Item: Constant Contact
Rating: 10
Author: Dan Gospe

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use constant contact to communicate with current clients or people who have signed up to our newsletter. Our newsletter contains stories about data security, new offerings that we have, and other information about our company. We send out newsletter once a quarter. We've gotten a lot of great feedback from our newsletters, and it's nice that we can track who has opened them, and who has clicked which links that are in the letters.

Pros and Cons

Drag and drop editor is simple to use
Tracking of who has opened the newsletter for reading
Tracking of which links are clicked on by individual readers
Comparison of performance to other companies in our market
Tips for improving open rate
Scheduled release of newsletters lets you plan ahead instead of scrambling at the last minute
Tons of templates, or make your own

Sometimes, the drag-and-drop editor will read your "backspace" as to go back a page, so you need to save often
Sometimes, the newsletters go to a recipients' spam
Watch the count of how many contacts you have, because they'll bill you if you go over by 1 person.

Return on Investment

Whenever we send out some marketing, we usually get some conversions
Constant Contact reminds our clients who use us less that we are still around!
There's been no negative impact at all

Alternatives Considered

MailChimp

We like Constant Contact's interface over MailChimps. It's easier to look at for me.

Other Software Used

SolarWinds N-central, Carbonite

Likelihood to Recommend

When you want to reach out to current clients, who have provided email addresses to you, Constant Contact is perfect. It's nice to have one single template that you use for all of your newsletters, and then you can just change the images and the text. It saves a lot of time. We have our staff jot down ideas throughout the quarter that we can use for our quarterly newsletter, and we can edit it on the fly and schedule it to be sent at the appropriate time.

Constant Contact wouldn't be appropriate for marketing to non-clients, since the recipients need to "opt in".

A great way to keep in touch with your clients!

Overall Satisfaction with Constant Contact