Constant Contact Review

Detailed Reviews

Email marketing is one of the most legitimate ways of reaching out to users, customers, and even prospects. Constant Contact assists its users with such outreach campaigns. It provides a wide range of solutions to deal with lead generation, advertising, and almost anything which may involve you sending out emails.

Pros

• Comes with a lot of email templates.
• Easy to manage mailing lists and segments.
• Can use it for autoresponders and automated emails.
• Allows creating landing pages, events, surveys, and ads.
• Comes with plenty of integration options.
• Provides detailed reports and analytics

Cons

• Split test is not as advanced as it should be.
• Lots of restrictions when it comes to creating automated workflows.

Introduction

Email accounts can be considered essentials of the internet. One can simply not exist on the web without having an email account (especially on the legitimate websites.) The first process is sign-up; this loosely translates into the need for one to provide an email account, in a majority of the cases.

It is apparent that the majority of people on the internet have email accounts. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense if one decides to reach out to people through emails. It is a much easier way to propagate a message to the user compared to reaching out through other mediums. Even advertisements are not as direct and effective as emails.

Since emails opened up the possibility for one to reach out to so many users, it led to the creation of a special category of tools which would help one in sending out so many emails.

With time, people devised new ways and methods around emails to reach out to users, and these tools evolved to incorporate those new ways. Today, there are plenty of email marketing tools available in the market, and most of them come loaded with a wide variety of features.

Constant Contact is one such email automation tool. It has been around for more than two decades now and is still considered among the top ones in the business.

Even though it is one of the top products, it’s not ‘the top’ product. Constant Contact has definitely seen much better days. They are not at their peak right now, but still holding pretty strong with a vast user base.

One of the reasons for them still doing so well is that they kept incorporating more features with the demand. In this review, we will get a very close look at the different features it has and try to find out if Constant Contact still provides all the necessary tools for the business.

If not, then we will try to deduce the reason for why people are still using this platform for their campaigns.

By the end of this review, you will have more information about the state of Constant Contact, and you will have more knowledge about email automation landscape, as well.

Create appealing emails

The essential part of any email or outreach campaign is the email. Sending an email is just a fraction of the actual job.

The tough part is to create compelling emails. Emails capable enough of grabbing the reader’s attention. Something which would motivate the recipient to react to your call of action in the email.

There can be different ways of creating an email. If you have someone in your team who is magical with words or someone who can almost cast a spell on readers with the use of some charming literature, then you have not much to worry about.

But people get so lucky only once in a blue moon. The other best way or probably the all-time best way to create eye-catching emails is to make them graphic. Even if you are good enough at creating textual content, the graphics will only help you deliver the message more powerfully.

Emails, especially the promotional ones, are like posters. The more eye-catching elements you have on it, the better it is for the business.

Constant Contact comes with all the necessary tools that you need to have by your side when creating some brilliant emails.

The platform provides the user with three options for creating a new email. The first one is to use the email editor, the second option is to use a custom HTML editor, and you can also import some pdf for the email.

The option to import a pdf for email isn’t something that you come across on email marketing tools on such a regular basis. We appreciate the additional option of creating engaging emails anyway.

If you have the necessary skills and prefer to do it all by yourself and from scratch, then the HTML editor can be your playground. You can come up with your designs and have the elements on it the way you like.

The pdf to email part will help you save a lot of time if you have already got something prepared for the campaign.

However, in most of the cases, users will have to create templates on their own, and this where the drag and drop editor of Constant Contact comes into play.

It starts with a lot of templates for the user to choose from. Constant Contact provides enough templates to get the user confused. There are templates to serve various needs of a campaign, and there are enough color schemes to keep everyone interested.

The only improvement we can suggest in this section is that they need to introduce some sorting options for all the templates. Things can quickly get confusing since there are so many options at the user’s disposal.

Once you are through the difficult step of choosing the template, the tool will take you to the drag and drop editor.

This editor is among the simplest ones you can get to create an email. There is a panel on the left side which contains all the elements, and then you have the canvas covering the rest of the interface.

The left panel contains three tabs. The first one is for all the building elements that you can drag and drop on the canvas. You will find blocks for images, text, layout, plugins, etc. under this tab.

The editor has been designed such that there is nothing much for the user to figure out. The block designs are simple to understand, and one should not have a hard time placing them on the canvas.

The next tab on the left panel is for images. You will find all the uploaded images in this section. One can keep some images always ready in this section so that there is no need to import the image every time the user is creating a new email.

You can also find tons of stock images in the library of Constant Contact. The library will help you fill your emails with some spectacular images.

The final tab on this panel is called design. You can take care of formatting, backgrounds, and other similar features using this panel.

To edit an element on the canvas, all one needs to do is select it. Upon selection, all the editing options for that element will appear on the screen.

You can also assign a proper name to the email before proceeding to the next steps. You can save the current design as a draft, use it in an email, use it in a campaign, etc.

We will discuss all the different ways one can use Constant Contact to send emails in upcoming sections of this review.

Contacts, lists, and segments

Before we get into the details of different ways of sending emails using this platform, let us first take care of the recipients of those emails.

When you start using Constant Contact, you will either have some email contacts already, or you would be planning to collect them through a lot of lead generation campaigns.

Even if you have already got a significant number of email contacts before getting this software, it is highly likely that you would still use some lead generation campaigns to expand the reach of your other campaigns.

We will discuss the different available methods of lead generation in later sections. Constant Contact offers a few different options when it comes to importing contacts.

You can type in the details manually, paste the details, upload a file containing all those email contacts, and import it from Gmail, Outlook or any other application.

You can create custom fields to store the details of the contacts or use the ones which are already present if they match your parameters.

You will be saving all these contacts under various lists. The lists will keep all the contacts organized for you and help you when you need to send out emails.

One should be careful when creating lists as it would help retain sanity at later stages.

There can be multiple basis for creating email lists. You can have ones based on the source of contact, demographics, region, etc. It will make you more efficient at sending out personalized emails to a particular category of users.

However, there is one downside of creating lists this way. Lists are usually static. You can keep on adding more users, but the old ones stay on the list for as long as you don’t care about them.

Unlike lists, people are not static in nature. Their preferences and tastes keep on evolving, and it is highly probable that your contacts may start to find your emails irrelevant which they ones used to find amusing.

It can be a tough job to continuously trim the email list for such contacts if you don’t have a way to automatically sort out the inactive contacts.

Segments try to take care of these issues and add some dynamic element to the whole method of sorting contacts. In segments, you can define different elements based on which you want to include contacts.

It can be how users reacted to a particular campaign or an email. You can differentiate between users who opened the email, who didn’t open it, those who clicked on the links, and so on. On top of this, you can choose the lists from which you want to include these contacts.

You can further classify them on the basis of different fields attached to those contacts. You can even include the contacts in your integrated applications under segments.

There aren’t a lot of email marketing tools which allow the integration of other apps while creating segments.

With the sorting options listed under segments, you can find out contacts which are highly likely to respond positively to your campaigns. It will also help you skim out the cream from different mailing lists and incorporate them into some profitable campaigns.

Constant Contact abides by all the rules set up by various government bodies to take care of convenience to people receiving these emails. If you are planning to import contacts from some other source, then you need to have a clear explanation of how you collected those contacts.

You will have to provide some details about sender before sending out emails. It is required under the US CAN-SPAM act, and you can always expect Constant Contact to go by the books.

The compliance with various rules and regulations end up benefitting the customers anyway. Since it is tough for people using black collar practices to get on this platform, the servers around the world perceive Constant Contact as a trustable source. Hence, the emails you send out are less likely to end up in the spam folder of your contacts.

Missed out a few tricks

When you are all done designing the email template, and ready to send it out to users, Constant Contact will provide you two options. You can either send it right at that moment or schedule the email for later.

For scheduling, you will get the option to choose a date and time for later. There are no options to change the time zone or deliver the email to users according to their local times.

It makes things a bit difficult for those who have an international audience but want to deliver emails according to local times. The only way to do so on this platform is that you create different sections based on regions and then send out emails according to their local times.

Even though it may sound like a good enough workaround, things can get somewhat complicated if the audience lies in a variety of time zones.

The task would have been so much simple if Constant Contact provided the option to send emails in accordance with the local time of a user.

They allow one to create segments right at the moment, which means you will find it easier to send out emails to specific contacts. You can choose to send out the email either to lists or to segments.

You can also enable the feature which resends emails in case recipients do not open it the first time. You can choose the time after which the second email will go out and modify the subject heading, as well.

This feature can come in handy in a lot of cases, but sadly, it is almost the peak of excellence on Constant Contact when it comes to sending out emails.

There is hardly anything better or impressive to do with the ways you can send out emails.

The platform allows the user to carry out A/B split testing, but it’s no way near to what other tools will enable you to do with split testing.

For those of you who are not familiar with this term, it’s a way of testing out two alternatives and then going along with the one which performs better in the test.

Under regular split testing for emails, one can create two versions of emails. The two versions may differ in subject, content, sender’s address, the time of sending out the mail, etc.

You will send out both these versions to a small portion of your mailing list and then wait to see what kind of reaction you get for them. At the end of the stipulated time, you can see which mail performed better with respect to your parameters and send out that email to the rest of the audience to get better results.

You will find a highly trimmed version of what we just explained about split testing. You can enable split testing only after you have dealt with the email template and body. And you will be surprised to notice that the only element you can vary for split testing is subject of the email.

The subject of an email definitely has a role to play in how the recipient reacts to it, but it cannot be the only variable. Constant Contact should have provided a few more options for variables.

You can change the percentage of emails going out to the test audience and set the time limit for the test. They provide four options for time limits in between 6 to 48 hours.

The winner is decided based on which email is opened by more people. There could have been more parameters for success, such as clicks for links within the emails. But you will have to be content with just one option.

Constant Contact could have done so much more with split testing and made it one of the highlights of the tool. We hope to see them incorporate some of the aforementioned features in the near future.

Ability to send out emails for RSS feed is one of the most common features on email marketing tools. Blogging websites put out new content continuously, and to keep the readers in the loop, they send out emails to all the subscribers.

Not just blogging websites, there are tons of other websites who send out emails for new content. Things get so much easier for people managing these websites when RSS and email automation integrate together.

One can set up emails so that for every new post of newsletter, the email marketing software automatically sends out emails to mailing lists. It eliminates the need to create new emails for each new post, or to even remember to send out mails for it.

The marketing tool takes care of all of it. Sadly, you can’t do any of this on Constant Contact. There is no option for RSS to email. You can incorporate blog feeds in the body of the email, but they haven’t provided a way to automatically send out emails whenever you publish a new post, or there is something new in the RSS feed.

Constant Contact is missing out on some key features with the absence of RSS to email and relatively poor split testing. If they wish to compete with big players in the category, they will have to address these issues. Otherwise, the future may not be so bright for them.

Automated emails

Some call them automated emails, whereas some prefer calling them autoresponders. There are some tools which introduce them as email series. It is just that we cannot throw in the term automated workflow in the mix in Constant Contact’s.

The difference between automated workflows and automated emails will get clear as we progress with the review. But we need first to make it clear as to why would one even need a series of emails to automatically go out to recipients.

Well, the answer is pretty simple. One can only handle so many emails. There are resource limitations, time limitations, the threat of more errors, and so much more.

With automations, you get to skip all these troubles and produce better results compared to what you would’ve got without the automation.

If you have a rule that a welcome email will be sent out to the user as soon as he signs-up, then it makes sense to let a software handle it rather than having a person monitor all the new sign-ups at all times.

Since none of the email marketing campaigns stop at just one mail, there will be other general emails that you will send out the user, and it still makes sense to let automation cover this part instead of a person remembering to send out a mail two days after the welcome email was sent.

If you bring in other kinds of emails into the equation such as birthday emails and the usual offer notifications, then you will realize that it can be a mammoth job to take care of all these emails if not for automations.

Now that we have made it very clear that automations are one of the necessities of any email campaign, let us see what kind of email notifications we can set up on Constant Contact.

Email automations are one of the primary features of email marketing tools, but the scope of automations differ across tools and separate good email marketing tools from the bad ones.

The good ones can be described as the ones having multiple options at each stage of the automation, those who provide flexibility at each step, the ones who keep things simple for even the most complicated of actions.

The tools which do the opposite of what we just proposed are the bad ones.

Constant Contact happens to show traits of both kinds of tools. While it is straightforward to set up automations and add new steps, you may end up yearning for a lot more features compared to what it offers at present.

All automations have a starting point or a trigger. It can be anything ranging from a new contact being added in the mailing list or a recipient clicking on the link provided within the email.

You get to choose one of the three available trigger options. You can start the automation by the user clicking on a link, opening a mail, or when a contact is added into the list.

A trigger is usually followed by an action, and it happens to be the most disappointing part of automations on Constant Contact. There are only two possible actions for any trigger; you can either introduce a waiting period or send out an email.

Both the options get automatically introduced at the end of each step. You need to modify both of them to define the next step. For the waiting period, you can only change the time for the next email to go out. And for email, you can either create a new email or pick one from saved drafts.

And this is all there is for automation on this platform. It may be impressive for a few of you since it allows you to set up the emails to go out automatically. But it as basic as it can get when it comes to email automation.

Other tools offer so much more functionality with automations. Let us go through some of the usual features which are missing in this case.

The most noticeable flaw is that they don’t allow you to create branches within the workflow. Even though one can only wait and send emails in these automations, why is it that one cannot have multiple responses in store depending on how the user reacted with previous emails.

For example, if the user does not open the mail after a few days of receiving it, then you may want to resend the email a couple of times. If she opened the emails but did not click on the link, you may want to send a different email.

And you may even want to have another email ready in case the user opens the email and clicks on the link. Since they do not allow adding trigger at any place other than at the beginning of the automation, you have no option but to follow a single thread along with the automation.

They could have also allowed the user to take actions other than just waiting and sending emails. The provision to add the user in a list or add a tag to contact can be very helpful in a lot of cases.

It can help in cases when you want to separate users who have clicked on one link in the email and those who have clicked on another.

The current version of email automation on Constant Contact has got a lot of catching up to do if they even want to be a contender to compete with automation features available on other prominent email marketing tools.

If all you want to do is create a series of emails which are supposed to go out automatically, once triggered, then this platform may do just fine for you. However, if you want to insert some logic into the automations and make actions dependent on the user’s reaction at every stage, then you may need to look beyond Constant Contact.

Sign-up forms

As we mentioned earlier, Constant Contact will help you with the lead generation process, as well. It involves you providing avenues to visitors to sign up for your newsletters and emails.

Marketers undertake various ways for lead generation. On websites, the best approach is to put out the sign-up forms, so that visitors can willingly provide their email contacts if they want to be a part of your service.

You will find four ways of creating sign-up forms on Constant Contact.

Pop-up forms

You must have come across these a lot of times while browsing websites. They invite you to be a part of the group or promise to provide more insights, or offer you a door to more similar information, etc.

Whatever the case or method may be, it provides you a column to enter the email address, using which the service provider can provide you with email letters, offers, and other similar stuff.

You will be doing something along the same lines under this option. Constant Contact allows you to create an appropriate sign-up form to invite users.

When we started creating a popup, we were disappointed by the limited options available for customization. Pop-ups are usually kept simple, but one can always spice it up a bit to keep users interested.

You can’t expect yourself to add any of that spiciness if you are creating a pop-up on this platform. You can change the background color, the color of the text and buttons, but it will be that same box.

We would have liked it better if they provided a few more options to change the appearance of the box or may be allowed to change the position of buttons and fields.

However, some of the available customization options can be useful too. You can choose from the custom form fields and add the one which you think will be good for the business.

Along with the email field, you can ask for name, phone number, etc. This will all help you create a rich contact list with multiple fields in it.

Once you are done taking care of the appearance of the pop-up, the next step would be to decide when would it show up on the screen. You can have it appear instantaneously on the website or set a timer for a few seconds.

There is also an option to introduce the pop-up when the user is leaving the page or the website. Such timing would ensure that the pop-up doesn’t interfere with any part of the user experience and reminds the user to sign-up only when she is about to leave.

Usually, some pop-ups also appear when the user has scrolled through some part of the page. Sadly, it is not one of the parameters available on Constant Contact to introduce pop-ups.

You can manage the frequency of the pop-up, that is, decide if you want the pop-up to appear only once for every user or if it should be there each time the user visits the website. It boils down to personal preference and choices for when one wants to introduce the pop-up.

If you are smart with the use of popups, it can be a valuable addition to your lead generation campaign. The only things we missed here was the lack of options to change the appearance.

Landing pages

A landing page can be extremely useful for not just lead generation campaigns, but for a wide range of other purposes too. People use it for sales campaigns all the time.

The most significant advantage of having a landing page is that you can eliminate all the unnecessary noise and focus only on one action.

For instance, if someone has created a landing page for selling a product, the landing page will describe all the good features, but it won’t have the options to get into the details of those features as it may divert the visitor from buying the product.

The landing page would have highlighted buttons for one beneficial action, which will be the ‘buy’ button when it comes to selling a product. There can be few options and link other than the primary one, but they will all be subtle and not so eye-catching.

Things would follow along the same lines even when the landing page is created for lead generation. The focus this time would be to get the visitor to subscribe to the newsletter. Hence, the subscription button will get all the attention this time around.

You will get comparatively more editing and customization options this time when compared to what we got on pop-ups.

A landing page is usually followed by a thank you page, which appears when the visitor presses that button you wanted him to. You will get the option to customize it too.

You can use this option to let the user know what will follow now that she has signed up or put in some other information that you want.

Constant Contact provides with enough customization tools for both the cases. You can change formatting and design such that it matches well with your parent website, take care of URL, insert logo, and so much more.

However, the biggest drawback of this section is that they don’t provide the user with templates, to begin with. No matter how detailed the customization options are, it requires a lot of work to create appealing and effective landing pages.

Templates reduce a lot of the legwork since they take care of most of the designing and formatting, and the user already knows how the landing page is supposed to appear at the end. We would have loved to see some beautiful templates for the landing pages.

Apart from templates, there is nothing much to complain in this section. You can create and publish landing pages to get more leads and increase your outreach.

Facebook lead ads

You can either say we are all social media consumers or say that social media has consumed all of us; it all means the same. Majority of people are hooked to one social website or another, and these sites handle a good portion of traffic all over the internet.

If you are out there online looking to generate new contacts, then what better place than social media. Facebook is one of the giants of this space, and Constant Contact would help you along the way when you try to boost your lead generation campaign using Facebook ads.

It is an integration where you can connect this email marketing tool to your ad campaign on Facebook. After the integration, you will get guidance and assistance at every step of the way of creating the ad.

Facebook ads can be very effective when used correctly. One needs to target the right audience, have the right content, have appropriate images or videos, and so on.

Constant Contact provides appropriate guidelines for all steps of the process. It will still be you who will have to take care of everything and follow the directions.

Once the ad goes live and you start generating more leads, you will have all of them directly in your email marketing tool. There will be appropriate lists depending upon how you design the form on the ad.

The integration will help you reap the benefits of the ad campaign straightaway. As soon as you start getting leads, you can deploy autoresponders to take care of the onboarding process. You can also choose to send out emails manually if you prefer it that way.

Create more than just emails

Constant Contact may fall behind other email automation tools when it comes to advanced features. But they try to make for the loss in other sections.

They push the envelope of email marketing tools by allowing users to create more than just emails. You can use constant contact to create surveys, events, ads, landing pages, and so much more.

Elements such as landing pages are getting increasingly common on other platforms too, but events and ads still don’t fall into most of their realms.

Let us go through some of these special inclusions on Constant Contact.

Surveys

Sometimes it can be challenging to find the right trick which would move the audience. There might also be a few cases when, all of a sudden, things start going south and have no clue of what’s happening.

In such cases, the best avenue for advice can be the audience itself. You can reach out directly to the people and ask them what’s up.

Even if you are not going through a slump, it is a good idea to get feedback from the audience to make sure you are on the right track. If you have a tough decision to makes, you can once again reach out to the audience and try to find out what they want.

Surveys can have so many different purposes. One can create multiple surveys for different purposes or have one survey that takes care of various motives.

You can create surveys and polls on Constant Contact without breaking a sweat. If you want, you can create a survey right from scratch, and if you need some assistance, then they provide you with multiple template options.

In their template collection, you can find one for each kind of purpose. There are usual ones, such as a customer satisfaction survey and suggestion box. Then there are also the ones for contest entries and follow up services.

If you have any doubts as what the potential uses of a survey can be, all you need to do is just once go through all the template options provided in their survey section.

You can select one of the templates, modify the questions, add or remove questions, take care of the responses, and mold the survey to your requirements.

You can take care of the appearance and make sure the survey form goes well with the theme of your website or service. They allow you to take care of the logo and other nuances.

Once the survey is ready, you can make it go online, send it along with emails to users, introduce it on the website, and do so much more with it.

As users start filling up surveys, you will be able to keep an eye on the live updates. You can see if there is some shift in the trends after some time or users are clear about what they desire.

Surveys are simply a great way to stay connected with the audience and sometimes even let them steer the business in the right direction. If the survey goes out to all the right places, then you always factor in the surveys while making decisions.

Event

This section of the tool may not be for everyone, but those who need some assistance in event management can benefit a lot from it.

Constant Contact allows you to create an event and promote it, as well. It starts with the basics where you can describe the event, name it, specify its type, mention the date and schedule, state the physical address if needed, take care of registration dates and so on.

You can mention all the big and small details about the event in this section. The section will be about logistics and monetary topics. You can specify the event charges, how many people can a person bring, if there are going to be some offerings from your side, etc.

All you need to do after this is to take care of the promotion of the event. You can customize the registration form. It allows you to insert images and logos. You can change the form fields and make the form more interactive and engaging.

You can also modify the messages that users will get when they sign up for the event. To make things more hardcore, you can also create landing pages for the event. The landing will have customization options of its own.

We have already gone through how one can create beautiful landing pages on the platform anyway.

If you still want more ways to promote the event, you can copy the event URL and paste it on all the appropriate places. It can be the emails you are sending out using the tool, popups, surveys, etc.

Constant Contact provides one with everything necessary to ensure that more and more people get to know about the event, and you don’t find any difficulty in taking care of the registrations and other nuances.

Ads

Constant Contact helps users with all kinds of ads. We already discussed how they help one create and manage Facebook ads.

In addition to those, you can also create and manage ads for other platforms. You can have ads for Google and Instagram too.

With ads on all these different platforms, your business can get some significant boost. And since you get to do all of this from a single platform, there is less hassle.

Analytics and reporting

So far, we discussed how you can create emails, how to use them in different ways from this platform, and how to deal with items other than emails such as landing pages and surveys.

But what happens once you do all the hard work of designing emails and sending it out to the audience. How do you determine if your emails are doing well or not, or how to know if your landing pages are getting you the same returns or not.

It turns out that email marketing is not all about how efficient you are at sending emails, or how many ways have you to send out emails. It is also about how good the quality of your emails is.

You need to know if recipients are showing any interest in your emails if the contacts are still active or you are reaching out to profiles which are not being used anymore, and so on.

Constant Contact provides a detailed reporting section where you will find answers to most of these questions.

You will get to know what tactics are doing good and find out all the areas which still need some improvement.

The reporting section starts doing its job as soon as you start sending out emails. As users start interacting with your mails, you will start seeing some movement in all the reports and charts.

These reports provide a lot of perspectives for one to look at the information available in these sections. You can see which emails subject line got more engagement. You can then apply this knowledge in subsequent emails and campaigns to get better results.

The reporting page tells you what portion of the mails have been opened on a mobile device and how many of them were accessed on a desktop. It will steer you in the right direction when it comes to deciding if you want the mails to look much better on mobile or desktop.

They provide trends and infographics to let you know about various attributes of a campaign. You can see the open rate, click rate, bounce rate, and sends. Since you can see all this data over a chart, you can ensure that right elements are on the rise.

You can also get the data in tabular form. You can have multiple campaigns in the table and then sort them based on various metrics. You can see the ones with higher open rates or have a look at the ones with non-acceptable bounce rates.

You can use this sea of information whichever way you want. It is not just that campaigns that you can focus on; Constant Contact allows you to pay some attention to contacts and mailing lists, as well.

You can see the ones who are not interacting with your emails and campaigns anymore. The information can help you keep the list updated.

If some users are not interacting with the mails or marking it as spam, then it can have a ripple effect over all of the campaign. Servers may start perceiving your emails as not so important, and therefore, start pushing them in spam folders.

You can easily export all these reports and information, making sure you don’t come across roadblocks when sharing the finding with others.

The reporting and analytics section on Constant Contact is a great way to identify things that are yielding positive results and staying away from all the hindrances to progress.

Integrations

You have already got a few glimpses of automations on this platform when we discussed how they help you with ads.

Integrations are becoming one of the core features of most of the services. It does not matter if the service is outstanding on its own, if it hasn’t got all the necessary integrations, you won’t be able to make the most of that exceptional tool.

For instance, if you are using email marketing to gather more leads, then those leads might help you get more traffic on your blog, or it might be a list of potential customers.

Depending upon the purpose of the campaign, you will want to make use of progress made on this tool in other areas. If you sell products online, then you would wish the email marketing tool to gel well with the e-commerce platform you are using.

If you offer live chat support to your users, then you may want the tool to integrate well with the live chat tool you are using.

In any case, it is difficult to make do without other tools, and if all the tools you use are integrable, then life gets easier for sure.

Constant Contact offers a lot of integration options to help users take care of various departments. You can use integrations for lead generation and develop a rich contact list.

Some of the useful integrations, in this case, are the Facebook app to create a mailing list, Eventbrite integration helps with registrations for events along with promotion. Some other mentionable integration examples in this field are the ones for Shopify and WordPress.

Integrating Constant Contact with eCommerce tools help create better communication channels with customers and keep them informed about offers, orders, and so much more. Some useful integrations for this case can be MINDBODY, QuickBooks, WooCommerce, etc.

You may find out that there is no option to link some app directly with Constant Contact, but you can always make use of apps such as Zapier to achieve the necessary connection.

You can integrate social media apps, connect to CRM application, have mobile integrations, and so much more. We felt that there are enough ways to connect Constant Contact with other useful applications and simplify a lot of tasks.

Conclusion

When we started the review, we mentioned that one of the focal points of this review would be to see if Constant Contact has been able to keep up with other email marketing tools when it comes to providing advanced features.

So, let us first address that issue. Constant Contact misses out on a lot of functions and features that one would expect from an email automation tool in general. In some cases, the feature was entirely absent, while there were instances when a feature was present, but one can’t use it to its fullest potential.

We also feel obliged to mention that not having a few advanced features doesn’t make Constant Contact any less of an email automation tool. It outshines a lot of competition when it comes to stuff which matters the most. You will get high deliverability rates, which is one of the necessities for any successful email campaign.

You may not be able to create automated workflows which involve branching, but you can still send out a series of emails to users and customers.

There were options to create landing pages, surveys, events, ads, and other items using the tool. It is also something that you will not find on a lot of such tools.

Another thing going in favor of Constant Contact is that they keep things simple. You don’t need to be an expert at email marketing to use this tool to its full potential.

The reports section helps one take care of the progress of different campaigns. Managing email list is like a walk in the park. One gets enough app integration options that you may not even miss the absence of a few automations.

Constant Contact may be missing out on some features here and there, but it boils down to how one was supposed to use the tool anyway. If you need some highly advanced automations in your campaign, then you can always find some better tools than this.

But if you are looking for an email marketing tool capable of handling primary email campaigns, and offers more reliability, then Constant Contact might be the tool you are looking for.