching each vendor by investigating its offerings, watching tutorials and how-to videos, testing the software (when possible), and reading user reviews. We also evaluated each service’s pricing structure and customer support. When selecting our pick for the best email marketing service for small businesses, we considered the features that would be most important to small businesses with modest email marketing budgets.

Bottom Line

We recommend Constant Contact for …

• Small and midsize businesses looking for affordable email marketing software.
• Companies that want to experiment with a risk-free email marketing service.
• Organizations that want to integrate email marketing with e-commerce or social media platforms.

We don’t recommend Constant Contact for …

• Businesses with many email contacts (over 50,000).
• Companies looking for highly customizable templates.
• Organizations seeking a completely free plan.