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Terrible UI.
March 01, 2013

Terrible UI.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

  • We used the product to send simple email newsletters with little customization.
  • Some very basic metrics around click-throughs etc. but they offer very little insight.
  • Give good reporting. Reporting is very basic and not really adequate for enterprise use.
  • It gives the overall click through rate, but not the unique click through rate. The same is true for open rate.
  • There is no filtering for bounces or being marked as spam. You would have to look at your reporting and manually extract those individuals.
  • Also, it would be great if it gave a link overview with your click rate in ratio to the links in your email. For instance 7% CTR on an email, 5% was on the call to action, and 2% was on the unsubscribe, etc.
  • Email customizations. Although they do offer a range of different email templates, they are generally not very attractive and are very difficult to customize; there is very litte scope for changing the format.
  • We wanted to send newsletters mentioning promotions or company events to our customer base. It did this effectively enough at a very basic level.
There were two major issues, reporting and deliverability.

- I felt that the reporting was lacking.

- The IP addresses that the emails were sending from were blacklisted due to others sender scores affecting everyone's sender score. "The Constant Contact Effect". Some ISP’s block Constant Contact out of hand and there is almost nothing you can do to get your emails delivered to those recipients, even if they have added your address to an “approved” list.

Product Usage

1 - One developer.
  • To send email newsletters to customer base.

Evaluation and Selection

No - None. First platform.

Implementation

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.
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Self-taught
Yes, it was easy to learn. They have the email creation in a step by step process with instructions and templates.

Support

They didn't really have any formal customer service which was problematic. There were help FAQ’s and you could submit a support ticket. Other than that, there was no premium support and no way to get phone support.

Usability

Product has a really terrible user interface. They need to list things out in steps: Step 1, import contacts. Step 2, design email, Step 3, send.

Within each step, there should be sub-steps and links to FAQ or a how-to document. You have to navigate away from the page you are on in order to learn how to work the feature.

Reliability

No issues with downtime.
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.

Vendor Relationship

It was easy to sign up. You created an account and set up the billing type and frequency package. Everything was handled automatically.