Are you looking for the best email marketing software for your small business?
Then you might consider using Constant Contact.
Constant Contact is the most easy-to-use and beginner-friendly email marketing service in the market, with over 20 years of experience under its belt.
In this article, I’ll provide an honest and complete review of Constant Contact and you can decide if Constant Contact is the right choice for you.
When it comes to choosing an email provider, here’re a few important things that we should look into:
- Pricing: Is it worth paying for the service and convenience you get? Choose the right plan can save you from paying for extra features you don’t need.
- Security: To keep your email addresses and confidential data secure from potential attacks or hacks.
- Customer support: To help with technical issues
- Features: Give all the features and tools needed to build a successful email marketing campaign.
In our review, we found that Constant Contact to be reliable, and affordable with phenomenal customer service. It’s ideal for small businesses, bloggers and those who are looking to build their own list of email subscribers.
Here’s the good news – you can test out this tool and all the features to see if it’s right for you before making a commitment.
- Click here for 60-day free trial (no credit card required)
Note – I am a Constant Contact affiliate. If you make a purchase through this or any of the links on this post I’ll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. But this doesn’t influence my recommendation. Thank you all for your support!
Why You Need Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a great way to reach your customers in a place where most people visit every day- their inbox.
Getting into someone’s inbox is like getting into their house!
No matter the size of your site, the amount of traffic it attracts, or the niche you’re in, to achieve long-term success in your business online, you need to start focusing on building your list from Day1.
Email marketing can help you build a deeper and long-lasting relationship with your potential customers, making it an incredibly effective tool to develop brand loyalty, drive sales and revenue.
- Have total control on your email lists: With email marketing, you can promote your blog posts, products or services to your audience directly. You no longer have to rely on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google or any third parties to reach your potential customer organically.
- Drive more traffic to your blog/website: With emails, you can easily connect with your subscribers and send them valuable content. It’s a sure way to encourage them to keep coming back to your website.
- Improve conversions: Email converts to sales better than both social media and organic search traffic.
- Build brand awareness: Email marketing allows you to craft a personalized message, talk directly to your potential customers, build a better relationship in an intimate way with your followers. It’s the most cost-effective way to build brand awareness for long term growth.
- Increases revenue: Email Subscribers tend to buy your products. Studies show that email marketing helps you generate $44 in return for every $1 spent.
Now, let me get into our detailed review of Constant Contact email marketing service with screenshots.
What is Constant Contact?
Constant Contact makes email marketing easy for everyone.
With Constant Contact, you can easily manage your email lists, automate welcome emails, create customizable emails, segment your customers, track your email marketing results and more, from one convenient dashboard.
Most importantly, using Constant Contact will be able to ensure that you’re compliant with CAN-SPAM laws. This basically means that your emails won’t end up in the spam folder!
It’s meant to be used by bloggers, marketers and small businesses.
Even if you’re a complete beginner, have little or no knowledge of marketing, Constant Contact can give you more and help you build your first email list with literally no learning curve.
Once you sign up for a free account, Constant Contact will walk you through the setup process in a couple of minutes. You’ll need to select an industry that best fits your business.
Based on your input, you’ll get:
- Industry-specific suggestions for email marketing strategies to grow your business
- Content and promotion ideas that convert.
- Email template design tips that get opened, read and clicked.
- Learn success stories from real businesses.
Also, check out our guide on how to create an email newsletter with Constant Contact.
An In-Depth Look at Constant Contact Features
Let’s have a look at the most commonly-used features, one by one.
1. Fully Customizable Email Template to Create Emails that Get Responses
Once login to your dashboard, you can either choose to create an email from scratch or use an email template.
The easiest way to get started is to pick one from their over 100 beautifully designed templates. It’s easy to edit and fully customizable.
Plus, all the email templates are mobile responsive, you can be sure that your emails will look great on all devices.
2. Branded Email Templates to Create a Branded Email
What’s particularly great about Constant Contact is the “Brand Your Email Feature”. It allows you to create a personalized email template in seconds.
Simply enter the URL of your website or Facebook page, the template builder will automatically pull the colors, logo, images, and social media link from your site. You can use this as a master template. To send a new email, simply make a copy of it and tailor the content to your subscribers.
This way, you can quickly create great emails without sacrificing quality. In fact, don’t be afraid to reuse your brand image, logo and design traits.
By sticking to your own color schemes, professional-looking fonts and design traits, you can make your brand more memorable to your audience with each email sent.
3. Drag and Drop Editor to Build Responsive Email Templates
The visual page editor, What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG), makes it easy to create customized and engaging emails.
Simply drag and drop the elements such as text, image or button into the editor. You can rearrange the order, edit your text, resize images.
4. Analytics Report to Track your Email Marketing Results in Real-time
Constant Contact’s built-in tracking tool will give you real-time insights on how your email marketing is performing.
You can see the overall picture of your results, track email opens, clicks, bounces, spams, unsubscribe rates and more.
Not only that, but you can also compare performance between different email campaigns and industry average. So you can further improve your strategy and deliver more relevant emails to your readers.
In addition, you can also view a heat map of the most popular links people are clicking in your email. Use this invaluable data to place link button at the optimal position and design a better email that gets more clicks.
5. Email Marketing Automation to Save Time
Email Automation is a powerful yet easy-to-use tool that allows you to collect new leads and send automated emails to your contacts based on specific links that they click. It’s a hassle-free way to engage with your audience and grow your business without extra action from your part.
Here’s a few other things that you can easily do with the Email Automation:
- Automatically send a targeted welcome email to new subscribers that sign up for your newsletter.
- Send an automated email series to nurture your leads
- Automatically resend emails to those that didn’t open your recent email
- Send a birthday or anniversary email to your subscribers
- and more
6. Create Different Types of Effective Marketing Emails
Aside from creating autoresponders and basic automation, you can also create many different types of emails to connect with your audience in new, creative ways, such as:
- Surveys and polls– get actionable feedbacks directly from your audience
- Coupons- create a coupon and manage redemption to boost sale
- Event registrations – create, manage and promote events with Eventbrite integration
- A/B testing – A/B test your email subject
- Donations -collect online donations securely
7. Apps and Integrations to Grow your Business
Whether you already own a fully-fledged eCommerce store or aspire to start a new online store, Constant Contact can help you get more out of email marketing with its powerful apps and integrations feature.
With Constant Contact, you can easily sync your email account with your favorite apps and partner services that you’re already using including:
Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Eventbrite, Office 365, Quickbooks Online App, Outlook Desktop, Google, Salesforce by Cazoomi, WordPress Plugin, Facebook, ListBuilder App (tablet signup form), Constant Contact App (mobile email marketing).
By connecting your Constant Contact email account with other small business tools, you can:
- Grow your email list
- Update contacts between your Constant Contact account and other applications
- Make your website or social media presence more effective
8. Easily Integrate into Your WordPress Website
Once you set up your Constant Contact account, you can ask your visitors to join your email list by entering their email addresses.
Although you can copy and paste the signup form code from your Constant Contact to your website, using a contact form WordPress plugin can make the workflow even easier and faster.
WP Forms is one of the most powerful and beginner-friendly contact form plugin that’s supported by Constant Contact. You can read more about WPForms here.
With WPForms, you can easily add Constant Contact sign up forms to your WordPress site without a single line of code. Plus, you can create, manage and track your Constant Contact account all within your WordPress dashboard, without needing to log in to your Constant Contact account.
Once you connect Constant Contact with your Contact form plugin, you can simply add any contact form to your website (blog posts, pages, sidebar, top bar, pop-ups) to grow your email list with just a click of the button. And it will pull in all your Constant Contact lists, so you can choose the lists you want to make forms for.
Pros of Constant Contact
- 60-day free trial
Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial (no credit card required) for you to try out all their tools and features. While international users (outside the US and Canada) enjoy a shorter trial period of 30-day to test their service. This risk-free trial is especially helpful for beginners, you are able to test the product with enough time to determine whether is it a good fit for you.
Once the trial ends, you can subscribe to their plans, starting at $20 per month.
2. Superior and award-winning support
If you’re new, getting started with email marketing can be overwhelming.
But don’t worry.
After you sign up for the free trial, their support team will contact you via phone call and email, walking you through the product, how to navigate around your new account, how to use different features, and answer your questions so you can start making most out of the free trial.
You can save yourself tons of time (and frustration) from figuring out what you need to do yourself.
3. Simple and easy-to-use
With the drag and drop email editors and hundreds of beautifully pre-made templates, you can quickly create a personalized email for your business.
4. Advanced Email Marketing Features
Constant Contact offers plenty of advanced functionality that you need to grow your email list, such as:
- Unlimited emails
- Customizable templates
- Automated email resend to non-openers
- Subject line A/B testing
- Image library
- List-building tools and welcome email
- Test spam and preview designs before sending emails
- Real-time tracking and reporting
- Integrate with eCommerce store
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And much, much more!
Cons of Constant Contact
Of course, Constant Contact is not without its drawbacks.
- No Free Plan
If you ask me, the biggest con would be its pricing.
While other email marketing tool like ConvertKit offers a free forever plan for everyone, Constant Contact only offers a limited free trial of 60-day. That said, if you’re looking for the most easy to use and beginner-friendly email marketing service, Constant Contact is best for you.
2. Limited A/B testing
Constant Contact A/B test only allows you to test email subject lines. While you can change and compare different designs and other variables with A/B tests using other email marketing tools in the market.
How much does Constant Contact cost?
Let’s look at the details of Constant Contact plans, features and terms in the screenshot below:
You pay nothing when you sign up for a 60-day free trial with Constant Contact. With the free-trial account, you’ll get access to all basic and premium features without restrictions.
If you prefer, you can continue your subscription with one of 2 plans offered by Constant Contact:
- Email: This is the cheapest plan, costs as low as $20/month (based on the number of contacts in your account). It’s suitable for beginners who want to collect email leads, send unlimited emails.
- Email Plus: This plan offers many extra features such as A/B testing, Automated email series, Surveys and Pools and Online donations etc. It costs $45/month.
Our Verdict
Constant Contact is the best choice for beginner markets, bloggers, small businesses and nonprofit organizations who want to build an email list, manage and track results all in one place.
If you’re just starting out, you can start with Email plan. With unlimited email, drag-and-drop editor and professional-looking templates, it’s powerful enough to build your first email list.
If you’re an experienced email marketer or have an eCommerce store, get Email Plus to unlock advanced automation features to grow your business.
Sharpen your Email Marketing arsenal. Take Constant Contact for a Test Drive. It’s free and you can send unlimited emails, create personalized emails and track results.
What do you think?
Would you use Constant Contact to grow your blog or business? Why or why not?
Tell me in the comment!
I’ve handpicked a few guides for you to read next:
- Why You Should Start Building an Email List
- 5 Proven Ways to Monetize a Blog That Generate Under 1,000 Visitors a Day (#3 is my favorite)
- 7 Best Time-Saving Instagram Scheduling Tool
- How to Use Constant Contact Email Marketing to Grow Your Blog
I live and breathe making an income online.
I’ll be sharing more ideas and guides soon. Stay tuned.
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Great article