Constant Contact

Constant Contact is an email marketing software platform who's pledge is to offer beyond typical support with personal coaching seven days per week. Payment plans are monthly and slightly more than the industry average but they do offer a sixty day trial of their software platform in order for testing. They offer tutorials, webinars and guides in addition to call-in support which will help set up your account, offer custom templates and design and send emails. It's easy to select a template and create emails as well as integrate social media into them. It's simple to post emails and view tracking reports with bounce rates, unsubscribers and inactive email accounts. Importing email lists from Google, Outlook and Excel is no problem. I can add forms to my website or Facebook page. The tracking will report open and click rates and sharing via social media also. I like being able to send birthday or anniversary emails automatically. This is a great non-disruptive way to stay in touch with customers. The autoresponder feature is standard today in email marketing software platforms. But it's important one for following up with prospects or customers as most of the time responses will come from multiple points of engagement. Once the autoresponder is set up it can be left to run on its own. I like being able to send emails specific to donations, registration, coupon redemption in a single software. And you can provide invitations with registration management and payments possible from inside your account. Collecting donations is a feature I was recently asked to look into for a client so it's nice to be able to do so with a custom page and promote it via social media and email using a secure connection. I also like how the pre-written templates speed up the process. And creating surveys to get important feedback from customers. It's also good that multiple categories can be setup with contacts placed in one or more of these categories. The email reporting is very solid with all the stats I need to properly analyze each email campaign. And by all accounts I've researched deliverability is quite good, so I know prospects and customers are going to actually receive my email in their inbox.

Constant Contact doesn't work well with LinkedIn when I checked and I think this integration is key for businesses. The formatting is the issue. It's better at this point to do this manually. Custom templates created cannot be saved as a standard template. They have to be created from scratch each time you want to do so. I had text formatting issues. Text size changing suddenly and even color changes. The cursor was hard to spot at times. The list formatting seemed to alter the formatting of the entire email and not in a good way. Images included cannot always be seen on the editing screen. They may show up in the previewer but not otherwise. The stock images are too expensive and there need to be more fonts to choose from. I don't find the dashboard particularly intuitive and it all looks a bit old school.

Sending emails to individuals with a company that has a decent reputation is obviously important and Constant Contact seems to do this well. But with the small bugs in the email editor while editing content it makes it tough to be patient enough to care to get it all setup. The price seems reasonable and live support is always a plus.