Constant Contact vs. Engagor (discontinued)

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.

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Engagor is a very powerful tool for customer care purposes to be able to engage in real-time with your customers. If there are a lot of messages coming in during important peaks throughout, we can easily answer them every 30 seconds.
Engagor isn’t that fit to use for publishing. We mostly use Engagor to reply to messages in real-time. However, for scheduling posts in Engagor, we publish and schedule on the native platform instead.

• 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.

• Real-time mention tracking is a must these days. Quick responsiveness is critical on many social media platforms, especially on Twitter.
• Fast and helpful support via Engagor chat and messages helps a LOT! I think the longest wait time was about 40 seconds for me. My workflow never gets disrupted because of idle sessions.
• Automations can help you a lot. Automated "recipes" are great tools for decreasing your agents' workload, and there are many customizable settings for them.

• 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.

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• The UX is pretty clunky. Engagor only loads about 10 mentions per page, so if my team is behind on tagging/mention resolution by a couple of days, for a global brand that can mean an extra week of work. Would be much easier if the user could choose how many mentions show up on their screen.
• Over the year we have had issues with Engagor's glitches. For example, the user has the capability to publish to a platform (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) through Engagor as the brand. For a couple of the brands we work on, Engagor would show the update as published as one brand, but would actually publish as another. As an agency that handles social media content/community management for several very large brands, we cannot afford to have accidental status updates despite the author's efforts. This happened several times over the course of our experience with Engagor, to a point that we had to forego this feature for those brands and publish natively through the platform.
• It has definitely skewed reporting numbers more than once -- for a set time period (i.e. 30 days, our typical monthly reporting period), the stats for a platform will appear very different from how they display on the native platform itself. For example, on occasion Engagor would load numbers from a Facebook fan count during a 30-day period that did not at all match up with the numbers Facebook showed me. This also applies to the number of overall mentions of a brand/account.
• There is no immediately clear "undo" feature when resolving a mention. There have been times I have bulk-tagged a set of mentions, set all as resolved and then realized that I had made an error, without a very clear way to revert that action.
• Double mentions have shown up, skewing numbers and sentiment/tagging analytics.
• The insights/reporting section could definitely be a little more clear in how it explains metrics (or why the user should care to report these metrics). While we have an analyst on our team who is happy to explain these terms, I can see how some of them would not be intuitive at all to a user who doesn't live and breathe social media analytics. Also, the line graphs can be very difficult to read and parse. If the user downloads a line graph to their desktop from Engagor, it doesn't necessarily show all of the information you need, making it necessary to screengrab rather than downloading a higher-quality visual.

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.

Both the tool and the support that we receive from the customer service department and the customer success manager makes me likely to renew the use of Engagor.

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

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

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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

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.

Sprout Social is good for smaller accounts with limited traffic. Some insights available but often questionable data. Only picks up direct interaction (i.e. doesn't monitor likes or favourites). Sysomos was used for a while, but spent ages defining search times still producing questionable data. Did not properly monitor Facebook interaction and often did not pick up from that platform at all. Customer service only operated in US time (we are UK) which proved increasingly problematic

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

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• 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.

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• Better customer service.
• Better detection of potential crisis on social media which leads to avoiding the crisis or better managing it.