Constant Contact vs. PageLever (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.

Incentivized

Pagelever has an amazing team that helps clients get what they need. They understand the needs and are there to help you get the benefits you need from your competitors. In comparison with some other vendors we have worked with, they adopted a true partnership approach. They are very good at listening to what we wish to achieve and then helping us tweak the product to meet our goals. We were initially on the Professional plan and even before we eventually upgraded to the more fully-featured Agency plan, they were very willing to work with us to make sure the product did what we needed it to do. Moving to the Agency plan was great since it gave us additional agency features that were very important such as giving our clients automatic acces to their data and allowing us to set up custom KPIs and custom reports.

• 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 has amazing in depth of data about Facebook Pages. For example, it shows us how exactly content is being consumed over time. We can easily see segmented data showing what content is being consumed by which demographic groups. It's also very easy to incorporate all this data into a a usable report which can be share with our clients.
• Analysis with competitive streams: We can compare metrics across client accounts to quickly spot anomalies or see if, for example, low click-through rate is specific to one client, or is common across our account base and possibly due to external factors.
• Very easy to use - great usability. The product is quite flexible and we can easily configure custom reports with dashboards and KPIs that are specific to our client's use cases.
• Client access: Clients can log-in to the system to see customized reports that we configure specifically for them. This is a huge advantage.
• The ability to track changes in metrics over different time periods is also extremely helpful. This is often a key metric for our clients and it is very simple to pul this data from the system.

• 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

• The interface should be a little bit faster. Since the system contains a lot of data, it can be a bit slow to load.

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.

PageLever is a fantastic product for agencies. The ability to customize and easily share metrics with our clients is key. Many other tools are great for corporate use, but PageLever is a particularly effective tool for agencies working with multiple clients.

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.

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.

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

• Great data that can help a lot in decision making. For example, as the system provides very granular, real-time data we can easily see if certain posts / conntent is resonating with the target deomgraphic group or not. If we are trying to appeal to males between the ages of 35 and 45, it's quite simple to see if our messaging is effective in reaching this group. We can do A/B testing and test different things until we find the content that resonates most strongly with this demographic group.