Constant Contact Review: Should You Use This Tool For Your Newsletter?

Key Takeaways

hi guys Lewis here from Authority hacker and in this video I'm gonna give you a quick overview of constant contact which is yet another popular email marketing tool and I'm going to dive straight into the segmentation now Constant Contact uses a tag based system to sort and segment subscribers so I'm going to go into contacts here and the first thing I'll point out is that you can import subscribers by either pasting them in uploading a CSV or directly from another application so all you would need to do is click Add contact and you get your options here as for tagging you can do this manually or in bulk if you choose you can select each individual subscriber or you can select them all using the top row here once you've selected a subscriber or multiple subscribers you'll see some options up here including manage tags and that will allow you to apply or remove tags in bulk if you want to use automated tagging that's actually something you cannot do with Constant Contact so you can't tag based on events or conditions like when someone clicks a link in your email or visitor page on the website none of that is possible it's completely out of the question with Constant Contact so overall aside from being able to manually apply tags and do that in bulk this whole segmentation system is very rudimentary and let down by the fact that there's no automations involved and speaking of automations not only is automated tagging not possible but there's also no form of automation app or aside from simple auto responder so i'm going to show you what the auto responder looks like but this is important to understand because it means that there's no automation workflows there's no automation rules there's nothing to really take your automations to the next level aside from sending out a simple sequence and that to me is a huge blow for Constant Contact and apart from however is the only tool that doesn't check these boxes and to be honest even the autoresponder build it is poor I'm going to show you that right now so this is when it looks like I've already set up one email here and I'm going to add another to show you the process this takes you out of the sequence view and you have to go through the steps to create another email it is very very long-winded and one thing I really don't like about this once I've gone through here is that it's not drag-and-drop which means unlike even a weather I cannot reorder this sequence without having to go through some extra steps and to be honest I can't even figure out how I did this before that's just how bad it is really poorly laid out so overall not impressed with the automation functionality okay moving on to split testing this is a really interesting one because constant contact doesn't allow you to a be test and what I was able to find was several forum threads on people requesting this feature this one this one is from last year and it's got nine up votes and what what's really interesting about this is this guy I mentioned that changes take years around here and they'd only mess up something like that anyway so this is a guy who's an esteemed contributor has obviously stuck with the platform he's really basically told it as it is and what's even more interesting is some of the other responses here so this is from a product manager and it says a be testing is a feature we continue to evaluate our past research has indicated that multivariate testing is too complex for our target customer now to me that's just a complete cop-out you've clearly got people requesting it here and if I scroll down we've got don't hold your breath for this it was first asked for many many years ago another one a B testing has been suggested and requested for almost as long as I have been a customer and I started in 2004 so it's clear to me that constant contact of really ignoring their customer base here and just making excuses not to implement features that people clearly want now on to form building and this is the the for building in constant contact it is very very straightforward but that's because there's very little control in the first play so is not drag and drop this is this is as it looks as soon as you fire up the Builder and you can't really hug change anything without having to go to the sidebar here and going through the options and as you can see even these are very very limited in terms of design basically you've got background option and you've got a button color and if that wasn't bad enough you have to deal with this powered by Constant Contact that's gonna be on your form and aside from that there's really not much else to say this is a very basic form builder there's no form functionality it's inline so that you can forget about pop-ups and slide ins it's just a very basic inline form with very basic and limited customization options moving on to email templates and cluster contact does have a large amount of templates to choose from there are probably hundreds here if you scroll down you can see there are definitely a lot to choose from and these cover different events occasions different niches and while there are a lot here most of them do unfortunately feel quite outdated the designs are pretty weak and I don't think I could see myself using many of these at all so let's open one at random here just to show you what the template editor looks like and honestly I was quite surprised there I think this this was not too bad especially considering how things have been going up to at this point unlike the form editor you can drag and drop so you can move things around and drop them in there is a slight delay which is kind of weird but customization is a lot easier so I can just click on any of these elements and it will allow me to customize same at the image if you preview your email another nice addition here is the fact that you get a responsive you this is something that some other email marketing tools offer as well and even though this does require a few extra steps to get to that view I still think it's quite a good addition and you can even navigate it as well so overall I think this is one of the better areas of Constant Contact okay moving on to integrations and Constant Contact integrates with around 280 different apps and services which i think is a really comprehensive list as far as integrations goes definitely up there considering that convert clear and drip have around 70 integrations and those are pretty well established tools in this space so I also like how detailed the integrations page is here so what you can see here is user reviews for these integrations so you know simply integrating with something doesn't make it necessarily good that there's there's certain levels of integration and you can really dive into that on this page so for example let's click into the Facebook integration you get a bunch of information about this integration what it does the overall benefits you get the cost breakdown in this case it's free and of course you can see the reviews now this is something that you really do not see on many other integration pages so I think this is a great addition moving on to tracking and reporting Constant Contact tracks everything automatically so there's no options to toggle before sending which for some people is really good it means less steps involved less thinking involved but that may not always be what you want to do because when you enable tracking it can compromise the liver ability and if you have a high priority campaign that can be an issue but that side looking at the documentation for the reporting feature what really confused me was seeing these screenshots here and this is just not what I saw in my in my dashboard so I'm gonna flick over to my dashboard now as you can see is it's just completely different I'm not sure if this is a different page or it's just been updated and the documentation that hasn't yet been updated I'm really not sure but what I'm seeing here is quite basic and even though this is the dashboard I would expect to see a little bit more going on here I can narrow down into my individual campaigns again this is pretty basic there's not a whole lot going on here you get your your open rate in your click rates there's a click report here which gives you a kind of heat map view of your email and working love clicked and you get the send history which is literally that when it was sent out apart from that there isn't much going on if you're the kind of person that likes to really dive into the numbers and the statistics Constant Contact will leave a lot to be desired there so overall it's not terrible but it's definitely not as deep or visually engaging as I'd hoped and it's certainly nothing compared to the likes of activecampaign or grip ok finally let's talk about support and most people will start in the knowledge base when they're looking for help with something I actually found this to be quite thorough but the the search engine let it down in my opinion so if I type in split-testing for example one thing I found here was that even though it gave me back a ton of results not all of them were very relevant so that the top result here is improve email open weights and that's not really what I'm looking for I'm looking for how to run a split test or something similar a cycler map they do have video tutorials which I actually thought were pretty useful they show you the product inside out and you can go through creating campaigns customizing emails it's really nicely laid out it's almost like a mini course just for using Constant Contact if none of that works for you there are some more direct options available so you can go on the live chat you can go to the community forums you can contact them through social media as someone who likes to use live chat when it comes to support I was really quick to test that one out and unfortunately for me the chat agent just wasn't very helpful they refused to give them some basic information about constant contact pricing pricing that isn't on the pricing page because it's perhaps a little too high but of all the email marketing tools that I reviewed this was definitely one of the more difficult ones in terms of support what you're looking at here is the forum the community forum unlike most other tools there is no Facebook community group so all the action seems to happen here and the funny thing is is that a lot of these threads are they're not getting many risk is the forum as a whole doesn't seem to be super active I'm not sure if that's because they don't have many users or there's another place that I'm not aware of that people are discussing these issues I'm really not sure it's kind of strange but overall you know aside from just the forum I think the support could have been a lot better so that's the end of this overview video for constant contact and if you want to learn more about this tool I've done a full review on the authority hacker blog which I highly recommend you go and check out but that's all from me and I will see you in the next video