Constant Contact

We use Constant Contact to create our Email Campaigns and also to schedule posts on our social media on a weekly basis.

We had no problems with Constant Contact at all.

Just like any other email marketing tool, they can do the job. No complaints. Email creation for fast email campaign is a breeze. Templates are as well handfuls to choose from. Drag and drop features as well. And it seems that they have much more responsive email system compared to other clients.

Besides, you can use there service for user registration, A/B Testing and surveys.

First off, Constant Contact can do the job. No Problem. The problem comes when you deep dive into there system - technically taxing, not so user friendly interface, hard to implement branding etc...

Bugs, of course. When you drag a widget, it won't appear on the canvass. Exporting HTML version of the email is also a pain.

It integrates with our database, Donor Perfect, and syncs each night, which is helpful. The ability to segment and create lists is good and I appreciate that you cannot accidentally duplicate contacts. It's also nice to be able to schedule social media posts as well off the emails.

Designing emails in Constant Contact is such a pain. It always does SUPER weird things, which I suspect has to do with the way the emails auto code. Back in the day, you used to be able to manually go into the code and change it, which we would do regularly. But then they changed to this "simpler" format, and while it is more user friendly, they took away the option to manually change the code. When we asked them about getting that functionality back, we basically receive a big shrug. So now you have to deal with things like if you copy text from ANYWHERE (even Notepad, which has no formatting) and paste it into your email, the actual font, font color, and font size are NOWHERE NEAR the actual font, font color, and font size you have already in your email, so then you have to select that entire patch of text and redo it so that it matches whatever text you have, and sometimes it randomly bolds things too. It is such a pain. This happens too if God forbid you decide to actually TYPE in the box, the font attributes will all completely change, unless you type in the middle of your paragraph and then delete around it. It's maddening. Additionally, when you send tests to yourself and then forward them, the spacing completely changes, so I have to tell my bosses that no the actual email is not actually going to have giant spaces in it. And when you send an email from Constant Contact that has a background color and forward it (this is in Outlook), the background color comes with it, so you have to manually change the page color of your email, which is difficult for me to teach some of the older staff on our team to do.

Link tracking, see immediate responses easily, some updates to email editor that have helped, look and feel of emails is good, importing and exporting contacts is fairly pain free.

Email editor shortcomings: no way to create reusable items to be used across emails; hard to get to html when editor features are insufficient or inaccurate.

Folder management and use: site does not remember when you work in a folder, always starts at the "All folders" level, forcing repeated navigation steps to continue working in the desired folder.

Contact management is awkward: working with large contact lists to clean up/reorganize is a nearly futile effort if contacts are part of multiple lists.
Even though emails can be scheduled in advance, Contact lists are attached to emails at the time of sending, no option to change this. So when sending a templated email with contact group dependent links and content, there must be a separate email/campaign created, plus a separate contact list to be used with it. Dead lists and emails are a quickly a mile deep if not regularly purged.

Reporting on results over multiple email campaigns appears to be non-existent.

Lack of responsiveness by vendor to problems. Feedback and problem reports get an autogenerated email. No other response is ever apparent.