As the name suggests, Constant Contact helps businesses stay in touch with customers and contacts all the time. Whether you need to grow your email list, texting list, or social media marketing strategy—or all three—Constant Contact can help you do it. Its time-saving automations and 97% deliverability rate are nothing to sneeze at, either. In this review, we’ll take a deep dive into what we love about Constant Contact, as well as what we think could use some improvement. Ready, set, dive!
Constant Contact Compared to the Best Email Marketing Services
When it comes to the best email marketing tools, we’ve done extensive research to narrow down the field to our best of the best: the Golden Eggs. See our list of the best email marketing services for even more options beyond these three.
MailerLite demystifies email marketing, making it an excellent option for beginners. Sign up for a 30-day free trial to test out its features.
Omnisend is tailored to ecommerce and stands out for its ability to help boost sales via email marketing. Start any of its plans for free to see how well the service works for you.
AWeber helps marketing experts get the results they require. Sign up for free and upgrade to the premium plan when you’re ready.
Constant Contact: The Good and The Bad
Constant Contact is a quality email marketing platform that’s accomplished a great feat: staying relevant in a fast-paced digital world for almost three decades. But like most things in life, the service isn’t without its flaws. This section digs into what makes Constant Contact stand out—and what just doesn’t work.
What Constant Contact Is Good At
Constant Contact eases beginners into the world of email, text, and social media marketing with a super user-friendly interface. It’s a solid tool for small businesses that need easy list management, drag-and-drop templates, and time-saving automations.
Ease of use: In the hundreds of reviews we analyzed, users raved about Constant Contact’s friendly user interface. From the moment you create an account and begin your free trial, Constant Contact guides you through the super-simple process of creating your first campaign.
You can create landing pages, email newsletters, social media posts, ads, and events within minutes. Even users who are dipping their toes in the waters of email, text, or social media marketing for the first time will find the entire process incredibly intuitive.
Audience segmentation: Once you have a list of contacts, Constant Contact makes audience segmentation a breeze. Users can manually create audience segments, dividing contacts by location, ecommerce activity, list membership, tags, and email activity.
Or, you can pay more to have Constant Contact automatically segment your audience into four categories:
- Most engaged: the contacts who reliably open your emails and engage with the content, if applicable
- Somewhat engaged: contacts who occasionally open and read your emails
- Least engaged: contacts who hardly ever open or read what you send
- Everyone else: audience members who are new to the list and haven’t received enough emails for Constant Contact to analyze them
Constant Contact reviewers praised how easy it is to segment audiences with Constant Contact, whether manually or using the pre-built segments.
Easy-to-access stats: Constant Contact customers love how easy it is to see metrics for campaign performance. When you log into Constant Contact, you’ll immediately see basic stats on your user dashboard, including total contacts, contact growth, and social audience growth.
To see the rest of your stats, simply click the Reporting tab on the menu. For each campaign, you’ll see click rate, open rate, and bounce rate, as well as an overview of performance across all your campaigns and how you stack up against industry leaders.
Template variety: Constant Contact offers hundreds of customizable templates and layouts to choose from. Whether you want something bright and eye-catching or something with less noise, Constant Contact has a template for you. Plus, you can enter keywords in a search bar to easily find templates that match your campaign needs.
All templates are mobile-friendly and can automatically scale to fit different screen sizes. Even better, each template comes with placeholder text that gives you ideas for what you could write there. This is helpful for marketers who always feel like they’re out of ideas or simply pressed for time.
Constant Contact’s Brand Email feature is very helpful, too. Enter your website address into a search bar and Constant Contact will create a custom template based on your website colors and design.
Automations: Sending a welcome email manually to each person who signs up for your list can be exhausting, which is why users like Constant Contact’s automated welcome email feature, which you get in the brand’s base plan.
The more expensive pricing tier unlocks additional automations, including automated re-sends to recipients who don’t open the first email, abandoned cart reminders, birthday and anniversary greetings, and automated email behavior series that send emails to audience members based on what they click on your website or in another email.
What Constant Contact is Lacking
Even though we think Constant Contact is a solid choice for many users, the service has its downsides. Here are the three main drawbacks we discovered during our research.
Affordability: One main complaint that reviewers expressed is Constant Contact’s prices. While the base plan starts at just $12 a month, prices increase quickly based on how many contacts you have. If you grow to 5,000 readers, you’ll be paying $80 a month for the base plan features. In addition, some of the features, including text marketing, are add-ons and cost extra to use.
The more feature-rich plan costs $35 a month for your first 500 subscribers. Once you hit 501, pricing jumps to $55 a month, with further price hikes as you grow beyond that. Even if you don’t have thousands of subscribers when you start out, it may be your goal to gain that many. In that sense, pricing can get difficult for smaller businesses that are successful in growing their email lists.
Underwhelming UI: Even though the user interface is easy enough to navigate, users reported that Constant Contact can be clunky and unresponsive at times, particularly if they were trying to embed videos. When we tested the product, we found connectivity to be slower than the standard in this digital era.
And while Constant Contact comes with mobile apps, they appear to be missing key features and have limited functionality, according to the reviews we analyzed on Google Play and the App Store. So it’s tougher to build and manage campaigns on the go with this provider than some other email marketing services.
Outdated templates: Even though Constant Contact offers hundreds of templates, many users in the reviews we studied found many of them to be less visually appealing than they’d like. Customizing templates with design tweaks can help with this, but Constant Contact’s customization options are limited, too.
Several users expressed that they would be happy to have fewer template options if the templates were more up-to-the-minute in terms of their style and functionality. Since email templates are such an inherently important feature on these platforms, we’re hopeful Constant Contact will give their templates a facelift in the future.
Constant Contact Options and Pricing
It’s best known for email marketing, but Constant Contact offers additional services beyond that. Here’s an overview of the different services you can get from Constant Contact, complete with pricing info.
Constant Contact Lite
If you’re a solopreneur or microbusiness, Lite offers essential social media and email marketing features:
- Hundreds of customizable templates
- AI content generator
- Automated welcome emails
- Social media marketing tools
- Engagement reporting
- Marketing campaign calendar
- Over 300 integrations
- Event management tools
- Landing pages
- Web sign-up forms
Ideal for the business owner who manages their own email and marketing campaigns, the Lite plan allows for one user and 1 GB of storage. The monthly email allotment is equal to 10x your contact tier allowance.
Pricing begins at $12 per month for up to 500 contacts, then jumps to $30 a month for 501-1,000 contacts, and rises to $50 a month for 1,001-2,500 contacts. The more contacts you have, the more you’ll pay every month.
Constant Contact Standard
With this service, you get everything in the Lite plan, plus more automations and social media marketing tools. It’ll also give you reports showing user engagement, link clicks, and more.
If you opt for the Standard plan, you’ll get everything in the Lite plan, plus:
- Subject line A/B testing
- Email campaign scheduling
- Built-in subject line recommendations
- Plug-and-play automation templates
- Options for resending emails to non-openers
- Social campaign scheduling
- Social media ads integrations
- Drilldown reporting to monitor campaign performance
- Basic contact segmentation
- Custom segmentation
Constant Contact Standard is ideal for small teams and businesses looking to take their email and social marketing to the next level. It allows for up to three users and 10 GB of storage. The monthly email allotment is equal to 12x your contact tier allowance.
You’ll pay $35 per month for a list of up to 500 contacts, $55/mo for 501-1000 contacts, and $75/mo for 1,001-2,500 contacts. The price increases with the amount of contacts you have.
Constant Contact Premium
The Premium plan comes equipped with all the features of the Standard plan but with more tools to take your marketing campaigns to the next level.
Here’s a look at the extra features you get with this plan:
- Dynamic email content that varies based on the recipient’s location, job title, and other key data points
- Custom automation paths
- Google Ads manager
- Facebook lookalike ad targeting
- Retargeting ads if you spend a minimum of $5,000/month on ads
- Dedicated ads manager if you spend a minimum of $5,000/month on ads
- Email engagement heat map
- Revenue reporting
- SEO analysis and recommendations
The Premium plan is made for businesses that want to propel their growth with advanced features like automated ad setup and custom segmentation. It allows for unlimited users, 25 GB of storage, and a monthly email allotment equal to 24x your contact tier allowance.
Pricing starts at $80 per month for up to 500 contacts, $110 per month for 501-1,000 contacts, and $150 per month for 1,001-2,500 contacts. Pricing increases with the total amount of contacts you have. If you have more than 50,000 contacts, you can reach out to Constant Contact for a custom quote.
Constant Contact SMS Add-On
SMS marketing is new to Constant Contact. Instead of being a standalone plan, it’s something you can add to either your Core or Plus plan. You’ll receive a dedicated phone number to text from and a message editor with live previews.
If you have a lot of young people in your audience and want to offer coupons via text, this add-on can fill that need.
The SMS add-on costs $10 a month (on top of your monthly subscription) for up to 500 contacts, $20 a month for 501-1000 contacts, $45 a month for 1,001-2,500 contacts, and so forth.
Constant Contact CRM by SharpSpring
Large corporations will benefit the most from Constant Contact’s SharpSpring CRM Platform. Constant Contact acquired SharpSpring in September of 2021, keeping it intact and offering it under a sales accelerator service in its pricing tiers.
The CRM platform comes with:
- Full automations
- Campaign tracking
- Behavior-based email marketing
- Sales and CRM automations
- Analytics and tracking
- Chatbots
- Dynamic landing pages
- Advanced workflows
This service is essentially Constant Contact’s enterprise solution, and it packs a lot of advanced features into one all-inclusive marketing package.
Pricing begins at $499 a month for this enterprise-grade package.
Constant Contact in Summary
Constant Contact is one of the top email marketing tools out there thanks to its ease of use, plentiful templates, and audience segmentation capabilities. That said, it’s only one option out of many great ones.
Remember our Golden Eggs? They might suit you better. MailerLite is a more affordable option for beginners. Omnisend is an ecommerce-plus-email-marketing powerhouse. AWeber is an advanced tool for experienced marketers that lead large teams. For more details on these Golden Eggs, check out our list of the top email marketing services.
