Adequate!
November 15, 2018
Adequate!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Constant Contact
As a business, we promote and host clinics for sports and fitness professionals.
We use Constant Contact for two purposes to support that.
Constant Contact is the tool we use to send our pre- and post-clinic communication. It's the platform for having a one-to-many relationship with our customers - directions, reminders, notes, and follow-up.
We also use Constant Contact as a tool to continue engaging with people who have both made purchases and those who are interested in what we're doing but have not yet chosen to make a purchase. That's mostly in our monthly newsletter, but is becoming more important for segmented communication.
We use Constant Contact for two purposes to support that.
Constant Contact is the tool we use to send our pre- and post-clinic communication. It's the platform for having a one-to-many relationship with our customers - directions, reminders, notes, and follow-up.
We also use Constant Contact as a tool to continue engaging with people who have both made purchases and those who are interested in what we're doing but have not yet chosen to make a purchase. That's mostly in our monthly newsletter, but is becoming more important for segmented communication.
- Ease of use. It's simple to use though that comes with some limitations in what we can do easily (like the photo interface - which I find cumbersome and will get to that later). Our SOP for sending clinic emails is really, really short - which means there's less that can go wrong.
- Functionality. Frankly, it does exactly what we need it to do. We send the same email a lot - we have bout 4 emails that we send and we send them a lot. CC makes that really straightforward.
- Ubiquity. Everyone pretty much knows how to use it - we could bring in another user really simply and without any real training.
- 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.
- Positive ROI comes from the simplicity of being able to communicate with anyone using a brand-consistent platform.
- We have been able to actively outreach to our customers and engage prospects using CC. I don't think CC deserves credit for the ability to do so but it's been a great tool for us to easily get started.
- Opportunities for greater ROI would be in allowing it to EASILY connect to Squarespace (our webhost and commerce platform) and Thinkific (our online learning platform). Even with Zapier, it's limited.
I think if I were coming in with nothing in hand, I would have chosen MailChimp over Constant Contact. Constant Contact won because it was the incumbent and we're satisfied.
The time and operating cost of moving from one platform to another was higher than the expected return on that change. I don't think anything about Constant Contact is much better or worse, in my view, than the other.
Pretty lukewarm, I know. But it's honest!
The time and operating cost of moving from one platform to another was higher than the expected return on that change. I don't think anything about Constant Contact is much better or worse, in my view, than the other.
Pretty lukewarm, I know. But it's honest!