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Constant Contact Pricing: Is It Worth The Cost?
Businesses use email marketing to promote their brands and sell their products and services. Email marketing is also an important digital tool for nurturing customer relationships.
When it comes to email marketing tools, Constant Contact is quite a popular name among small business owners. Due to its friendly pricing, small businesses find it a viable option for building an online presence.
However, as it is always prudent to be cautious about where you put your investments, you might still be undecided about whether Constant Contact is worth the cost.
To help you answer this question, we will look at the following:
- A brief description of Constant Contact email marketing software
- An overview of Constant Contact pricing
- An in-depth look at Constant Contact plans
- How to sign up for Constant Contact
- How to cancel your Constant Contact subscription
- Pros and cons of Constant Contact
- Should you get Constant Contact
By the end of this pricing review, you should know all about Constant Contact and how it works. That should help you make a more informed buying decision.
You can also take advantage of Constant Contact’s 60-day free trial (credit card information not needed) to test this platform to your satisfaction.
However, if you are ready to jump in and sign up by the end of the article, you will be entitled to a 30-day money back guarantee. So, no risk involved at all here.
Table of Contents
What Is Constant Contact?
Constant Contact is a marketing tool aimed at helping business people launch and execute email and social media marketing to grow their websites & online stores.
As with other online marketing tools, Constant Contact increases campaign efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and increases the overall ease of managing email marketing as your email list grows. With it, you can send product updates, offer discounts, promote your brand, and track campaign results in real time.
Constant Contact helps businesses to automate sending of personalized emails to customers based on how they interact with a company on its web or offline resources. For instance, in a bid to entice customers to complete a purchase, Constant Contact through the cart abandonment feature, can target a customer with discounts if they add items to their cart but don’t check out.
In addition, with Constant Contact, you can see email opens, clicks, and other actions like shares. You can create an email series to automatically trigger once any of these actions are taken. For instance, a welcome series can trigger when a new subscriber signs up. More so, when emails aren’t opened, you can resend emails automatically to those who received but did not open.
The analytics tool in their email marketing software gives insights that you can use to optimize your campaigns. The insights will show you details such as:
- The best days or time your emails are likely to get the most opens,
- The perfect length for your subject lines,
- The ideal number of images and links to have in your emails
How Much Does Constant Contact Cost?
Constant Contact pricing plans for its main digital marketing offering are as follows:
- The Core plan for $9.99 per month
- The Plus plan for $45 per month.
Besides these two plans, Constant Contact also offers the Sales accelerator, which is an All-in-one CRM, for $449 per month.
An In-depth Review Of Constant Contact Pricing Plans
Constant Contact Core Plan
The Core plan starts at $9.99 and offers over 300 email marketing templates, drag and drop email editor, landing pages, and Facebook and Instagram integration.
With the Constant Contact email marketing solution, you can grow your lists, segment, manage contacts, and access reporting on this tier. However, this plan holds off on some pretty important list management, automation, and contact management features.
List growing features such as Google ads, text message sign-up, and Look-alike Facebook targeting aren’t included in the Core plan. While the other list growth tools available on this tier can help you grow your lists, the missing features could really give your efforts a boost.
For example, think of all the traffic you could be missing out on because you don’t have text sign-up. With all the people accessing emails and the internet on mobile devices, this number could be quite a significant missed opportunity.
The most glaring gap in the Core plan is probably in the automation feature, as it only lets you send automated welcome emails. Without a cart abandonment series, automated email resends to non-openers, and other behavior-based emails, you cannot retarget your customers with personalized conversion messages.
The contact management feature plays a key role in centralizing all your contacts in one place. It also extends that functionality by integrating with your CRM and communication tools. However, in this plan, contact management is limited to basic segmentation, which again denies you the opportunity to convert individuals through personalized messaging.
That being said, I think Constant Contact makes up for these gaps by throwing in a few more useful email marketing features. Features such as video, A/B testing for your subject lines, built-in product recommendations, are all poised to give your email marketing efforts quite a strong boost.
Constant Contact Plus Plan
The Plus plan has everything in Core, in addition to:
- More list-growth tools. These include text message sign up, Google ads, and lookalike ad targeting in Facebook wider automation options. You can send abandoned cart series and retarget non-openers, and send personalized emails on birthdays or anniversaries)
- Automatically generated segments. This helps you know your most engaged, least engaged, and somewhat engaged customers.
- You can also segment your lists based on parameters like one-off, best, recent, and repeat customers. This will help you craft rewards for your best customers, or educate one-off and recent customers with relevant brand content.
- Conversion and sales reporting
- Additional customer service through a personalized kickoff call
- Surveys are also available here but are missing on the core plan.
The Sales Accelerator Plan
The cost of the sales accelerator plan starts at $449 per month. This offering pulls all your customer data, interactions and transactions in one place to facilitate:
- More accurate lead scoring
- Collaboration between sales and marketing on new opportunities
- Creation of advanced automated workflows
- Centralized reporting and analytics
Additional Costs: Event Management
If you run events on the regular, Constant Contact will come in quite handy for managing invitations, event registrations, and ticketing.
Costing for the events feature isn’t part of the main constant contact package though.
For every ticket sold through PayPal, Constant Contact will charge you 2.5% + $0.50 while PayPal will charge you 3.49% + $0.49. Total feels for PayPal transactions will be 5.99% + $0.99.
If payment is through a credit card, Constant Contact will charge you 2.5% + $0.50, and WePay will charge you 2.9% + $0.30. This will add up to 5.4% + $0.80 for each transaction.
How To Sign Up For Constant Contact
To sign up for Constant Contact,
- Go to the Constant Contact website and click the button to sign up
- Create your account by keying in your email and password, then click “continue”.
- This will take you to the second step where you’ll confirm your plan.
- Finally, enter payment details and checkout.
You’ll get a 30-day guarantee on your payment.
Can You Cancel Your Constant Contact Subscription?
Yes. However, Constant Contact does not support self-cancellation. You can only cancel your account with the help of the billing team.
When you contact them, provide your account username and provide reasons for cancellation. You will receive an email confirming your cancellation request.
Be sure to initiate cancellation before expiry of your current billing cycle to avoid incurring extra payments.
Note: after your Constant Contact account has been cancelled, you’ll have 120 days to access your data, after which time all data will be permanently deleted.
Does Constant Contact Have A Free Trial?
Yes, Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial on all plans.
So, while there is no Constant Contact free plan, you can try the paid plans at no cost for two months.
You don’t need a credit card to sign up for the free trial. All you need is to key in your email address (this will be your username), create a password, fill in your name and organization name, then enjoy all of Constant Contact features for 60 days.
Pros and Cons Of Constant Contact
Pros
- High deliverability rates
- Easy to use even if you aren’t technically savvy
- Its interface is user friendly
- It is feature rich, offering a suite of features such as coupons, questionnaires, event management etcetera
- Integrates with social media
- Offers great Market segmentation feature that you can customize
- Email list maker is easy to use and intuitive and offers custom fields
- Campaigns has features that allow you to retarget non-openers with resends
- Helps you to generate creative subject lines
Cons
- Templates aren’t very customizable
- Offers limited automation
- Its price increases as your contacts go up
- You might find the email builder basic if you are looking for a builder with more options and flexibility
- It doesn’t support direct data import from CRM such as salesforce. You can only import directly from Excel.
Bottom Line: Is Constant Contact Worth It?
Constant Contact is a robust and feature-rich email marketing tool. But I cannot claim everyone will find it suitable. But it is definitely a tool to try out if you want to go into email marketing. You will especially find great value in using this software if:
- You are a freelancer with agency clients
- You run events
- You constantly run email marketing campaigns for your ecommerce, affiliate marketing or other business
Here is why you might not find Constant Contact worth it:
- Constant Contact has a wide range of templates for most scenarios. However, depending on your customization requirements, you might find the templates limited in this regard
- In addition, anyone in need of advanced automation workflows may find this tool not worth it. for everyone else, the automation feature will work just fine.
Want to see how Constant Contact’s pricing structure compares to other email marketing solutions? Check out these guides: