Constant Contact vs. Qualaroo 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

It makes it easy to move from design to development. We collect highly targeted feedback without organizing a meeting to discuss every iteration, saving time and effort. The comments are open-ended and unorganized. But with survey Nudges, we can ask additional questions about design UI/UX.

• 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.

• Qualaroo’s question engine connects fragmented data points spread across all the customer feedback gathered from varied sources.
• Qualaroo allows us to connect with our customers’ questions directly so that we can focus on the most important ones on priority.
• The insights we get from Qualaroo surveys help us prioritize which hypotheses to formally run as an experiment first, and which to implement straight away.

• 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

• I wish the dashboard was a little more interactive so that you can do some deeper analysis - things like filtering out people who answered a certain way
• I wish the building of the survey "nudge" was easier and more visual - it's a bit clunky and hard to reorder questions.
• I wish there was a way to add more logic into questions, as you have to duplicate questions to get around this which can make the building process difficult

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.

The micro-survey landscape is evolving very quickly and it seems like there is a new entrant almost every month. I'm generally happy with Qualaroo (we got what we expected) and I like the folks on the Qualaroo team (support is fast and friendly and rarely needed), but there haven't been real improvements to the platform in the last eight months. We will be re-assessing Qualaroo's features and price versus other competitors when our current contract is up.

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

We know the value of consumer feedback and believe that users actually want to be a part of the process. With Qualaroo, we have learnt that people like answering certain types of questions, especially if you ask them something about themselves — like what they want most and their motivations behind purchases — they can’t resist typing a response.

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

Incentivized

I've never experienced an outage where Qualaroo was unavailable. I don't think I've even gotten notices for scheduled down/maintenance time. The platform is always available.

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

Our developers complain that Qualaroo is just one of several similar site add-ons that slow down our site performance. I'm skeptical that Qualaroo has any measurable impact on our page load times, but don't have any hard evidence either way. The Qualaroo admin interface and reporting mechanisms are all quick and reliable.

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.

I have only contacted customer support twice, and they have managed to solve my problem every time. There is a slight waiting time between the query and resolution, but other than that I don’t need to contact them time and again to understand things since their help section is sufficient most of the time.

Not available for the Pro edition.

Qualaroo doesn't offer full-blown online training, at least not that I've used or needed. The online help documentation is adequate and Qualaroo-sponsored webinars are informative.

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

Have your technical team set up the "Identify" feature right out of the gate - this is a "fire and forget" feature. Once it's set up, your data is much more valuable. Also, if there are very specific kinds of page targeting you might imagine doing, have a technical person set up and test at least 2-3 examples of using Qualaroo's regular expression features to achieve this targeting. With a couple good examples in place to work from, it becomes much easier to create your own regular expressions for custom targeting.

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.

Qualaroo makes it very easy to launch a quick survey based on templates or custom questions with an intuitive user interface. It is also very flexible and can be easily integrated with AB testing thanks to the advanced options. Reports are getting better but analytics wise it's still not up to the refinement level of SurveyMonkey but it does beat the latter in terms of UI experience. When compared to SurveyGizmo, the flexibility on surveys is what stands out and how easy it is to create different survey flows.

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

Qualaroo's simplicity has its down sides when it comes to scaling. Managing multiple nudges across multiple domains, at least in the Pro edition, is challenging. The active nudges all appear as a single list on the admin home page, automatically grouped by domains. Archived nudges are on a separate tab. It would be helpful to have a folder system to organize nudges. Also, once you have multiple active nudges that are targeted to different sections of your site using regular expressions, it's difficult to keep track of what is appearing where. It's also difficult, if not impossible, to figure out where you may have competing nudges. And there's no ability to assign reporting or configuration access to other members of your team. The Pro edition has a single login, which must be shared if you have multiple staff who want to use Qualaroo.

• 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

• Qualaroo has proven to be extremely useful when it comes to improving conversions.
• We deployed Qualaroo on our website to survey visitors and uncover their pain points about our landing page.
• Using the feedback, we made several critical changes to our page, including the visibility of the CTA button, information on the page, and the quality of pictures. Since the implementation, there has been a significant increase in conversions, and our visitors have been getting a lot more value from the landing page.