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

Generally it’s easy to navigate, though a bit dull-looking. You can get to most places within a couple of clicks, though as they’ve added more functionality, some things have become a little hidden, for example, automations.

The editor is fast, but light on features, especially in the styling department. Apart from that it’s easy to work with.

This is very basic, only allowing you to insert simple greetings or contact details. There is no if/then/else logic available.

Classic, autoresponders, basic automations, recurring newsletters, A/B testing, event registrations, coupons, surveys and polls.

Not bad. There are around 200 (!) templates to choose from, with varying degrees of quality (some are decent, while others look a little basic and dated). You can also start from scratch, and use a handy feature called ‘Brand your email’ to auto-generate a template based on your website’s colors and logo.

They offer autoresponders and abandoned cart campaigns for Shopify and WooCommerce. It also generates pre-defined contact segments based on your customers’ interactions with your online store (e.g. repeat, lapsed and potential customers). Automations based on contact triggers (e.g. email opens, clicks) are also available. It’s worth noting that the automations aren’t the most flexible, as you can’t really combine conditions and actions as you can in many other tools.

You can create segments from contact activity, list membership, contact details, tags, or ecommerce activity. You can also create a segment from your contact insights and tag contacts based on contact field criteria.

There is next to no customization with the form, and it simply offers a description box, basic field options (which you can’t add to) and then a list, or lists, that people can check to be added to.

As you can see in our deliverability tests, Constant Contact performs very well, reaching the most popular email providers (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook) the majority of the time.

In addition to standard open and click reports, spam, bounce and unsubscribe rates are also available. You also get click heat maps, and some useful overview reports such as open and click trends, opens by device, % of contacts engaged, and most successful subject line. You can also compare campaigns. However, advanced tracking such as social tracking isn’t available.

Here’s where it gets a bit hairy. The site and the tool are only available in English. You can choose to change some of the non-editable email sections (e.g. footer and privacy policy text) to one of 10 languages available, mostly European. Support and the knowledge base is available in 4 languages. Slightly confusing, but at least there’s some effort to support multilingual users and audiences.

Spam testing isn’t available, however, there is a feature to check the email for errors (missing links, placeholder text that hasn’t been updated, etc.). There’s also a tool that allows you to preview how emails will look for specific recipients, although this didn’t seem to work when we tested it out. ‘Inbox Preview’ by Litmus is available as an add-on service, although at $10/month for just 5 tests, it’s a little steep. Find out how to avoid spam filters here.

Soft bounces are placed on temporary hold for 15 days, and then resent. If it happens again, they are moved into a suspended bounce category. They have a ‘recommended for removal’ filter available to view these, but don’t remove them automatically.

Import/export available although it’s not as straightforward as it could be – you need to first enable advanced email permissions under Account Settings.

All plans come with unlimited storage.

SPF and DKIM are supported.

The Account Owner can also assign roles to be either an Account Manager or a Campaign Creator.

Constant Contact offer a massive amount of apps and integrations, almost 400.

This is only available via their form builder, and it’s very basic. Instead, we’d recommend these free landing page builders.

There are several channels of support, including live chat, phone support, a knowledge base and community-based support. However, I found that the chat and phone support weren’t always available, which was a little frustrating. When I was able to get hold of chat support, however, I did find them to be responsive and useful. Bear in mind that you’ll need to call in order to cancel your subscription, which is pretty annoying.