Audiense vs. Constant Contact vs. VerticalResponse

When you start a strategy and want to discover how the audiense is composed, this is the first step to start exploring and then create your buyer personas with more details from other auxiliary tools (social listening, market research). Audiense is the best way to start exploring. It works better when you are dealing with big social media accounts when you want to explore audiences from a specific country or very specific interests. It’s good to import information from listening tools like Brandwatch to get better results about your audience.

Incentivized

Constant Contact is an excellent tool for sending out flyers and newsletters. However, I feel the content's appearance is typically all the same. When I receive an email from Constant Contact, I can immediately identify it - the templates usually all look the same. When sending out communications with images, it is easy to use Constant Contact and link webpages. However, the email layout is always vertical and can get very lengthy. I prefer a more flip-book approach with options to flip the page.

Incentivized

For businesses requiring advanced email marketing features like sophisticated automation, in-depth analytics, and extensive customization, VerticalResponse might fall short due to its limited featuresVerticalResponse is ideal for small businesses or freelancers who need a simple, straightforward email marketing tool. Its ease of use and basic features make it suitable for those without extensive technical expertise in email marketing

Incentivized

• Audiense is the best tool I have found for tie your tweets to changes in your followers. In essence, I can see when tweets are gaining or losing followers for my account.
• Audiense also has great analytical tools like best time to tweet reports
• Audiense also provide a very complete look at each person you follow or is following you. It helps to understand who the people are.

• Market segmentation is great: my main segmentation is by region because that's how our sales team is divided.
• Lists: making customized email lists is easy and intuitive; the custom fields allow some flexibility in case our fields don't exactly line up with Constant Contact's.
• Campaigns: creating campaigns is quick and simple. I especially appreciate the 'resend to non-openers' option. I am constantly using this feature.
• Subject line generator: I like using the recommended subject lines. I'm able to plug in their recommended ideas, or sometimes, this feature helps me generate my own ideas.

• I love the ease of list builder because we often times have a lot of data to import. It would be simply impossible without this tool, considering the amount of customer data we have for any one given email.
• We really enjoy the ease of use of the HTML wizard as well. It helps even a novice be able to make a beautiful and attention grabbing email.
• The dashboard is functional and easy to find when you need with a quick search.

Incentivized

• For the USA, if Audiense.com is able to pull in the FULL spectrum of Acxiom data, then we have a truly splendid solution.
• For the world, if Audiense.com is able to enrich an audience with PIPL, Apollo.io, and Full Contact API data, then we have the next iteration of this already amazing solution
• As Audiense.com refines its SEMRush partnership, we will see advanced SEO unlink anything seen in past decades.
• If Audiense.com were to integrate the full capabilities of Relationship Science ( relsci.com ), then we would, as salespeople, have the next iteration of the solution as a sales power tool.

Incentivized

• It would be nice if we had more customizable options for emails - like moving around pictures and text boxes, rather than a set spot for everything to go.
• I would like it if multiple people could work on a document at one time. So if I'm in charge of graphics, I can get those updated while someone else is entering content, etc.

Incentivized

• The type face is small. Not sure if this is to avoid overwhelming the reader, but I could see this being an issue with vision-impaired people or people who don't see small print well.
• Sometimes I find it takes multiple clicks to make one simple change. I wish there was a search field at the top of the screen that allowed me to jump directly to a client's entry to update it there.

I have been using it for a few years now and I still think it's a pretty competitive tool, although a lot of new interesting tools are coming on the market and I am always on the lookout for new solutions. If it keeps innovating, however, Audiense could stay relevant for some time to come

Incentivized

There is no doubt that we are going to renew Constant Contact. We have not just invested a lot of time in learning and creating a great looking product but we have developed a strong database of information that allows us to track how we are doing for each newsletter. This supports our goals of creating products that residents desire and are excited to receive.

Product is easy for both technical and non-technical people to use. A cost effective solution for sending out large number of messages. We can manage unsubscribes by individual accounts, so we can have multiple multiple accounts combined to maximize our buying power on credits. Effective API for sending/receiving data makes tool a valuable asset.

The dashboard is excellent and easy to understand. Their messaging is very clear. The reports are visual and powerful.

There is always room for improvement. I don't know how they test their systems, but they should invite not-so computer savvy people to test it. If I, as an expert have problems, they need to think like the technophobe. Since I've used Constant Contact in the past as part of my former employment, I have not viewed any of the tutorials and just jumped in to work on my client's newsletter. With that said, I found some areas easy and some a bit cumbersome

I truly love this product. We are moving to an all-in-one system next year and my greatest fear in doing so is how much I will miss this platform. Although we are excited for things ahead, I will always keep Vertical Response in my back pocket incase I don't love the new platform as much

Incentivized

I have never had an issue.

No major problems in sending out the email campaigns and accessing the analytics

Incentivized

Never had an issue with uptime

I have never had an issue.

The system seemed quite slow sometimes. Specifically, there was sometimes a delay in sends if it was during a high traffic period. There were time-outs when uploading new code for an email, and a lag in reporting analytics which was sometimes as long as 72 hours

No issues

Any questions we had were promptly answered.

I think the overall support for Constant Contact has always been incredible; I have nothing negative to say. Our customer support representative was attentive, easy to understand, and very knowledgeable. I never felt like I wasn't a priority of his and my issues, while very small, were fixed in a very short time frame.

At Vertical Response the help desk associates are courteous, knowledgeable and helpful. You can tell they enjoy what they do. And clearly, they are well trained because most times, the first point of contact is able to resolve any issue you may have. There have been very few times where an associate has needed to get back to me or escalate me to a supervisor

Incentivized

Pretty simple to start using. Have to do some self-study to learn more advanced features

Basic functions and online help...we used what was needed, at the time, and will continue to explore other online trainings as our functional needs expand

Just a plug and play online tool

Implementation is very easy for someone who wants to send out the “batch and blast” type newsletters. If you want to use their templates with no customizations, the product works fine. However, the more customizations you get into involving link color, etc, that’s where things can get tricky for someone who may not be familiar with coding

Salesforce integration never worked right. We had to abandon.

I have used a few audience insight tools but I find Audiense has a large mix of data within one platform. For instance, IBM Watson, Demos, Social Listening, Hashtags. It is great to have a lot of insights about an audience in one place to have a holistic understanding.

Incentivized

Constant Contact is much more intuitive for people who are not tech-savvy. Also, while sendgrid offered more options in it's drag and drop interface, it displayed differently across different email clients, which made it very cumbersome to use. It also took much longer to upload contact lists and it was harder to manage existing contacts. Performance in sendgrid was much slower as well, and the Preview feature was quite buggy. Our team initially chose sendgrid because of the integration options that it's API offered, but we ultimately switched to Constant Contact because it was much easier to build campaigns and better suited our requirements.

In addition to using Vertical Response personally I also manage email marketing for clients that already use Mailchimp, Robly and Constant Contact. While most of these platforms all offer similar features I choose Vertical Response first if the client does not have a platform in place. Typically I am also teaching the client how to use this tool and the Vertical Response visual interface is very easy for me to teach a client how to navigate and create their own campaigns.

Incentivized

Very reliable in sending email campaigns and controlling the recipients so that no contact is sent the same email more than once, even if they are on a resent list

Incentivized

• Definitely increased the value of my social intelligence data. Now I'm able to really understand who my audience is and this helps my clients think about them as real people instead of an anonymous group.
• Time saved, being able to click a button and then have my audience generated within a couple of hours without me having to do anything else is invaluable.

Incentivized

• I have had nothing but positive impacts from using Constant Contact.
• The church is large, and there are many subgroups and axillary groups within the church. Setting up specific groups based on responsibility, interest, member goals, and service needs allows me to send information quickly, saving valuable time for other tasks.
• Constant Contact allows leadership to stay personally engaged with the members I work with, without over-taxing my time. It feels so seamless.

Incentivized

• We were able to blast out promotions our company was having to customers which created an increase in business.
• By blasting out any service issues, it keeps our customers informed so that they are not wondering what is going on.
• Allows us to store unsubscribed emails so that we are not constantly pestering people who do not want to be emailed.

Incentivized