Are you a business owner who is aiming at taking your business to the next level through email marketing but do not know what platform to use? Constant Contact will provide you with the right solution. Constant Contact is a powerful email marketing and marketing automation solution that provides help to businesses, thereby making them to be able to effectively make use of social advertising through email to gain, convert, and also to retain customers. This platform has several email templates, including the drag and drop elements. Constant Contact provides its users with easy access to social media features, event management tools, and several resources that would help in making their business to be successful.
Constant Contact makes use of a marketing automation tool that makes it possible to target and send personalized emails to different contacts in batches. This will also allow you to resend emails that weren’t opened the first time. It also has a good reporting tool that makes it easy to carry out an in-depth analysis of the campaign to know how well you engage your contacts. Another interesting thing about Constant Contact is the fact that it provides a mobile application with which you can create and send emails from your smart form. You can also track and monitor the performance of the emails you send.
Features of Constant Contact
Here are the features of Constant Contact that makes it possible for business owners to start email campaigns and build a good relationship with their subscribers:
- Marketing Automation: Constant Contact makes it possible for birthday and anniversary emails, autoresponder series, and welcome emails to be automatically sent to subscribers or contacts, depending on some trigger factors. Users do not have to worry again after they have customized the email they want to send.
- Statistical Reporting: Constant Contact makes it possible to effectively carry out analysis on campaigns through the detailed reports that it provides. This report gives statistics on the number of spams, opens, clicks, forwards, unsubscribes, and many more. A graphical representation of this report is usually provided to users, and this can also be exported as a spreadsheet.
- Contact Management: It has a contact management dashboard that provides different tools that can be used in managing a contact list. Marketers can either directly import contacts from their Outlook or Gmail, or they can upload the contacts from a spreadsheet or a text file. There is also a tool that makes it possible to delete duplicated contacts with ease.
- E-commerce Integrations: There are several native integrations that provide e-commerce solutions on Constant Contact. This makes it possible for marketers and business owners to process abandoned emails, and also to see their sales from the Constant Contact dashboard.
- Event Marketing Tools: Marketers can make use of the event registration application to leverage email marketing, which will help in driving attendance at conferences and also at trade shows. This application is known as EventSpot, and it also provides users with a means of creating email invitations and also a registration form. Another integration is Eventbrite, which is another interesting marketing tool.
Target Market
Initially, Constant Contact was designed to serve only small businesses. However, the operations were later scaled to make it possible for larger businesses to make use and enjoy the services.
Here is a list of major customers:
- Element Productions
- Artists for Humanity
- Boston Athletic Association
- Luke Adams Glass Blowing
- The River Rock
- Turnstyle Cycle
- Light Health Research
Customer service and support
Constant Contact has the best customer services and support, and this is as a result of the robust customer resources it offers. This include;
- Provision of educational events in-person and online. This also includes seminars and webinars.
- A knowledgebase that contains guides, tutorials, and how-to-articles
- A professional service team that provides premium design, marketing advice, campaign design, autoresponders, branded footers, seasonal templates, and holiday templates.
- A video tutorial database that provides beginner and advanced tips for users.
One feature that makes Constant Contact stand out is the provision of customer support via live chat, phone, and also through social media accounts. This feature is lacking in so many email marketing platforms. There is also a help center that is provided for customers that will help them to locate a community with over 665,000 users.
Pricing
Constant Contact provides users with a 60-day free trial, which is twice the number which is offered by most competitors. The pricing system used by Constant Contact is grouped into two plans as follows:
- Email plan pricing: A monthly fee of $20 is charged for 500 contacts or less, $45 for 501 to 2,500 contacts, $65 for 5,001 to 10,000 contacts, and so on. The price increases as the number of contacts also increase. It is recommended that you contact the sales team for more information.
- Email Plus Plan Pricing: This plan comes with more features, and a monthly fee of $45 is charged for every 500 contacts or less. This fee also increases as the number of contacts increases.
Implementations and Integration
It is easy to implement Constant Contact. The Getting Started option is provided for new users in order to help them set up an account and that using it for their campaign.
There are several integrations that users can make use of in customizing their accounts. Constant Contact can be integrated with platforms like Intuit, Salesforce, Shopify, Outlook, Gmail, Facebook, and more. This makes it possible for users to search for small businesses.
Which is better Constant Contact or Mailchimp?
Both are great email marketing platforms, but serving different type of users I'd say. As to which one is better, if you're a blogger or an online business owner go with Mailchimp. If, however you need to send tens of thousands emails every month and need great deliverability at high volumes, go with Constant Contact.
What is Constant Contact used for?
Constant contact is an online email marketing platform that allows its users to send any kind of emails to their users or customers. You could use it to send your latest marketing offers to your potential customers, or deliver updates about your company to your users.
Shortcomings
In recent times, the additional step that is required in saving individual text blocks or images before they can be edited has been the major complaint of users who see this as frustrating. To this user, they would prefer having an option that will make it possible to go between blocks and conveniently save emails as a whole.
Overall, Constant Contact is a very powerful email marketing tool that can help in generating a very large ROI for both small and large businesses.