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
ShippingEasy
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
ShippingEasy, an Auctane (formerly Stamps.com) company, offers their cloud-based ecommerce shipping platform, providing full support for USPS, UPS, FedEx and integrating with online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Volusion, and others. ShippingEasy allows automated order tracking with fulfillment data, and inventory levels to populate in real time.
$5
per month 50 shipments per month
Pricing
Constant Contact
ShippingEasy
Editions & Modules
Lite
Starting at $12.00
per month
Standard
Starting at $35.00
per month
Premium
Starting at $80.00
per month
Starter
$5.00
per month 50 shipments per month
Basic
$29.00
per month 500 shipments per month.
Plus
$49.00
per month 1,500 shipments per month.
Select
$69.00
per month 3,000 shipments per month.
Premium
$99.00
per month 6,000 shipments per month.
Enterprise
$159.00
per month 10,000 shipments per month.
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Constant Contact
ShippingEasy
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
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.
We used to use the Quickbooks shipping option to ship all of our orders. This was clunky and time-consuming. Especially since Quickbooks is not exactly known for being lightning fast. We would also then have to manually transfer over shipment data into BigCommerce which was …
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.
ShippingEasy is perfect for a small business that needs the inventory system but doesn't want to pay through the nose. The customer service is excellent - they help you in set up, making changes, and make sure you understand how to use it. They save me time in managing our inventory and save me time when there is a problem - I call and get an answer right away. Plus if there is a system wide problem, which there rarely is, they make announcements and keep us up to date during and after
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.
ShippingEasy makes it very easy to set up shipping rules for various scenarios so that shipping is fairly automated. It really is a click and ship type set up.
ShippingEasy integrates into our BigCommerce platform very well. We very rarely have any issues with ShippingEasy syncing orders and shipping status to BigCommerce and vise versa.
ShippingEasy's marketing service is very easy to use. It makes email campaign design extremely easy and aesthetically pleasing and it also makes automated emails very easy to set up as well.
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 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.
ShippingEasy customer support is excellent. We rarely have to wait on hold, the reps are knowledgeable, well trained, well spoken, and understand technical issues. They listen carefully to make sure they understand the issue and check if they do not know something. I feel confident that I am getting correct information and rarely have to make more than one phone call to get an issue corrected.
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
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.
ShippingEasy has really had a positive impact overall on our business. It is very simple to use and the flexibility of the shipping rules has more or less automated shipping. So for a small organization like ourselves, it allows us to reduce overhead by not having to have multiple employees to ship.
It also has helped reduce overhead significantly by switching our email marketing from Constant Contact. It is about a 10th of the price and has more functionality. So that was definitely a no-brainer
All in all, ShippingEasy helps us reduce overhead the most in labor. It is extremely easy to use so a lot less of our time is devoted to shipping concerns such as manually entering shipments like before and making sure shipment information is transferred over to BigCommerce, or doing return labels. Everything integrates so well it is essentially automated.
