Constant Contact vs. Freshsales

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

Generally speaking for small to mid sized team I really cannot recommend it enough. It has an excellent feature set, good amount of integrations, fairly customisable and backed by solid support. And the pricing is very competitive too. I feel like if your team is larger than that, you might want to look at other alternatives but for teams that size, its really perfect.

Incentivized

• 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 helps you automate your onboarding process for new leads.
• It has lots of integrations with other apps, so you can interact with other things like calendars and calls.
• It's pretty easy to set sequences so the platform automatically follows up with people for you. This is not only helpful for your sales pipeline, but also for client communication when working on a project that requires their input.

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

• Leads and Contacts do not seem to be adequately defined.
• Reporting is not as robust as we would like it to be
• Integration with FreshDesk is one way - we can see information from FreshDesk to FreshSales but not vice versa

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.

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 would give Freshworks CRM's overall usability a 7 out of 10. Although the software has improved since we first obtained it, it still could use improvements to make functionality more intuitive and easier for the average user. It is not that challenging but there is definitely a learning curve

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

When you initially log in to Freshworks, you get snippets to guide you on how to set up. You have a chat option on every page so you can reach out to the support agent and get your issues resolved in real time. The agents are fast, responsive, and experienced in handling even a person who introduced CRM to the world...

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.

We selected FreshSales because we needed something cheaper and more user-friendly than Salesforce, but we're now in the process of switching to HubSpot because it gives you the best of both worlds - ease of use + scale and reliability

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

• 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

• Increased visibility of open deals, as well as encouraging 'clean' data
• Faster data updating (if Freshsales is used as our sole source of data)
• Some follow-ups are missed, as sales staff forget to create new tasks after each follow up, depending on if the call was answered or not (for example)

Incentivized