Constant Contact

I used Constant Contact for approximately one year as part of an internal marketing campaign for a healthcare group. I would suggest avoiding the software and the company altogether and would like to provide a brief explanation to substantiate this.
First, there are free email marketing vendors that provide the same functionality.
Second, the user interface is cumbersome and poorly designed.
Third, their billing policies are aggressive, are not transparent and I believe are illustrative of the companies nature in general. As an example, our company was not going to use the software for a period of 6 months to a year. When I called to inquire about options, it was strongly suggested to me that I do not cancel the account but rather, place it in suspension. I was told that there would be no charge for this and so I did so. However, when I received monthly bills I called back. A representative apologized for this and issued me a refund in the form of a Visa gift card. However, the bills kept coming. When I called back again, another representative informed me that the policy for suspending an account did involve a monthly charge. I explained that this is not what I was told. The representative told me that they would «review the phone call» and consider issuing a credit. I also requested that my account be cancelled completely. I was told that I would receive an email confirmation of cancellation. I then received an email stating that the phone call was reviewed and that a credit would not be issued. I did not, however, receive any email verifying cancellation.
In summary, this is a company that charges a fee for a poorly designed service that you can get for free elsewhere and that adopts what i consider to be a very aggressive and non-​customer friendly billing policy, which I imagine is representative of the companies philosophy in general. I would seek your needs elsewhere.

Constant Contact was a great company to work, but there is very little room for growth. They are the master of the pigeonhole

As a business owner I have used Constant Contact for 10 years. I grow my list organically and over time and I use the service to inform and not sell. Support is top notch… and award winning.
I’ll never use another email service company.

Warning to users of SafeUnsubscribe. If this is the only way to unsubscribe to your emails I report them as spam. If you know my email address I should not have to enter it. If you force me to enter my email address I WILL report your email as SPAM!

Ever since the fb approach of launch it and fix it later, ALL software has become total buggy crap. I can give you 4 – 5 instances of how intuit, hp, & apple have about killed me or our businesses this year. The best one is from Constant Contact though. As you know they are an email program that small biz, non-​profits use to mange their email efforts. Since ~May, Old Town Outfitters was getting an inordinate amount of unsubscribes and spam reports. Comcast. bet even identified
as a serial spammer and block all my emails, even personal ones to friends and employees as spam. I knew something was up but I just figured we are all getting sick of the avalanche of email and unsubscribing more. I even have been to more aggressive on this lately trying to clean up my inbox. BUT, a customer in passing in November says“hey, whenever, you send am email out I get 7 of the”. At fist I was incredulous, thinking no way that could happen but sure enough it was true. Some bugs at constant contact. UNBELIEVABLE! That type of error should NEVER occur at a reputable email manager. Some folks were getting 10 or 11 emails from us whenever we sent one out. Probably lost 100 customers or more due to this bug which is significant on a list of only ~2800 emails and only growing organically at 500/​year. Asked Constant Contact to credit my account for all payments to them sine may (had probably been occurring since nov13). Nothing but Crickets as a response. Take-​away = avoid Constant Contact at all costs. Anyone know a good, reliable email service? Wanna move to my own small island and live off sun and coconuts.

There are many frustrating aspects of working with Constant Contact, but I’m not aware of a better alternative. For our nonprofit professional organization with an email list of about 600, changing from EventBrite to Constant Contact has been a good thing, even though our patience has been tried with various bugs and infelicities in database design and visual layout. Constant Contact does not excel at elegant programming and well-​tested innovation. But again, for organizations that can’t afford something custom-​made, their service is way better than nothing. On the plus side, telephone tech support is available and the people on the phone are patient, friendly, and usually relatively knowledgeable.
Warning to NON-​PROFITS: Registering your organization as a nonprofit with Constant Contact has no effect with respect to getting the nonprofit discount rates. To get the discount, you must send them your IRS tax-​exempt letter, must specifically request the nonprofit discount by phone each time you pay, and you must be vigilant to be sure that you actually get the discount by watching the charges. I suspect that a big percentage of their nonprofit customers think they are getting discounts but are not.

I’ve been using Constant Contact for 2.5 years BECAUSE I HAVE TO at work and I am telling you: STAY AWAY. Their email marketing product is horrendous and their event planning system is not much better. I can’t tell you how many HOURS I have spent on the phone with their technicians, many of whom do not know diddly. (I am on hold with them as I write this — waiting for a rep. to figure out what’s wrong with my email.) On top of this, MANY contacts do not even get the emails due to any number of glitches. One time, and I kid you not, a rep. suggested that I contact each client who didn’t get an email and ask them to use another browser. Huh? I recently looked through my technical support history and there are pages and pages. I have probably spent two weeks on the phone with these guys just holding. I could go on for pages about how terrible this service is, but bone would be protruding from my fingertips. I finally convinced my employer to get rid of CC a few weeks ago — YAY! Problem is that we pay for months in advance and Constant Contact does not refund a dime, so we need to use it up. Booo! P. S. Once they get your money, kiss it goodbye. Yep, I’m still on hold.

This review is for their ‘instant removal’ safeunsubscribe feature.
No one should have to enter their email to get unsubscribed. That is not ‘instant’. The email is already entered after clicking the link to unsubscribe. I wonder if it is for nefarious marking schemes we are required to enter our email address.

This company does not allow you to cancel your month to month service unless you personally CALL THEM. THEN they put you on hold for hours. The only way I was able to cancel this before my cell phone battery went dead was to reverse charges on my credit card. This is FRAUD of the worse kind! If you ever think of canceling your membership just plan for it to be an all day event!

DONT WASTE YOUR TIME! I had over 12,000 contacts when I started with the company. We sent out our first email newsletter and received 44 «spam» reports. Constant Contact told us we had to provide a ridiculous amount of «proof» that these people signed up for our newsletter, including IP addresses (seriously???) and written signatures. We provided them with whatever info we could find but it wasn’t good enough. 44 spam reports out of 12,00 contacts was unacceptable for the first newsletter (they couldn’t even give us one month of a learning curve) and we had no choice but to cancel our services or they would not send out our next newsletter (even though we paid for the whole year). They were not helpful at all! Terrible service! Very disappointing!

Terrible service. They even hold up your newsletters to get your attention and try to sell you another product. Go somewhere else.

I really liked the service for a while. Then, when I got my account to 5600 subscribers, I started to have problems with their management of my list. On my last newsletter, only 10 of my subscribers reported my newsletter as spam. I’m not sure why. I’m sell real estate. They most likely didn’t want the newsletter and just selected spam. Constant Contact at that point said I’d have to leave their service. I was like, huh? Not only that, I tried to delete my email addresses from their website and they said that once you upload the email addresses, they become property of Constant Contact. I can’t delete them EVER! I feel really uncomfortable about this. Though I did enjoy their templates to send out newsletters, in the end, I found them to not be able to handle newsletters for the real estate industry. Since I switched services, I found two really great companies that handle real estate newsletters. Though CC was professional in how they treated me, I do feel like they could have been more forthcoming in how these services worked and didn’t work before taking my $ 170 per month.