Constant Contact vs. Text-Em-All

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

We have found them to be very good for immediate communication of a brief message to a large number of people at once. Thus, it works perfectly for a neighborhood association. It may not be suitable for longer messages or situations with excessive notifications.

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.

• Scheduled delivery: works as it should every time and is SUPER convenient.
• Mass contact upload: I was able to pull a report to excel and it loaded PERFECTLY to ‘Contacts’
• Feedback: if anyone doesn’t get the message, I will know almost immediately.

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• 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

• My initial concern was regarding the "opt out" feature. I work with the senior population, and many of whom are not that tech-savvy. I have a couple of residents who had unintentionally opted out of messages thinking it was an individual message they were skipping. I would suggest that there be a clarifying question when a user chooses to opt out; it should default to opting out of a single message and survey the user to see if they would like to opt out of receiving additional messages. My residents were wondering why they were missing information and why I hadn't informed them of important dates and events.

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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.

Text-Em-All is a great way to get messages to our associates versus posting on a memo board and hoping they see it. Very efficient. I would recommend this great tool to companies big or small as a form of business related communications. The only thing I would change is the ability to use more characters in the messages. And it would be a plus if you can translate to different languages in the app.

Incentivized

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

It's fantastic. In general, it's a 10. But I give it a 7 because of the way I know it can improve. I save my workers' names in lists...and I have only the first and last name fields to classify them. I grade my workers based on their experiences and based on their jobs; so I use the last name field to group them. This could be easier by you adding another field.

Incentivized

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

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The availability of the text em all is amazing specially when we needed the most to spread out the word on an event that was happening.

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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 love the performance it provided us. Also, want to clarify that the time it takes to send out a mass text is amazing

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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.

There have been few times over the last 18 years that I have had to make changes to our billing or deal with particular tech questions and I have never had any issues with their response time or ability to be helpful once the issues were communicated

Incentivized

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

This was the best way we were able to reach out to everyone we wanted to, being that there were some not tech-sabi elderly people. This was a better way for them to be able to get the information they needed.

Incentivized

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.

Our last provider was costly for what we needed. We need the ability to text, and that's it. The sense was challenging to navigate; I had to sign a one-year contract and pay thousands upfront. Text-em-all has been the best thing.

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Seems like a fair price for the product

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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

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We have never had a problem being able to use Text em all when we needed it

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• 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.

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• We definitely have a higher response rate when we contact applicants via text message; it seems to be the thing people check more often than email now.
• It saves us a lot of time wasted before with "phone tag" when employees are unable to immediately to take a call.

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