Is Constant Contact really worth it?
Constant Contact is a popular email marketing program that has been on the market for over two decades. This tool comes with a wide range of features such as email automation, segmentation and reporting making it suitable for small businesses who help them grow their audiences, take charge of the mail campaigns, create landing pages or increase exposure to events. However, high prices offered by Constant Contact have become an issue for a large number of users.
The fact that Constant Contact does not offer a free trial or trial period is one of the drawbacks of its pricing plans. This means that, from the beginning, if businesses are unsure whether Constant Contact is an appropriate choice for their needs, they must commit to monthly payments which can be a problem for the small businesses.
A new contact is defined as a specific email that you add to your subscribers' profiles. Therefore, if one contact is considered to be a subscriber who appears on multiple lists with the same email address, Constant Contact will interpret them to be multiple contacts in each list which can increase the price of the plan. For this reason the business needs to be careful and need to have clean their lists once in a while to keep their email marketing cost in a budget.
In addition, for companies that need the services of professionals with a view to achieving campaign success, Constant Contact provides additional services. For example, one of the available addon services will be able to help you take advantage of a custom email template starting at 79 USD. To help you deepen your email marketing play and increase it substantially, there are custom consultancy services offered by the experts of Constant Contact that will be made available to you. You can hire someone who will review your campaign and help you with the development of effective campaigns. The pricing starts at 50 USD per month.
Updates in Constant Contact pricing
The recent pricing plans of constant contact is shown below in the table.
- The Email pricing plan, which costs at least $20 a month
- The Email Plus pricing plan, which costs at least $45 a month
This doesn't include all the Constant Contact pricing, there are a number of pricing points which are taken into account while choosing an apt plan for your business. Make sure that you get a good idea of all the basic price options and features offered before going any further. On top of that, the pricing options for Constant Contact are based upon the number of contacts per user.
While price plans can be considered acceptable for SMEs with few contacts, as the number of contacts increases it becomes more and more expensive. For instance, an enterprise with 10,000 contacts would have to pay $195 a month for email and $335 per month for the Email Plus plan. This may be a significant cost for a small or medium sized business, in particular when there are other email marketing tools on the market that offer similar features at a lower price.
Verdict
While Constant Contact offers an extensive range of email marketing tools, the high price plans and supplementary costs make it a costly option for businesses, particularly those with a large number of contacts. Before adopting Constant Contact's pricing plans, it may be worth exploring alternatives in light of other email marketing tools that are currently on the market at a reduced price.
The quality of email automation, where Constant Contact fails miserably, is one of the key features that every business looks at in any email service provider. The triggers are next to nil, and they also have a very confused user interface. In addition, the landing page builder is not useful because it's part of the signup form builder, and there are no customizations.
To put it bluntly, the features offered by Constant Contact are not worth the price they are offering. Similar and more advanced features at a relatively low price point compared with Constant Contact, are available in today's email marketing landscape.
