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Small businesses use email marketing to boost leads and sales, but they often have limited budgets and need a simple, effective platform. Constant Contact is an excellent solution. This email marketing tool is easy to use, with a user-friendly interface any business owner can adapt to. Its robust feature set includes numerous design templates that help companies create engaging and personal campaigns, as well as reporting functions to help them track their success. And, starting at $12 per month, small businesses get more than their money’s worth with this investment.
Constant Contact is an excellent email marketing software platform for small businesses. It’s easy to use and offers all the essential email marketing campaign features, including A/B testing, an autoresponder, deliverability tools and a drag-and-drop email editor. As a bonus, its user-friendly interface makes campaign creation easy.
Constant Contact’s feature set rivals those of more expensive platforms. It offers an array of email templates, subscriber list management tools, and robust reporting and analytics functions. Its pricing remains accessible, starting at just $12 per month, making it a great fit for small businesses with limited budgets.
We were really impressed by Constant Contact’s 97 percent email delivery rate — a critical factor for small businesses looking to grow and establish their email marketing lists. We also appreciated the numerous help resources on the vendor’s website, including email best practices and information about phrases that can land your campaigns in spam folders. For all these reasons and more, Constant Contact is our choice for the best email marketing software for small businesses.
Constant Contact’s outstanding email editor is exceptionally easy to learn and use. We were impressed with how it 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. Then, you can save it for future use. We didn’t see this functionality in some competitors we reviewed.
Other notable ease-of-use elements include:
Here’s an overview of some of Constant Contact’s essential email marketing features that small businesses will appreciate.
We really liked Constant Contact’s email editor. Combined with its helpful BrandKit feature, you can easily add your brand’s colors, logo and social media accounts to the platform 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 or build your own from scratch using the drag-and-drop function. First-time users will see a tutorial video to help them navigate the email editor — a touch we appreciated.
Constant Contact users can browse the platform’s library of well-designed email marketing templates built for desktop and mobile devices. The platform includes more than 600 templates. Each of Constant Contact’s fully customizable templates follows responsive web design best practices for mobile. This feature means your messages will automatically adjust when your subscribers open your emails on their mobile devices.
Constant Contact allows users to focus on email efficiency, relevance and flexibility with automated campaigns. Pre-built templates help those new to automation easily plug in their information, choose their contacts and press “Send.” You can take your automation to the next level by setting up triggers to send messages based on subscriber activity on your e-commerce platform and other integrated apps.
Constant Contact users can also leverage its AI-powered tools to handle much of the heavy lifting. The platform’s Campaign Builder uses AI to consider your preferences and generate branded, fully drafted emails — streamlining the marketing process, saving you time and energy.
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. However, we were disappointed to note that Constant Contact’s A/B testing is limited to subject lines; you can’t use it to test other message components.
Constant Contact’s autoresponder lets you create a series of personalized, automated emails to send when specific trigger behaviors or dates occur. These emails may include welcome messages for new subscribers, birthday and anniversary emails for existing customers, and reminders about unused discounts.
With Constant Contact, building an email subscriber list is as simple as syncing the platform with Outlook, Salesforce, Excel or wherever you store leads. We like that you can create list segments based on activity, demographics, previous interactions and more to categorize your imported contacts.
List management is a standard feature in email marketing software, but Constant Contact streamlines the import process by automatically removing duplicates and unsubscribed contacts — a time-saving detail we didn’t find consistently across all the email marketing platforms we reviewed.
An email marketing campaign is only as good as the number of recipients who receive, open and respond to the included call-to-action (CTA). We appreciate that Constant Contact offers comprehensive reporting and analytics tools that display campaign results almost immediately after sending an email.
You can view email open rates, the number of emails sent, your click-through rate (CTR), successful deliveries, unsubscribes, spam reports, email bounce rates and the number of unopened emails. You can also monitor which links were clicked, social media statistics and poll responses. For business owners who are frequently away from their desks, the Constant Contact mobile app makes it easy to check campaign performance on the go.
Constant Contact integrates with more than 300 native applications, making it easy to connect your existing tech stack to your marketing efforts. You can use integrations to streamline various processes, including the following:
We were impressed by Constant Contact’s broad array of marketing features, including the following:
Constant Contact offers three service tiers, with pricing based on your number of contacts. For instance, if you choose the Lite tier and have 500 or fewer contacts, you’ll pay $12 per month. However, if you have 501 to 1,000 contacts, you’ll pay $30 monthly.
Here’s how Constant Contact’s tiers match up:
Plan | Starting Monthly Price (up to 500 contacts; prices increase the more contacts you have) | Allowable Emails | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
Lite | $12 | 10x the number of your contacts |
|
Standard | $35 | 12x the number of your contacts | Everything in Lite, plus:
|
Premium | $80 | 24x the number of your contacts | Everything in Standard, plus:
|
Additional pricing considerations include the following:
Once you start your free trial and create your Constant Contact account, you can immediately begin crafting your first email campaign by clicking the “Create an email” option.
Next, you’ll 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 an email 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.
We like that Constant Contact is truly invested in helping small business owners succeed while learning and using its platform. For instance, the company offers a Small Business Hub filled with useful articles designed to help you improve your email marketing efforts.
Constant Contact has several resources to help its customers succeed. (Note that Premium plan users will enjoy dedicated priority support from the Constant Contact team on all channels.)
Constant Contact is an excellent email marketing platform for small businesses. However, we did note the following downsides:
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.
We recommend Constant Contact for …
We don’t recommend Constant Contact for …
Sean Peek contributed to the reporting and writing in this review.
