Constant Contact Review: Well Known, But Worth Its High Price?

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Pros and Cons

Is Constant Contact the right newsletter service for you?

Rating Details

A closer look at Constant Contact’s top features

Event marketing

Setting up an event in Constant Contact

Constant Contact’s event marketing capabilities set it apart from other ESPs. With Constant Contact, you can send invitations to various events, including product launches, store openings, workshops, and classes. Additionally, you can seamlessly manage ticket sales, registrations, and check-ins, while also offering merchandise for sale.

What’s great is that you can also offer different ticket types, and customize event registration forms to suit your needs. Constant Contact also lets you generate printable tickets and create promotional codes, such as those for early bird registrations.

For online transactions, Constant Contact allows you to accept payments via PayPal or Stripe, streamlining the ticket purchasing process.

Overall, Constant Contact’s event management solution is particularly beneficial for smaller-scale events. The best part is that these features come at no additional cost to use, although you are charged 5.4% + $0.80 for each ticket sold or transaction conducted.

The main downside? While the functionality resembles that of popular event management tools like Eventbrite, the event landing page designs look very basic, with limited customization options. And unlike platforms like Eventbrite, Constant Contact lacks features such as the ability to add FAQ sections to landing pages, edit the thank-you page or confirmation email, and set up waitlists.

Content generator

Like a growing number of its email marketing competitors, Constant Contact have now integrated AI within their product. This includes a content generator to help you write copy for emails and social media posts with just a few prompts:

As we’ve seen with other AI content generators, though, the quality of the output can vary. While it may serve as a useful starting point, it’s still likely to need further edits before it’s audience-ready.

Constant Contact also offer AI-powered tools for:

• Subject line creation
• Writing SMS
• Spam detection

They also promise to integrate AI within more features in the future, so watch this space – we’ll be sure to keep you updated!

Constant Contact Deliverability

As we’ve seen in our tests, Constant Contact’s deliverability tends to be pretty high. They are one of the providers that we’ve been testing since our very first round in 2017, and ever since they have managed to keep a stable score ranging from the high eighties to low nineties. In the last three rounds, they scored around 88% deliverability on average, and in our latest email deliverability test, they came second out of fifteen providers. They were also one of the few providers who managed to land 100% of all of their emails in Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail, and AOL inboxes.

Conclusion

As Constant Contact themselves reiterates through their site, they are a tool for small businesses. And, as such, it’s worth evaluating them on these terms. As mentioned above, they definitely have enough of the basics covered to satisfy most small businesses, and if it were as simple as that then we’d recommend them more highly.

The issue, these days, is that there are plenty of other fantastic email marketing tools offering even more than Constant Contact, and for a lot less money. This includes not only features, but also user experience. In fact, for the amount you pay with Constant Contact, you could find yourself using much more powerful tools such as ActiveCampaign and GetResponse.

What we’ve also noticed is a tendency to remove features that weren’t necessarily central to their product, but certainly added value. In the past, they offered extras such as a website builder, appointment booker, logo maker, and the ability to sell digital downloads – however, these no longer seem to be available.

They do pick up points for their decent deliverability rates, integrations (particularly social media integrations), and for allowing different access levels for separate users. And with recent enhancements to automations and reporting, and the addition of new features like an AI content generator, it does look like they’re making an effort to improve the product. But their lack of advanced features makes it difficult to recommend them over others at this price point. (You’ll see we don’t list them as a good Mailchimp alternative, either.)

So, there you have it: the next time you see Constant Contact as the number 1 rated service anywhere around the web, I would boldly claim that there might be other interests at play there.

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Constant Contact Alternatives

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ActiveCampaign has one of the most advanced automation systems we’ve ever tried, and it can’t be compared to Constant Contact’s simplistic approach (it only features autoresponders). They also offer robust reports and analysis tools. On top of that, they are even cheaper than Constant Contact.

Brevo is one of the cheapest all-in-one email marketing tools on the market. It’s available in 6 languages and comes with advanced automation options and a built-in CRM.

GetResponse is a solid alternative. It comes with many advanced features (e.g. a webinar tool), has excellent automations and offers one of the best spam and design testing tools we’ve ever used. That’s why Constant Contact falls short when compared to GetResponse.

We have a detailed guide with the best alternatives to Constant Contact, check it out here. You can also try out our Smart Finder to see which newsletter service is best suited to you.