Constant Contact vs. Full Circle Insights

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

In full disclosure as a professional services marketing agency and consultancy, based on our very positive experience with Full Circle CRM, the robustness of their offering, and our ability to work together, we have entered into a partnership to provide implementation and consulting services in cooperation with Full Circle CRM. Rather than paint this review as biased, I hope that it provides insights into our decision to partner with an impressive and growing company.

• 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.

• Easy to understand data model and attribution model
• Expert implementation support
• Connecting tools to Salesforce as single source of truth

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

• We worked closely with the vendor to add functionality to their current release to allow us to track multiple separate waterfalls simultaneously in order to operationalize the new Sirius Decisions Waterfall model. With the needed changes, the product works as advertised, and is providing the specific results we anticipated. In 6 months, we have not found anything else that we would want to change.

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.

Full Circle CRM has solved a major visibility problem for us that was the result of architectural differences between Eloqua and salesforce.com that cannot be solved by reporting alone. We rely on this visibility as much as the core systems themselves.

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

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.

The vendor worked with us tirelessly, never complaining about our broken processes and bad data. In fact, they went above and beyond their responsibilities to assist us in the process re-engineering and the data clean-up

The instructor was the same person who guided our implementation so they not only knew their application but they were also familiar with our data and our specific configuration and processes within salesforce.com. They were able to provide customized instruction to match our needs and personnel.

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

When I look back at where we were on November 25th compared to where we were on January 25th, having been live for just one month, the difference is amazing. Our management discussions had already moved from discussing the validity of the data to the implications of the insights. As we approach the mid-point in our year, it is difficult to remember the old days when we could not see the road in front of us.

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.

Full Circle's main competitors are standalone reporting tools which perform well and are a good first step into attribution. All tools require significant investment to improve your marketing data model and how you plan and execute campaigns. Full Circle is heavily married to Salesforce and takes advantage of Salesforce's reporting suite vs. visualizing in a standalone tool. This approach also works well if you prefer to visualize data in an alternative tool such as Tableau or Looker. The proprietary approach to visualization used by Bizible and BrightFunnel are less appealing to enterprise companies who are building a modern stack.

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

• 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

• Eliminated underperforming channels such as content syndication which accounted for up to 20% of spend
• Improved funnel velocity and inspection of Marketing to SDR handoffs
• Created an attribution model which provided better transparency to company leadership on marketing performance - unlocked more budget
• Good value product and ROI was positive within a year.

Incentivized