Constant Contact is a full-featured email marketing solution with capabilities such as social media integration, drag-and-drop editing, and real-time reporting. It is a bulk email tool designed for SMB customers. Since 2019, Constant Contact also offers marketing automation features, a website and landing page builder, and other tools to support midsize businesses.
$12
per month
ReachMail
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
ReachMail focuses on assisting email marketers in achieving delivery success, and present their services a a guide in the ever-changing world of marketing and transactional email. ReachMail includes tools like optimized time-of-day sending, integrated list hygiene and expert support.
$9
per month
Pricing
Constant Contact
ReachMail
Editions & Modules
Lite
Starting at $12.00
per month
Standard
Starting at $35.00
per month
Premium
Starting at $80.00
per month
Basic
$9.00
per month
Prro
$29.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Constant Contact
ReachMail
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
The SMS Marketing tool can be added to any Standard or Premium Constant Contact account. SMS is only available in the US for Standard and Premium paid plans. SMS can be added when logged in to an account after purchase. Plans start at $10/month for up to 500 messages.
Constant Contact:
Program marketing dollars disallowed when organization was absorbed by another entity, so Reachmail's free account was chosen to replace for localized target audiences. Constant Contact is visually more appealing and has more ready-to-use templates, but …
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.
The free Reachmail account (which I have used for several small organizations) is a good tool where there are limited or zero email marketing dollars, a contact audience of up to 5,000 subscribers, and a max of 15,000 monthly emails. The pricing levels are really reasonable for volume requirements, including custom plans for infrequent mailings. If there are constraints (time and/or design experience) that require a large choice of ready-made contemporary templates without graphic or font modifications, then this probably isn't a good email marketing tool.
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.
I have a $10 account, but customer support treat me like a princess. They even added a feature to one page to remedy a problem I was having with that page. They care about their customers.
ReachMail Features (or at least, these are the ones I know they have): WYSIWYG Email Editor, Template Management, Mobile Optimized Emails, Dynamic Content, Subscribe/Unsubscribe, Mailing List Management, Drip Campaigns, Auto-Responders, Image Library, A/B Testing, Customer Surveys, CAN SPAM Compliance, Reporting/Analytics.
These folks know what they’re doing. I can’t speak highly enough about ReachMail.
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.
There are no batch report downloads. When I have multiple variations and waves in a campaign, I have to download reports individually. I'd like for a way to download one report of all sends during a certain time period, or given another set of parameters.
It would save a lot of time if we had the ability to upload multiple images or assets at once.
There's only a two-level "tree" of organization of lists and suppression lists. It would be great if we had the abililty to nest lists into better categories, rather than having to scroll through one giant list of suppressions or deployment lists. Something like a 2015 folder, then inside that a Business Unit folder, then inside that, a Campaign folder, etc. This would make things much easier to find.
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
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.
In my opinion, ReachMail is a good competitor to Mailchimp, probably has more features though and analytics to help organize information. There are also a lot more third party integrations that have helped us compared to other apps that we've tried before, but ReachMail has been the most useful, for me personally and my team
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
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.
None. I signed up for a pay account so only had to spend a dollar for the first month. Even that was a waste as I simply can't send emails out with their forced unsubscribe header. If it was the typical CAN-SPAM footer it would be fine, but it just looks awful.
