Constant Contact

If you are a beginner like I was 9 months ago, you are on the right page. I got introduced to email marketing and before long, Constant Contact was a top-recommended email marketing software that I got introduced to. I worked for a non-profit at that time and I was tasked with determining which was between a few other email marketing software, specifically Mailchimp and Convertkit

Before I go into details of why you should use Constant Contact (its Pros) and Cons of Constant Contact, let’s go through the basics. I will try to answer the questions I had when I got started with my research of CC back in 2019.

About Constant Contact and History from 1995 to 2020

Let’s get started by answering what is Constant Contact or who is Constant Contact. I am serious. I have had my colleagues mistaking it for an individual rather than a software or web tool. Constant Contact is an email marketing software that is owned by Endurance Group International. A lot of bloggers have had a lot of complaints when they realize who owns constant contact.

CC was founded in 1995 as Roving Software by Randy Parker and its headquarter is here in America. It is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. Waltham is a small town in Middlesex County and is known for being part of the industrial revolution history. On May 18th, 2004, Roving Software changed its name to CC. When it changed its name, it reported that “the  name change will leverage the success of its Constant Contact(R) product and to align the company’s strong corporate and product brand identities.”

By 2007, Roving Software (now CC) had received the backing of Greylock Partners, Morgan Stanley Venture Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Longworth Venture Partners, and Hudson Ventures. By July 31, 2007, it has 130,000 customers but had made a loss of $5.5 million on revenue of $21.1 million in year ended June 2016.

While CC is known for email services, specifically email marketing and automation, it introduced the Social Stats feature in 2010. When it launched this feature, it reported that “Social Stats tracks Facebook “Likes,” tweets, LinkedIn posts, and e-mail page views originating from social media channels.”

This feature was an additional layer of insight to the pre-existing data on e-mail and click-through stats.

In Feb 2011, CC acquired social CRM startup Bantam Live for $15 million in cash. The ‘Social CRM’ feature was lauded as a platform with easy-to-use real-time dashboard streams of messaging and workflows. With this acquisition, CC client reach hit 400,000.

In Jan 2012, it acquired Cardstar and a few months later, it acquired Storefront. On Nov 2, 2015, Venturebeat reported that CC was acquired by EIG for $1b.  Before it was sold it had 331.7 million revenue in 2014 and in that year, it made $14.3 million net income with 1,235 employees. EIG offered a premium of 22.6% of each share, purchase a share at $32.

How Constant Contact Works and How to use its latest version (Feb 2020)

Constant Contact is a great marketing tool for small businesses of all kinds, yours included. However, you must understand how Constant Contact works for your business to benefit fully. Constant Contact solutions include email marketing, event marketing, social campaigns and reporting, survey management, and offer management. All Constant Contact services are available either independently or through the Constant Contact Toolkit, which is an integrated suite.

This guide shows you how to use Constant Contact for professional marketing campaigns, which entails building lists with convenient tools, draft stylized emails, and using advanced tools such as birthday messages and automated welcome emails.

• Create Your Email List

Setting up your email lists is the first thing you do after creating your Constant Contact account Email lists are groups of contacts that you will send different emails. For example, a restaurant contact list may have an email list for vegetarians and another for those who eat anything on the menu. Email lists are essential in marketing because they allow you to send customized emails to different groups of clients.

To create emails lists, click “Set up your first list” located at the home menu. Fill in the list name and at least one email address.

• Add Contacts

Next, you need to add contacts to the email list. Click “Contacts’” on the left-hand menu. After that, select “Add Contacts” visible near the top-right of your screen. Constant Contacts gives you several options of adding contacts into your email list;

• Manually enter one contact
• Manually enter a list of contacts. This is most appropriate when you have written your email contacts in a list of paper. Select “Type in paste contacts” and enter names and email addresses in the boxes below.
• Enter the new emails as a batch if you have a list of emails on your computer by copy-pasting them all. You select “Type in or paste contacts’ and select the next tab “Paster names and emails.”
• Upload contacts from a spreadsheet, especially if you have connections in your POS system.
• Import from Gmail or Outlook, which is most suitable when you have a work email loaded with clients. You should choose contacts based on your categories such as customers, vendors, and coworkers
• Import from your CRM. For example, you can add contacts directly from Insightly, Zillow, Nimbie, among others.
• You can import contacts from your website
• Send an email

Sending emails is the most critical step in email marketing. Constant Contact is a powerful email marketing tool owing to its advanced features.

Click the “Create” button in the upper right corner. Then, select the prompt “Send an Email”, where you will find many different email templates to choose from.

Click in the template of your liking, where an editor will pop up (the editor helps you add your text and  or images). The editor also allows you to adjust the template format through drag and drop sections. You can also add new articles to the template from the ‘layouts’ and drag it into your email.

Remember, the single email you are writing is sent to your entire email list. To write a personal email to a specific client, you must use the Constant Contact “Insert” tool. The “Insert” tool enables you to add the recipients first or last name, or the company name. After that, add your subject line and select email addresses you will send the email message to. Click continue to send the composed emails.

One of the most significant advantages of using Constant Contact in marketing is that you can track your successfulness of your emails. For example, Constant Contact informs you the number of people who have opened the messages, clicked the link inside the message, and who forwarded the email to a  friend. You view the Constant Contact reports by going to “Emails” then Reports

• How to Sign Up New Contacts

You can allow individuals to sign up to your mailing list by creating a form using Constant Contact and adding it to your website. A person becomes is added to your mail list automatically when he or she fills out the form and

what is constant contact used for, what does constant contact form and clicks “submit”.

To create a form, go to “Contacts” then “Sign-Up Tools” at the top.

Click the “Create a Sign-Up Form”. Write the title and description of your form and after that, choose and decide which contacts to add to every form. Note, every form can be placed at different landing pages; One can be placed on the homepage for the vegetarian menu and other on the homepage for the carnivorous menu. Next, specify what information you need visitors to enter, which could be an email address, name, and date of birth. Lastly, add your logo and modify your colour scheme.

Constant Contact gives you different options of adding your signup form to your website. Go to the “Sign-Up Form” homepage and select “Embed Code.” Copy/paste the code and embed the form on your website.

Constant Contact can also host your sign-up forms, where you select “Form URL” and you are given a web address that leads visitors to your contact form. You can then link the address to your website or share it on social media.

The bottom line, make sure you use all Constant Contact features in your email marketing campaign to optimize the kinds of messages you send to your customers.

Constant Contact Pricing: Is constant contact free?

Constant Contact email services such as email marketing and automation are NOT free. If you’ve been convinced of how cool CC is, you may be wondering how much constant contact cost[170/mo – $17.51 – 0.43].

Constant contact has two pricing plans, Email and Email Plus. Here is a detailed comparison of the two plans:

Once you have over 10K, you automatically get our Email Plus plan: 10,001 – 15K contacts $195

Constant Contact Pros

• The Constant Contact email-creation UI is easy and powerful, which make it simple and fast to create new emails and newsletters for even non-technical users.
• Constant Contact has additional campaigns such as event registration, surveys, and A/B tests, which adds value to your company beyond email marketing.
• Constant Contact provides you with many email templates, which enables you to choose one that suits your brand or email that you wish to send to your contacts.
• Has high deliverability rates of to your email contacts

Constant Contact Cons

• The reporting features cannot be modified  such as importing the data into Excel
• It’s more expensive compared to other email marketing tools.

How to cancel constant contact account

Some people may wish to cancel their Constant Contact subscription despite its many and amazing features. To unsubscribe from Constant contact, call the billing support team to assist you. Find the billing support team contact by clicking this link; https://community.constantcontact.com/contact-support

You can also delete your constant contact account by contacting the billing system team that takes only a few minutes.

Constant contact vs Mailchimp

Constant Contact and Mailchimp are the go-to names for email marketing because they enable businesses to reach prospects, market products, and maintain engagement with their clientele via email messaging. However, Constant Contact and Mailchimp differ in deliverability and pricing.  For example, Mailchimp has more advanced automation tools than Constant Contact that allow its users to send personalized product recommendations and purchase follow-ups. Comparatively, Constant Contact has limited automation capabilities, although it will enable you to set up autoresponders and personalized emails.

Regarding deliverability, Mailchimp has a 96 to 99 per cent deliverability rate while Constant Contact has a deliverability of 98 per cent owing to its excellent reputation, authentication, and content.

Concerning pricing, Constant Contact costs between $20 to $45 per month, while Mailchimp costs between $0 to $299 per month. Mailchimp offers a forever-free account, which is suitable for business start-ups. Constant Contact, on the other hand, offers a 160-days free trial period.

The Overall Winner: Mailchimp because of its free plans, lower-paid options, ease of use, more advanced features and customization.

If you value call support and more comprehensive customer support, you should choose Constant Contact.

Constant Contact  vs Sendinblue

Compared to Sendinblue, Constant Contact is cheaper than Sendinblue. Constant Contact provides its email marketing services through two paid plans, the email and the email plus that cost $20 and $45 per month, respectively. Sendinblue, on the other hand, costs between $25 and over $66 per month for its paid plans. However, Sendinblue has a forever-free plan while Constant contact does not.

Both Constant Contact and Sendinblue have eCommerce Integration, Unlimited Emails, Tracking and Reporting, List Segmentation, Email Scheduling, Email Automation, Contact List Import features.

However, Constant Contact has surveys and polls, mobile app, the marketing calendar, image library, Facebook lead ads, event marketing, and customizable templates features, and Sendinblue does not have.

Bottom line: Constant Contact is a better email marketing tool than Sendinblue.

Constant Contact vs Salesforce

Salesforce and Constant Contact are email marketing software. Constant Contact costs at least $20 per month, while the cost of Salesforce marketing is quote-based.

Salesforce and Constant Contact provide web activity tracking,  real time sales reports, lead scoring, lead segmentation, predictive analytics, and personalized web content. However, Constant Contact does not offer Bi-directional CRM syncing quotes, split testing, and creation of membership sites. Constant Contact is supported by the English language only, while Salesforce is available in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish.

Thus, Salesforce is a better email marketing tool than Constant Contact.

Nate R. Reiner

My name is Nate Reiner and I am the editor here at 10Webtools. I have 8 years of experience using 50+ different web tools ranging from podcast, web hosting, email marketing, and much more. I previously managed a team offering support services to a large conglomerate that utilized tens of software solutions. I now run this blog full-time and when I am not reviewing or testing software, I enjoy riding bikes and supporting my clients achieve internet success. You can reach me directly at [email protected]