Bambu is a social media marketing tool from Sprout Social that leverages employee advocacy. It allows users to organize and encourage distribution of company blog posts, press releases, news and articles, thought leadership, and customer case studies through employees' personal social networks on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. There are three main use cases for Bambu: Marketing, HR, and Sales. In terms of Marketing, Bambu aims to leverage employee advocacy to increase brand awareness…
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Constant Contact
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Constant Contact is a full-featured email marketing solution with capabilities such as social media integration, drag-and-drop editing, and real-time reporting. It is a bulk email tool designed for SMB customers. Since 2019, Constant Contact also offers marketing automation features, a website and landing page builder, and other tools to support midsize businesses.
$12
per month
Pricing
Bambu by Sprout Social
Constant Contact
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Lite
Starting at $12.00
per month
Standard
Starting at $35.00
per month
Lead Gen & CRM
Starting at $449.00
per month
Premium
Starting at $80.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bambu by Sprout Social
Constant Contact
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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The SMS Marketing tool can be added to any Core or Plus Constant Contact account. SMS is only available in the US for Core and Plus paid plans. SMS can be added when logged in to an account after purchase. Plans start at $10/month for up to 500 messages.
Routinely sharing job postings from Bambu by Sprout Social to LinkedIn, using the canned content our Marketing team provides and revising so that it "sounds like me" prior to sharing on LI. Cadencing my content shares for the week in the "Scheduling" option Creating a new link to share content via Bambu by Sprout Social to LI, to position myself as a thought leader in my space
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
It was similar in that it helped us push prewritten messages out to our team, but the UX/UI was far more dated and not as intuitive. It's mobile app also wasn't very useful; made it difficult to edit messages and would constantly need you to log back in. The two things GaggleAMP had over Bambu however was more comprehensive analytics and the ability to automatically push out social posts
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.
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
The social amplification effects of our employees sharing brand content helped us achieve a 400% increase in website visits following our re-brand.
With some "Executive nudging" when we announced that Bambu would be used as our internal comms tool, and that we would only be sharing real-time updates via the mobile apps push notifications, we were able to double the # of employees who use the App in addition to the desktop application. Mobile users aside, another positive side effect of using Bambu as an internal comms tool is that it exposes users (the non-social butterflies who don't like to share) to all other content that has been curated into the system and has helped garner more social impressions.
The majority of our employees come from the BabyBoom/Gen X generation and didn't come of age in the world of social media, which has presented some challenges in user adoption rates.
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.
