The core features of Constant Contact are its email marketing platform and its various tools, such as its user-friendly email editor, time-saving automations and reporting capabilities. While it was once simply an email marketing platform, it has since grown into a digital marketing suite with various features to help businesses generate leads and drive sales with tis marketing CRM and vast array of integrations.
Email Marketing
Although Constant Contact does more than email marketing, it’s still its primary feature. It offers users the ability to choose from dozens of prebuilt templates and customize them easily with its simple email editor. It has some automations to help reduce the need for hands-on labor as well as landing pages, surveys, analytics and reports.
Email Templates and Layouts
One leading reason why Constant Contact is widely revered as a very beginner-friendly platform is because of its vast library of prebuilt email templates. There, you can view layout templates, which give you the option to choose a certain structure for your email with varying number of columns, text blocks and graphics. You can also choose from predesigned templates by email-type, such as newsletter, sale, event or holiday. Although its predesigned templates are largely dated looking, it does provide a good selection of layouts to choose from which is the real key when building out an email and likely the preferred template-type among marketers.
Automations
Constant Contact offers a few different types of email marketing automations, of which, vary by plan. All plans come with the welcome email automation, which automatically sends an email to any contacts who sign up for your newsletter. Meanwhile, the midtier and top-tier plans also come with email automations, such as the option to create automated email campaigns that send emails based on the number of days that have passed, such as send a follow-up email seven days after the welcome email, or based on whether someone opened your previous email.
Email campaigns aside, it also offers the ability to automatically send an email or short message service (SMS) text message on a contact’s birthday, after a user abandoned their cart on your online store or designated anniversary, such as their membership anniversary. These various, automated emails help businesses stay in touch and remain top of mind, which is a vital aspect of marketing. Keep in mind that Constant Contact connects to Shopify and WooCommerce stores only.
What’s nice is that Constant Contact has a library of automation workflows users can choose from and customize. This can be very helpful and time-saving for those that want a standardized structure in place to follow and update quickly. Of course, it also gives users the option to create a custom workflow or “path.”
Landing Pages
Constant Contact has an easy-to-use landing page builder where users can design a landing page with zero code or design experience. It utilizes a drag-and-drop editor where users can quickly drag blocks, such as text, images and buttons, to their landing page and then customize said blocks. The purpose of this is to give users an easy way of collecting leads on their site. However, the downside of this is that it will be cumbersome to design a landing page with Constant Contact that aligns with your web design. For this reason, it is often advisable to build a landing page through your content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, Shopify or Wix and then connect the landing page to your Constant Contact account.
Analytics and Reports
Data-driven marketing teams and businesses will find the analytics and reporting feature to be a helpful tool in tracking and understanding the performance of their email campaigns and digital marketing efforts. It tracks open rates, bounce rates and shares for every email that is sent automatically. To give users further insight, it also provides industry averages and benchmarks to help give a better idea of how their campaigns are performing compared to other businesses.
Integrations
Constant Contact has nearly 6,000 integrations available, giving users an incredible about of flexibility in expanding the capabilities of their Constant Contact account. For example, it has integrations with all major website platforms and online selling channels, such as Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, WooCommerce, Zapier, eBay and Etsy. Given its vast number of available integrations, it’s not surprising that it seemingly connects with just about any major tool businesses use, such as call tracking tools, accounting software, sales CRMs, human resources (HR) tools and more.
The process of connecting to your chosen integrations is easy. Simply locate the product you wish to connect, click on it and follow the prompts to connect it to your account. Constant Contact does a good job of walking users through the process, so it’s generally straightforward. However, if you run into an issue, support is there to help.
Contact Management
Users can create different contact lists, add tags for quick reference and also create different segments for those on the midtier and top-tier plans. What’s nice is that it makes the process of adding your contact list easy, as it offers a variety of ways to add contacts.
Here are the ways in which users can add new contacts to their Constant Contact account:
- Enter new contacts manually
- Copy and paste contacts
- Upload from a file
- Upload from an integration
- Upload contacts who have previously unsubscribed
Additionally, Constant Contact also offers a few different lead generation tools to help businesses grow their contact list (and business). These tools include text to join, sign-up forms and Facebook Lead Ads.
What’s cool is that as soon as you navigate to your contacts, insights are displayed across the top showing you key stats, such as the number of contacts you have subscribed, your number of new users over the past 30 days, your subscriber growth as a percentage and the total number of contacts who have unsubscribed.
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