I have used Constant Contact as my preferred email service for medium to small scale mailings for several years. Throughout this time, Constant Contact has served me well with is basic feature set. However, the product development has not kept pace with the changes of Internet communications and I am investigating alternative solutions.
The items Constant Contact lacks that are present in most competitive packages are:
- Multiple levels of list views and segmentation. Constant Contact provides for a simple set of email lists without any segmentation or cross list management capabilities. This is the largest issue in that this requires numerous lists instead of one list with multiple parameters in a recipient profile.
- A varying range of metrics beyond the simple sent, open, click thru and bounce rates.
- A set of comparative trend charts and other metrics for presenting performance comparatively across campaigns. No such metrics are available from Constant Contact.
- Easy removal of the vendor brand. The Constant Contact logo must be requested to be removed from each email and is discouraged.
- Automated click thru tracking of links in email. (Constant Contact requires manual coding to track links in custom HTML emails).
- Ability to create your own email templates. Constant Contact charges a fee and must create such templates themselves.
- Integrated A/B testing of email subject lines and bodies.
- Built-in preview of email layout in email clients. A simple HTML preview is all that is available in Constant Contact.
- Unified billing. Constant Contact charges come to a credit card with little if any detail.
- Cobranded interface. We do not take advantage of the Constant Contact co-branding opportunity because it is cumbersome to setup and manage this brand.
- Google Analytics integration. Constant Contact offers no integration into Google analytics or other statistical packages,
- Free archive and image hosting. Constant Contact charges for the live archive of images and emails. Other packages do not.
- Unlimited custom fields. Constant Contact has a limit of four custom fields.
- Forms integration. Constant Contact offers no form builder or any service to easily create payment gateways for items such as donations.
- Spam filter testing. Constant Contact does not offer an easy test system to check if the emails will violate spam filters.
- CMS integration is unavailable or limited. Constant Contact does not offer or manage plug-ins to common CMS. The few that are available come from third parties.
- API restricted to list management. The Constant Contact API is solely for list import and export.
- Integration with third party tools such as WuFoo for forms, payment gateways, CRM and other technologies without API involvement on the user side.
For a replacement I reviewed numerous packages and selected the following for side-by-side comparisons. (HTML | PDF)
- Constant Contact
- mailChimp
- Campaign Monitor
- Benchmark Email
- Fusemail
- Mad Mimi
- Bronto
- Vertical Response
- Stream Send
- Myemma
- Campaigner
- iContact
- sendloop
Click on the links (HTML | PDF) to see a product comparison table that includes the following vendors. Right now, I am favoring mailChimp and Campaign Monitor. Let me know what you think of these or other vendors. And Constant Contact folks, when you find this, I am by all means open to your suggestions as well.
#1 by AG-M on February 18, 2010 - 4:50 pm
I’ve been able to import custom designs to Constant Contact free of charge. It doesn’t result in a WYSIWYG template, but it does provide the design flexibility I need.
With regard to your second bullet point, what additional metrics are other services providing?
Silverpop is also an email marketing application to consider.
#2 by Dan Katz on February 19, 2010 - 10:04 am
AG-M,
By all means, Constant Contact enables you to place in an HTML template. However, you then need to constant edit the HTML to palce in content and this is not desired for most clients. Instead, I think we should have the abilyt to create the same WYSIWYG templates that Consattn conact provides. Alsmost all other packages have this ability.
Most other packages integrate Google Analytics. We then get the range of detections such as geographys, comptuer types and everythign else in GA. This then includes full clicks all the way thru conversion analytics easy automated with no coding.
Silverpop – Great package. Indeed this is what I think our agency should use for all cmapaigns we manage and create for clients. However, this is not the same class of product as those I have reviewed. It is quite a bit more sophisticated and a tool that is better compared to a breed of packages for a higher end dedicated email marketing professional.
#3 by Chris Nahil on February 18, 2010 - 7:00 pm
Hi Dan — Yup, we found your post! First, thanks very much for your business for the past several years — much appreciated. And I appreciate the thought and effort you’ve put into the post and the comparison. I have asked our Support team to give you a ring to go over all of the items in detail with you, but I wanted to point out a few here that we don’t think are 100% accurate in your analysis. As you know, we rev our product on a regular basis (regular as in weeks, not months) so we’re always changing and tuning things across Email Marketing, Event Markeitng and Online Survey. That’s good, but sometimes these regular updates can get lost in the shuffle and overlooked. We can probably do a better job communicating there. That said, here are a few clarifications from our end of the line.
- We do now have the ability to let you filter your list on at least five criteria. You do have to save the filtered list separately, but we feel that it’s better for our customers to have it saved for reuse instead of potentially losing the criteria in the future.
- While we do require that you contact us about removing our logo, you only have to do this once and not for each email campaign.
- We do offer click through reporting in our custom HTML templates. The manual code is required for XHTML emails as that technology is still new and we are in the process of figuring out how to best incorporate it into our authoring.
- We do do give cusotmers the ability to create templates from scratch if you know how to design in HTML. We also have basic templates which are essentially just formatted but allow you to add whatever designs you would like. Additionally, we have a service where we will create a template for you for a fee if you are not a designer but still have custom needs.
- While it’s true that we don’t have a formal feature for A/B split testing – this is fairly easy to do in the product because we do give you the ability to copy an email campaign. So you could copy a campaign and just change the variable that you are looking to test (i.e. Subject line) and then compare the reporting statistics.
- The ability to preview in muliple email clients is a feature that we are looking to offer in the near future. In the meantime, we do have a plain text preview as well.
- Billing breakdown. Our product has a “My Account” section in which you can always view an invoice of your bill with a breakdown of charges for our products and add-ons – this provides much more detail than your credit card statement.
- Constant Contact offers 15 custom fields (not four), which you can rename.
- We do have spam filter testing. When you create a campaign in Constant Contact, you can go to the preview section and use and anti-spam filter tester that will tell you the liklihood of your campaign getting caught in anti-SPAM filters.
– API is not restricted to list management. We offer a number of APIs. The best way to find out about all the ones available are to visit our developer website at http://developer.constantcontact.com.
- Paypal integrtaion. For our Event Marketing product, we do allow you to collect payment through Paypal.
Dan, we do appreciate your input and I’m sure you’ll be hearing from us directly soon. In the meantime, we hope you hang in with Constnat Contact and we wish you the best in the future.
Cheers,
Chris Nahil
Constant Contact PR
#4 by Dan Katz on February 19, 2010 - 10:06 am
Chris,
Thank you for your rapid response. It is good to see that your team monitors the net and prepared good conversational responses. I look forward to talking through these items with a representative. Here are some additional thoughts to bring to the team.
Filters – In the packages I am considering the filters may be saved to be rerun against the core list as needed. This way the filtered results are always current.
Logo – This is my error and I will update the table to reflect that you can request to have the logo removed. On the packages I am considering this logo is never present or has an option to shut this off within the application.
Click Thru – On all the other packages the click thru tracking of each is automatic for all email types. This I feel is a critical factor.
Templates – I look forward to having your team walk me through the creation of HTML templates that are equivalent to the form and function of custom templates you create. In the past, we have used your team to make our designs into such templates because that was what we have been told is the way to accomplish this setup.
A/B testing – This is an excellent integrated function in other packages to send out tests to defined lists or random selections from lists. More importantly, the reports and analytics are then available within the application for side by side comparison as test.
Email preview – There are certainly a wealth of third party tools for this function. I look forward to Constant Contacts release of this function that appears to be available in most similar services that makes the assembly and testing of campaigns so much easier.
Billing – Our agency has to enter a credit card for each client’s account. These then come through on our credit card statement as simply “Constant Contact”. There is no note of which account by ID or any other identifier. This makes aligning of the credit card charges to the proper account difficult. I have asked for years when we can be invoiced for multiple accounts. I have been told this is coming and it never has. We like the Partner Portal we use, but it really has little utility for such needs.
Custom Fields – We and our clients like to use the email marketing packages as our main contact database. Even with 15 field, this is does not allow for the customizations required for the wide variety of lists and details each client maintains.
SPAM Testing – I will correct my notes as I was not aware of this feature.
API – My exposure to the API has been fore list maintenance and I have been unaware of the advances. I will correct my notes.
Event marketing and Payment integration – It is good to know that this is available via one of your alternate products. Other systems being considered integrate this in the core product and do not require an additional fee.IN either case, I have been glad to see the Event Marketing integration at a very reasonable price point fixed per event and not per registrant.
Surveys, Images and other add-ons – Speaking of additional fees, most of the other products offer surveys, image hosting and archives as an integrated service with no additional fee.
Pricing model – Lastly, a number of our client shave had large databases with very low email distributions. For example, one client had more than 130,000 contacts but distributed emails only once a quarter. The per contact based pricing then falls apart for us in this case and the per email recipient model becomes more cost-effective for us.
#5 by Melissa Sherman on March 18, 2010 - 11:12 am
Check out JangoMail: http://www.jangomail.com. We have a very robust service and lots of flexibility.
#6 by Heath Arensen on March 30, 2010 - 3:26 pm
For me it is not so much a question of features as it is usability. I’ve recently switched to Mail Chimp and don’t plan on going back: http://www.mailchimp.com/ All the features I need, easy to use. Fresh Design and Intuitive Usability. I may switch back to Constant Contact but not before a massive overhaul of their current site.
#7 by MKinder on April 8, 2010 - 7:51 pm
Check out http://www.emailassistant.com, different way of approaching this. Plus, if you want, they can enhance your use of any central server solution, offering a campaign centric reporting model.
#8 by Drew McManus on April 16, 2010 - 1:05 pm
Thank you for this great resource Dan, I’ve been attempting to decide which email marketing provider to use as a bundled component within a hosted website service for performing arts organizations.
I’ve been focusing primary on iContact and Constant Contact and I’ve had the same observations and frustrations as you. In particular, the inability to upload an html template and then allow users to edit via a WYSIWYG interface is baffling in this day and age.
It’s great to see the response from Chris Nahil but it only reinforces this obvious, and in my opinion, crippling shortcoming to their service. Especially for those of us looking to bundle their services as part of an overall package. If they would address this issue in their next release as well as offer integration with Google Analytics and vastly improved WordPress integration, they could be in a much better position to secure market share.
I also wanted to add a bit about Constant Contact’s business partnership program, which you touched on a bit. They do offer more incentives than iContact but as you’ve pointed out, the co-branded interface is tricky to use.
I for one, am very anxious to learn if you stayed with CC or switched to a new provider. If the latter, who and what is your initial impression?
Thank you,
Drew McManus