Constant Contact Reviews

Their compliance department said my industry sends spam and closed my account, even though I only sent one message in 7 days.

I waited on hold for 2 hours and 47 minutes over six calls and still couldn't get a technical issue resolved.

Because they suddenly closed the account without contacting me first, I lost hundreds of dollars in salaries put into researching their API and setting up templates.

They do not offer true two-factor authentication using the TOTP algorithm, a must for any account with thousands of subscribers. Constant Contact's authentication method is vulnerable to an attack known as a "SIM swap."

Constant Contact's list management UI is not the best. Selecting a list on the Contacts home page does not link you directly to the list, so refreshing the page means you have to re-select the list, which is a couple clicks away. This becomes troublesome when updating contacts in a separate tab and hoping to refresh the list page to see the results.

The UI of the Contact page is also not great. There is a confusion between lists and tags, and the data fields are not organized well.

The reporting features, while useful, lack customizability. More than surface level data analysis needs done with an import into Excel.

The fee structure is based on the number of contacts, so rather than store all of our email contacts on Constant Contacts, we try to add and delete lists to keep the monthly cost down. This can be slightly tedious for the cost-conscious company.

While there is a 60-day free trial, there is no free version for extended use. For the small business, a longer free version during lean months or for further analysis would be helpful.

Poor billing policies. If I prepay for a year of service rather than opt to pay by the month, then my contract should last for 12 months. Constant Contact would notoriously say that their rates had gone up midway through a contract year and I would have to renew months earlier than what I should have.

A little more flexibility in the campaign e-mail design would be helpful.

Not sure if it's possible, but I'd really like the ability to see if the e-mail gets forwarded and an address for who it is forwarded to instead of registering as another view by the original contact.

Reporting system sometimes confusing

There is no notification if and when any new subscribers signed up via our sign up form

Bounced email types are not clear

There could be a "recently used" area in the image library that pulls up recent images.

The folder structure could be improved - being able to sort/search through past sent emails could be easier.

Would be great if we could integrate several accounts into one master account, for easy management by a supervisor.

Faster customer support is necessary. This is the only area that is lacking - the support team is extremely slow and almost negligent in responding to urgent issues.

I have not seen the ability to upload HTML to a Constant Contact newsletter form.

I like that Constant Contact auto-saves my changes but I would also love to be able to see a save button to reassure myself.

I would like to see the ability to create templates via API.

I can't think of anything that needs improvement.

Pricing is a tad high

The templates aren't truly that flexible

Some CRMs offer email campaigns that are industry specific

No built out content for industries

Needs more features.

Almost too simple.

Integration with Facebook.

Integration with Google.

Integrations with Big Commerce.

For a small nonprofit, the price is a little steep for us, especially when compared to similar software programs.

Constant Contact is pretty strict on showing proof of how people signed up to be on your contact list.

It's a little challenging to place images that are not in a standard size or that do not easily fit into a pre-designed template.

The graphic design capabilities when building an email have room for improvement. "Drag and drop" an image block into your template is not always as easy as you'd like it to be.

Mobile-responsiveness is a great feature but could be improved. What looks great on a desktop does not look as great on mobile, and vice versa.

Pricing for different numbers of emails. The break is at 5,001 and I wish that the breaks would be smaller so that our pricing doesn't jump drastically with the addition of only one or two email addresses.

The copy editor is a little stiff. It would be nice to see more flexibility and more fonts to choose from.

A discount for multiple accounts would be nice.

Limited templates.

Somewhat high cost.

Limited automation

User Interface. The interface feels dated - there are a lot of clicks to get from point A to point B, and those often feel like unnecessary extra steps in a world where I'm used to not hitting the 'save' button.

Inserting photos. The photo library really feels like it's out of 2004. It should be totally simple and transparent to drop a new photo into a newsletter rather than uploading it to a library, then editing it in that library, THEN importing it into a newsletter.

The myriad of in-app communication. It gets in the way of using it. I know that the holidays are coming - if I wanted to email people about them, I would. I don't need a pop-up reminder showing up at a random point in my use of the application. I get the same feeling about the upsells, but at least that I understand.

A live map of when and where people are opening the emails

As our company continued to grow, we found it difficult for Constant Contact to handle the size of our database. With about 25,000+ contacts across all companies, we experienced a very high rate of bounce backs. These issues began to flag us in the system.

We also were finding it difficult to sync with our CRM system. With so many contacts in an ever changing industry, it became a lot of work to constantly have to manually edit the information in the system.

Seeing as our portfolio of companies are so diverse, we wanted to be able to accurately (and cleanly) track all campaigns we were hosting. It made it a little difficult within Constant Contact.

If you know how to code, it lacks intuitiveness

Templates are cookie cutter

Lack of additional automation features (or at least, there used to be)

This system is great and I do not have much to say against, I just wish they could improve the search filter of email campaigns made previously, and include a search field that allows you to find campaigns related to the phrase name included in that field of search.

I really don't have any dislikes with the software now that I am familiar with the product.

Clunky functionality

Limited design options