Constant Contact vs. Metadata.io vs. MindFire Studio

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

Metadata is well suited when you have a really large ad budget (>50k per month at least). This is because the power of metadata lies in the ability to quickly set up and run a large number of experiments (combinations of channel, audience, creative, and conversion assets). To evaluate these variations, all of them need a large number of impressions, clicks, and conversions to be statistically relevant. If your budget is smaller, you will either have a very small number of experiments (not fully utilizing the power of metadata), or your experiments will not have enough clicks to make informed decisions. We had expected a better explanation of this from metadata before signing up.

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Mindfire is good when using direct mail pieces. You are able to analyze the web and print pieces together. However, it doesn't allow for good scalability of campaigns. While the templates are decent, you do need some coding knowledge to make these campaigns web compliant.

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.

• Best paid ops tool I've ever used (and I've used a lot): we can launch a new LinkedIn & Facebook campaign in minutes.
• Lead gen ops: no more dealing with broken zapier zaps, we are able to automate pushing native lead gen leads directly to our CRM.
• Attribution: see influenced & triggered opportunities/CW deals
• Multivariate testing: Metadata scales audience, ad, creative testing so you learn what performs much faster than manual process

Incentivized

• Mindfire provides a direct correlation to a print piece.

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

• If you don't have a large budget and audience it's hard to meaningfully optimize. If I have 4 ad creatives, to 2 audience groups on FB and LinkedIn, that creates 16 experiments, each of which needs an ample enough budget, say $40/day, that's now $640 per day or $19K per month.
• Limited ability to edit ads after they've been launched. You usually have to stop the ad, clone it, and launch a new campaign.
• Can't add new ads to existing campaigns which limits the ability to optimize. If I start an MD campaign with 4 ads, and in a few weeks we see that one is working well and the other 2 are not performing, I can pause those (or it can autopause by rules), but I can't add 2 more new creatives to the mix against the high performer. I'd have to either stop the high performer, and recreate it in a new campaign (losing likes and comments), OR - leave the high performer in the first campaign, and create. a second campaign with the new ones, which will only optimize against each other.
• Limited to a single conversion event on a landing page. I'm not able to choose either a Demo Request OR a Sign-Up conversion, I can only choose one.
• Google search ads are doable but aren't necessarily more feature-rich or easy-to use than native, so there's no value added to doing it through Metadata in my opinion aside from unifying ad reporting.

Incentivized

• The UI is dated and needs to be updated. The ability to delete elements after publishing and going back to edit mode. Better UX needs to be implemented.

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

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.

Metadata's customer support is a difference-maker! They really do care how well your campaigns perform and will help you improve them.

Incentivized

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 chose [Metadata.io] because it was a smaller company and could get more personalized attention. The price was better and they seemed more eager to support us. The feature set was what we were looking for and not more - it was exactly as robust as we needed it to be. Didn't want to pay for features we weren't going to use.

Incentivized

Mindfire wasn't my choice. The only reason it is being used is because it correlated with direct mail.

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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

• Huge decrease in CPLs, CPMQL and Cost Per Opportunity
• Big improvement in MQL to SQL rates
• 90%+ of our leads from paid social now have valid business emails, before it was like 30%
• Saving us hundreds of hours over the course of the next year doing daily manual optimization and budget management tasks for us so we can focus on strategy and testing new things

Incentivized

• It has been a neutral experience

Incentivized