Constant Contact

As an email marketing tool, Constant Contact provides a wide range of intuitive marketing applications that are designed to help nonprofits and small businesses to nurture relationships and grow their customer base.

The main solutions include offer management and survey management, reporting and social campaigns, event marketing, and email marketing. You can either find all these functions independently or as part of a suite that is called the Constant Contact Toolkit. The company is owned by eig constant contact.

The email marketing application of Constant Contact allows users to import data from email lists like Microsoft Outlook, and Gmail or from spreadsheets. You can personalize the email signup forms and embed them on Facebook or web pages to build email lists and capture new contacts.

What is Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a robust email marketing and marketing automation tool that helps enterprises to become more proficient in using social advertising and email in acquiring, converting, and retaining customers. This tool comes with a variety of email templates and drag & drop elements and also offers multiple ways of uploading contacts.

Users of Constant Contact also enjoy accessibility to social media features, intuitive event management tools, and a broad range of resources that help businesses to succeed in their marketing efforts. The marketing automation tools of Constant Contact allow users to target and also send personalized email series to a series of contacts, resend the emails to the subscribers who did not open them the first time, and many more.

Constant Contact provides in-depth reporting that allows enterprises to analyze the success of their campaigns over time and see the contacts that are engaged. Constant Contact also offers a mobile application that allows business marketers to create and send emails from their Smartphones. It has email tracking capabilities to help the users to track and monitor the performance of the mails that they send on a real-time basis.

With this brief introduction, you can tell that Constant Contact is among the best email marketing solutions in the market. In the next section of our Constant Contact review, we are going to learn how to use this tool. It is the first point before you can even think of learning about the features of Constant Contact.

How to Use Constant Contact

Constant Contact is easy to use and affordable email marketing tool. There is so much that you can learn by going through various constant contact reviews. It allows users to manage and automate campaigns, create email marketing templates, nurture customer relationships, and build contact lists. In this section, we will help you to learn how to use Constant Contact. You will discover that it is not a hard tool to use even if you are a beginner to this platform.

Account Settings

It is good to learn how you can manage your Constant Contact account settings. After creating your account, you need to set up the settings to help you automate the info that appears in your mails. Click your name in the top right corner and then go to the tab of ‘My Settings.’

Go to ‘Manage My Settings’ and you will discover that there are so many sections that you can modify. Some of them include the organizational privacy policy, organization logo, organization phone. The website address, and organization name.

The other thing you can modify is your signature information that populates the info that appears inside the emails’ signature block. It comprises your email address, name, and image. You can use the Form Name setting to modify the name which appears in the inbox of your contacts. It is advisable to use your business name.

The other account settings that you can edit are how to manage your contacts, the time zone and address of your organization, and opt-in and opt-out confirmation messages. Users can also update the info that appears in the footer of their emails like the unsubscribe comment box and profile link. If you have a problem with this, you can always contact the constant contact customer service.

Add Contacts

Before you begin to send out emails, you should start by building your contact list. This platform gives you three approaches on how to upload contacts. The first one is to copy them and paste directly into your Constant Contact account. You can also import these contacts from an excel spreadsheet or Integrate Constant Contact with a third-party app that is compatible.

It is good to understand that Constant Contact operates as a permission-based email marketing platform. Therefore, you have to receive the consent of the customer before you can add them to your email list. To add the contacts manually, you need to go to ‘Contacts & gt.’ From here, go to Add Contacts and then select the method that you wish to use. You can either type one contact or type and paste multiple contacts at once. All this information among others is available in the Constant Contact tutorial.

If you have saved the contact list as a spreadsheet, the file types that you can upload include .TXT,.VCF, .CSV,.XLSX, and .XLS. To prevent any errors when importing your contacts, try formatting the list with the email address in a single column and all the other information pieces about the contacts in another column.

When importing contact info from third-party software, Constant Contact integrates so well with MailChimp. Microsoft Outlook, and Gmail. If you want to import your contact information from one of the above tools, go to the integration tools, and then follow the instructions.

Create, Edit, & Preview an Email

The next thing is to learn how you can create, edit, and even preview an email in Constant Contact. After creating the contact lists, you are ready to prepare an email that you can send to your list. Click on the Campaigns tab, select Create, and then choose Email.

There are a plethora of email templates including the purpose-built email templates for holidays and restaurant promotions. Once you get the template that you love, you can click on the thumbnail to start editing. These templates render so well on mobile devices and you can always preview that from the respective icon.

The sections of the email are divided into blocks within the template where users can add text and images and change the coloring and background. To adjust the format of your email, all you need to do is drag and drop the components. You will also get the options to use in creating social sharing buttons, social media icons, clickable image links, text links, and calls to action.

There is also a pencil icon in the upper right corner that will help you to give your email a name that is easily recognizable in your account. The name is only for your eyes because what your contacts will see is the content of your email and the subject line. It is a feature that you will not find among most Constant Contact competitors. After you are done with email creation, you are able to preview it and then send a test version for yourself of the email from the ‘Check and amp; preview drop-down menu that is at the top of the screen.

Schedule & Send Emails

The other thing that most people don’t know is how they can schedule and even send emails in Constant Contact. With this platform, you can schedule your emails to send on a later date or even send them immediately. Go to the ‘Campaigns’ tab and choose the ‘Status’ drop-down menu to select an email that you wish to schedule.

Thereafter, you can select the individual email lists or recipients that you wish to send your mails to. Create a subject line for your email, apply the ‘From Name’, and choose the email address that you will be sending the email from, and your reply-to address. You can either choose ‘Schedule for later’ or ‘Send Now.’

If you decide to schedule for a later date, it will prompt you to specify the exact future time and date you want to send the email. If you don’t specify the time, it will default to one hour from the time that you clicked on the Schedule button. All this is possible through the use of constant contact API.

View Analytics

It is also good to learn how you can view your analytics in Constant Contact. You need to know how effective your marketing efforts are by visiting the ‘Reporting’ tab from the Constant Contact homepage. You will be able to view a long list of high-level insights from that point. 

The most engaged subject line will display the most unique opens that the email that you send receives. The opens by device displays the place your contacts are viewing your emails from. There is a visual graph that shows how your emails are different from one another. Just scroll the mouse over your graph and you will see a statistical plotting of each campaign.

Users can also filter by the contact list, time period, and campaign name to get the statistics for a particular email campaign. When you click on the hyperlinked numbers in the graph, you may dig deeper into the report to view details about the contacts that are interacting with your email and how they are doing that. It is possible to export all reports as CSV or Excel files. The Constant Contact salesforce can help you if you get stuck at any point.

Grow Your Constant Contact Subscriber List

Constant Contact offers several tools to help in growing your list. To start, you need to visit the sign-up forms tab that is on the homepage of your account. From here, the users can select from two different tools. The first one is ‘collect sign-up online.’ The tool will help you in embedding a sig-up form on your site, creating a pop-up sign-up form, creating a signup form for the landing page, or even creating a sign-up form for Facebook. The second option is to ‘collect sign-ups offline.’ This offline-signing-up tool enables customers to text a number that can subscribe to your email list.

From the tab of sign-up forms, you may also create a welcome email for your new subscribers and also an email prompting contacts to update their profile information. Constant Contact sends you weekly email digests of the new subscribers and all the opt-outs.

With Constant Contact, you can nurture your relationships and streamline your email campaigns. Here are some of the key features that will make all this happen.

1. Marketing Automation

People can use Constant Contact to set up birthday and anniversary emails, autoresponder series, and welcome emails to be automatically sent to your contacts based on particular triggers. Once you spend some time customizing your emails, you don’t have to worry about them anymore until you are ready to modify your content.

2. Contact Management

The contact management dashboard for this solution gives users all the tools that they require to organize their subscribers in a single contact list. The marketer can either upload a spreadsheet or text file for automatic processing. You can also import your contacts directly from your Outlook account to Gmail. Adding custom fields and tagging contacts is a breeze. Constant Contact also enables users to clean up their lists as it avoids duplicates.

3. Statistical Reporting

Constant Contact gives you highly detailed reports that display statistics on the number of spams opens, opens, forwards, unsubscribes, and even clicks. It displays these statistics graphically in your account. You can easily view these details after Constant Contact log in. The software also gives you the option of customizing your spreadsheet to export any stats that you desire. An activity tab logs updates, removals, exports, and additions.

4. Event Marketing Tools

The event registration application of Constant Contact is an excellent feature for those marketing professionals who want to leverage the power of email marketing in driving attendance at conferences and trade shows.  EventSpot has all the tools that you need to create email invitations and the corresponding homepage and registration form. These online forms streamline the process of event registration and eliminate the need to collect registration info over the phone. It also supports integrations with other event marketing tools like Eventbrite.

5. E-commerce Integrations

Constant Contact provides native integrations with several e-Commerce solutions to allow marketers to see sales and process abandoned cart emails in the Constant Contact dashboard. 

6. Create an Email

One of the best features of Constant Contact is the ability to customize emails to the styles and colors of your brand by simply entering your website URL. If you don’t wish to do that, you can use the drag-and-drop email editor and inbuilt templates of Constant Contact.

Even when using a template, Constant Contact provides so many editing options like inserting videos, images and adding polls, RSVPs, and even donation options. You can edit the elements of every content block or the newsletter as a whole including changing the backgrounds and styles. It is easy to use the platform and all things are self-explanatory and it can take you a few minutes to create your customized emails.

It has dynamic content options that show different content to particular contacts on any criteria that you want. It can be email segments or demographic information like purchase history or location. It is an effective and quick way or targeting particular contact groups with your highly relevant content.

Constant Contact will help you to check our several missing elements like dates, copywriting problems, typos, and missing links. It will help you to make sure that everything is technically correct. It has several scheduling options for emails to optimize your open rate depending on the past behavior of customers. You can also resend the email to those people who did not open it the first time to increase your open rate. You can also get early results for your email campaigns and not wait for all of them to be delivered. Therefore, if you spot an issue, you can make changes in the middle of the campaign.

7. Contact Management

The platform allows you to upload contacts from a file or add them manually. You can also import contacts from other productivity apps and popular email marketing services. The feature is highly helpful if you are already using another email service provider and wish to shift to Constant Contact smoothly and quickly.

Constant Contact will help you manage your contacts and grow your email list. It is good when starting out and you have very few subscribers or when you have little time to dedicate to this type of work. Constant Contact will suggest the actions that you should take and guide you through the whole process. It will not leave you to figure out what you need to do on your own. This is an important feature especially if you are a novice email marketer.

8. Segmentation

Constant Contact allows users to create segments depending on whether a user has clicked, opened, or received your email. It compares to the other email marketing tools that allow you to segment your clients on criteria like the last time they opened your mail and if they bought something or not.

The ability to connect with Shopify and directly using data from your online store to create segments is one of the most useful features of Constant Contact. It enables users to target clients across all the customer lifecycle stages with relevant campaigns that increase the likelihood of purchasing your products or services or re-engaging with your brand.

Constant Contact also comes with basic automation capabilities with a limited number of trigger options. These include subscribers joining a list, link clicks, and email opens.  The other options are ‘unsubscribe from a list’ or ‘make a purchase.’

When a contact takes any of the above three actions, the only available workflow option is sending an email. There isn’t an option of adding them to another list, putting them in a segment, or sending a push SMS or notification to them. Lacking automation functionality implies that you should take action manually when customers behave in a certain manner. Besides, you cannot easily spot the links that assist users to understand the various paths that customers take while making purchases.

9. Reporting

One of the most useful features of Constant Contact is that it shows you how different emails are performing (opens, clicks, bounces, and sends) on a single graph. Therefore, you can compare the success of each metric side by side and also progress over time. For instance, if you discover that your sends have dropped significantly over time, it tells you that you should take the necessary actions to rectify the same.

With every campaign, you may look at more granular details that could be affecting your performance like time sent and the activity of various subscribers.

10. Signup Forms

If you want to manage and grow your email list, you should capture the contact info of the users using the signup forms that are on your website. This platform allows users to create embedded forms, popups, and customized landing pages depending on your business needs. You can customize the landing pages and signup, adjust the background images and style properties to reflect your brand.

Whether you are an experienced marketer or new to email marketing, Constant Contact caters to all your user needs. You will not have a hard time even if you have not used this solution before. Upon your first Constant Contact login, you will be asked several questions so that it can tailor the user experience and dashboard accordingly.

Constant Contact does personalize its main dashboard accordingly depending on the experience that you have with email marketing solutions. It puts the most crucial activities front and center. It also comes along with six major tasks together with a few sentences of explanation and icons so that you don’t feel overwhelmed. Constant Contact also highlights the option of “Create an email” as its first logical step.

With Constant Contact, you will be able to maximize the trends on your website to help you maximize the traffic. It is an excellent way to track the performance of your website, draw in audiences, and also keep them engaged. You will be able to monitor the times and days that your website gets more visitors and whether they are returning or new. You will also note the traffic sources that are bringing in more visitors and their geographical location. You will also know the average time length that visitors spend on your website. It will help you to adjust your content as need be so that you can retain them for a longer period.

The other indicator of performance is the analytics dashboard. It helps you to get all the data that you need in one place. The website analytics of Constant Contact can be accessed from the dashboard before you can seamlessly integrate them into the interface of the website builder. Therefore, there isn’t a need for clicking off to another website or embedding third-party tracking codes. There are no complex tools or confusing jargon in Constant Contact. It just has straightforward and clean charts with easy to understand data points to give you a clear picture of the performance of your website. For more advanced users who wish to link to Google Analytics, you are free to add your tracking code to your website.

The other important thing about Constant Contact performance is Ecommerce Analytics. The platforms allow you to monitor how your online store is performing. To add to the statistics of your website, you can view data that is specific to your eCommerce business and get to understand how perfectly your website is transforming visitors into paying customers. Establish whether it is the right time to stock up or run a sale on specific items with insights like the top-selling products, conversion rate, and total revenue. You will be able to see the revenue that every visitor brings in every day. It will also tell you who your top customers are.

The other important thing about constant contact email marketing is the customer support that it offers to its customers. There is a help option on the horizontal menu of Constant Contact. It means that you can access the icon regardless of the page that you are on and what you are doing. The main dashboard also has the option that will take you straight away to the support options. Most of these experts serve customers from constant contact Loveland.

The knowledge base of Constant Contact has a step by step tutorials and so many in-depth articles for your reference. You can also access the Constant Contact phone number and email options with a lot of ease. The other important support option is being able to ask questions to the other users in the community. It will help you know how you can work around on more specific issues.

Constant Contact also has a live chat option on its dashboard. However, this icon is deeply buried within the help pages which makes it hard to ask the desired questions. The direct support options of Constant Contact are only available at particular times of the day and not 24/7 support.

In case your problem is urgent, you may be forced to wait until the specified period. All in all, you will not fall short of options when it comes to Constant Contact customer support. The support options will also serve you well if you want to learn how to cancel constant contact.