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.

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.

- 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

With regard to your second bullet point, what additional metrics are other services providing?

Silverpop is also an email marketing application to consider.