Constant Contact vs. Sendblaster vs. Yesmail360i

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

Sendblaster is a great tool for any environment. It's particularly good in organizations that do not have a full featured CRM that manages bulk email marketing and communication. Even if an organization has a great CRM, Sendblaster is still great for those marketing or communication campaigns that go out to recipients who are not already in the CRM, custom groups, bulk sending that you want to keep separate from your other CRM(s), etc.

Incentivized

For all outbound messaging, YesMail is perfect. For Social Media management, or for customer service management, where customers or subscribers need a place to "talk back" to your organization, YesMail might not be the best platform.

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.

• Rendering HTML source code
• Managing mailing lists
• You can control the speed of email broadcasts
• Ease of importing lists

Incentivized

• Large Enterprise email campaigns for Fortune 500 clients.
• Account managers are very easy to work with and contact. I usually can get a response within a few hours to solve an issue.
• Software is very easy to use and ramp up time was short.

• 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 user interface could be more polished. It's very easy to use, but the appearance of the user interface looks a little old fashioned for a desktop software. Of course recipients don't see that interface, so that is not very consequential.

Incentivized

• The ramp up time for new users is pretty poor. Since it is not an intuitive interface non tech savvy users have a hard time getting the most out of it
• A lot of common functionality has to be built in... Which costs extra
• Support isn't the best, they do respond but not at the speed I would like.

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.

I do not have the buying decision to renew/change providers, but do have the ability to provide my feedback to those who do. Yesmail has a lot of kinks that need to be worked out. But, for those that just need to deploy emails, and house subscriptions, this is a decent platform to do so. Companies with more advanced campaign targeting/analysis needs should explore other service providers.

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

Overall it is easy to use but there's several different portals you must log into instead of having everything at your disposal in one place (reporting, emails, extracting data, etc).

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.

Very easy to get a hold of an actual person and quick responses.

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.

Doesn't apply.

Incentivized

We currently use MailChimp for automation campaigns. While there are limitations with MailChimp segmentation, it was much faster to get set up. We still use Yesmail for the bulk of our sending, and could probably do all the same things we do with MailChimp but it would just take a bit longer to get it set up

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

• Customer service was greatly improved because of Sendblaster. We were able to design our communication exactly the way we wanted to improve communication effectiveness.
• Sendblaster helped our brand because email recipients have been very impressed by the polished visual appearance of our outgoing messages, consistent branding and use of logo, wordmark, and other identifiers, etc.
• We saved a lot of money with Sendblaster. Our organization can send unlimited messages, and the Sendblaster software we paid for places no limit on messages sent. So, since there are no ongoing subscription fees or volume fees after paying for the the software, we saved a lot. Other "software as a service" options would have cost a minimum of $50 per month, and potentially a lot more than that for high-volume email communication.

Incentivized

• We spend quite a bit of time troubleshooting, so it has had a negative impact on employee efficiency. When there is an issue we have to give them step by step examples of what went wrong so they can re-create it. 8 times out of 10, they can't recreate the issue.