What is Constant Contact?
Constant Contact tutorial
July 11, 2021
8 minute reading
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective tools that businesses have, allowing brands to distribute messages directly into a customer's inbox, which is what brings customers to tools like Constant Contact.
There's no hoping that users search for the right keywords or stop to view an ad in a social feed while they're scrolling; that message is there. And when you're able to combine that with audience segmentation features that allow you to deliver relevant messages to each group of users, the efficacy increases. This makes email marketing almost undeniably valuable.
We know that every $1 you spend on email marketing can yield up to $42 in ROI, and 80% of marketers and small businesses say that email drives customer acquisition and sales. Since 61% of consumers like receiving promo emails from brands at least once a week, there's so much opportunity for ongoing engagement, brand building, and sales promotions.
Constant Contact is an outstanding email marketing tool, designed to help businesses improve their email marketing efforts. They allow you to send targeted, segmented, and personalized emails to increase the relevance of the content with the user, offer advanced automation features, and include detailed analytics.
We're going to dive deep into how to use the advanced and automated email features to help your business.
Constant Contact Overview
1. What is Constant Contact?
Constant Contact offers a powerful suite of digital marketing tools to help small businesses run smoother, improve their online marketing, and perform more efficiently.
While it may be best known for its extensive email marketing abilities, it also makes it easy for small businesses with no technical or strategic experience to do the following:
- Online eCommerce store creation and management
- Website builders
- Social media posting and monitoring
While all of these features are incredibly impressive and can be undeniably useful, in this guide we want to focus on its primary core function: email marketing.
Email marketing is a powerhouse for small and large businesses alike, especially considering the following:
- 81% of small and medium businesses use email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% use it for retention purposes
- Email open rates average around 21%, which is exceptionally higher than CTRs for other ad platforms; welcome emails have an average open rate of over 80%
- 60% of consumers have made a purchase based on an email they've received
- 61% of customers enjoy receiving weekly promotional marketing emails
2. How does Constant Contact work
Constant Contact's email marketing features provide advanced functionality to small businesses looking to grow their brand, drive sales, and nurture leads with email campaigns.
These features allow brands to effectively promote every aspect of their brand, including informing customers about business or product updates, offering discounts, sharing valuable resources or information. The platform also makes it easy for brands to track the results of their email campaigns in real-time and in great detail.
Email marketing features and uses
Constant Contact has intuitive marketing applications on their desktop site that can help you build your customer list, get in touch with them through email marketing campaigns, drive sales with ongoing communication, and nurture relationships.
There's so much flexibility in how you use the tool, especially considering there are hundreds of templates for email campaigns, landing pages, and lead forms. Once everything is up and running, automation can streamline the process.
You can, for example, import customer data from spreadsheets, email platforms like Gmail, or manual upload. If you have landing pages on Facebook or your site, all customer data can be sent directly to your email lists as soon as they convert. And as soon as customers are in your database on email lists, they can start receiving campaigns right away that are already locked and loaded in advance.
Constant Contact's email marketing tools allow small businesses to do the following:
- Create gorgeous emails either from scratch or premade, customizable templates
- Segment your audiences based on characteristics like user behavior, purchase behavior, or demographics
- Create triggered autoresponder series to deliver relevant information to each user, like welcome emails or abandoned cart series
- Redistribute emails to those who haven't opened them yet
- Utilize list-building features to expand your reach with new clients
- Send out surveys and polls to collect data directly from the customers
- Distribute coupon codes or exclusive deals
- A/B testing for different email subject lines to see what increases open rates
- Manage, monitor, and assess the progress of your email marketing campaigns by tracking results in real-time, including open, click, and sign-up rates
If you're feeling intimidated, the good news is the Constant Contact offers online and in-person training and seminars to teach clients how to get the most out of the tool. It's user-friendly for everyone, regardless of skill level.
Here's the best part: Constant Contact relies heavily on automation to streamline the process for you. And, since marketing automation offers incredible benefits like saved time, increases in lead generation and revenue, customer retention, and shortened sales cycles, those benefits can be passed directly to your business.
3. Constant Contact vs. MailChimp
There are several popular email marketing tools available on the market.
Both have their merits, and both market heavily towards small and medium businesses at relatively affordable price points. They have a few key differences, however, including the following:
- Constant Contact's list building and contact organization features are more intuitive. MailChimp uses a system encouraging one "master list" with different segments and tags, which can be confusing. "Segments" are segmented lists, while "tags" act more like internal notes.
- MailChimp's email marketing templates are a little more "polished," and are user-friendly to customize. These include block-based, drag-and-drop templates. On Constant Contact, this drag-and-drop technology keeps design work easy by letting you add blocks into the template. The templates themselves, however, are relatively cookie cutter and advanced customization options aren't available.
- Both have solid analytics platforms. That said, Constant Contact gives you more data in a single dashboard and graphic, making it easier to access. Constant Contact, however, doesn't allow you to hide metrics from reporting which can be irritating if you only want to focus on certain KPIs.
- MailChimp has an edge in automation over Constant Contact with a full automation suite. Many of their automation features are even available with their free plan. Constant Contact requires you to pay at least $45 a month for some automation features.
- Both allow for A/B testing, but MailChimp's A/B testing is more extensive. You can only A/B test subject lines with Constant Contact, while MailChimp allows you to change variations like subject line, body content, send time, or the "from" field." You can also determine how many users will get the test campaign.
- Constant Contact has a higher deliverability rate than MailChimp. As of 2020, Constant Contact's deliverability rate was 89.4% and MailChimp's was 81.6%.
- Constant Contact has superior customer service. That being said, MailChimp has solid service, too.
- MailChimp is more affordable. They have a free plan that allows for 2,000 subscribers and a 12K per month email sending capacity. Paid plans start at $10. Constant Contact doesn't have a free plan, and costs start at $20 a month for their basic plan.
- Constant Contact's extra features include more flexible survey options, the ability to collect and track donations securely on a landing page.
- MailChimp's extra features include old-school postcards and the ability to combine remarketing ads on Google, Facebook, and Instagram Ads.
4. Constant Contact integrations
One exceptional benefit of Constant Contact is the number of integrations they offer to users. Integrations allow you to automate everything more effectively while receiving more actionable data along the way. Depending on the integration, you can do everything from sync contacts from third-party sign-up forms to add in additional behaviors for new triggered campaigns.
Here's an example: A local fitness studio that uses the MindBody tool to allow members to manage their memberships, book classes, and purchase merchandise could take advantage of a native Constant Contact integration.
When members book a yoga class, they get an email right away confirming the appointment, and you can have it set up so they can get an email reminder a day or hour before. You can also have all new member information synced to your email list right away, and you can see which promotions drive the most clicks and actions (like a booked personal training or an extra visit to the gym).
Why are integrations important?
Integrations allow you to have a more cohesive, streamlined marketing process, with data and actions moving between platforms instead of having everything stay disjointed and isolated.
You're not needing to look through your customer list to see who likes boxing classes instead of yoga so you can then individually add in email addresses for each user who would be interested in an upcoming boxing boot camp; the integration handles this for you.
It's essential to remember that while email marketing can provide almost unbelievable returns, this is typically only true when it's executed well. You need to be able to deliver relevant messages to the right users at the right time; this is where automation and integrations can make a world of difference.
And as far as integrations go, Constant Contact clearly understands this value. They have over 200 different apps in a wide range of categories. You can view the entire list here, but in this guide, we're going to take a look at some of the most useful integrations they offer.
Contact growth & lead generation
These integrations make it easier for you to streamline customer acquisition and lead generation funnels.
Constant Contact for Facebook
Facebook and Instagram (which are integrated sister companies) are powerful organic and paid social platforms. Constant Contact can integrate with your Facebook page directly to sync data from your social media to leverage email marketing.
Features of this integration include:
- Streamlined creation of lookalike audiences based on your existing audience
- Get additional data into the performance of your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns
- Have new contacts (including from Lead Gen Ads) pushed straight to your mailing list
Constant Contact for Shopify
Shopify is a popular eCommerce platform for SMBs, so a direct integration with Constant Contact can be incredibly beneficial. With this integration, Constant Contact can automatically gain access to data about user behavior on your site, including what pages users have viewed or what products they have (or haven't) purchased.
Features of the integration include:
- The ability to send branded, customized abandoned cart emails to relevant customers and track the efficacy
- Use drag-and-drop design tools to place product or discount coupons into any email, customizing the details
- Create pre-defined lists of high-value customers, first-time customers, repeat customers, disengaged customers, and warm leads to increase messaging relevance
- Promote goods and services available in your store with a product block in emails
Constant Contact for WordPress
WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) that's used to build entire websites. The direct WordPress integration focuses on lead collection through on-site forms. It offers the following features and benefits:
- Use drag-and-drop tools to create the exact forms you need to generate leads
- Create forms that seamlessly fit in with the look and style of your overall WordPress site
- Have new email addresses captured through the forms be sent to your Constant Contact email list automatically
eCommerce integrations
Online shops have a lot of moving pieces, and all user actions on your site can be relevant clues that could help you send them the right messages at the right time.
There are two eCommerce integrations to look at: One for Quickbooks, and one for Shopify.
Quickbooks Online for Constant Contact by Cazoomi
Cazoomi's Sync Apps integration allows you to connect Quickbooks (which tracks transactions, invoices, and payments from customers) to your Constant Contact database.
This is how it can benefit your brand:
- Automatically push new customers through to your Constant Contact list, but only if they don't already exist in your database; measures are in place to prevent double entries
- Create campaigns based on recent customer actions like items purchased, date of checkout, and other sales triggers
- Keeps your data list fresh and organized while giving you access to additional data based on customer interactions
Shopify eCommerce integration
We've already discussed how Shopify can integrate with Constant Contact, but this integration is specifically for their eCommerce app. The focus of this integration is to sync up your contact data with Shopify and Constant Contact for one seamless database.
These are the core features included:
- You can sync unlimited contacts from the two platforms, creating one fluid database that's always up to date
- Set the stage for email marketing list segmentation and targeted campaigns based on purchasing behavior
- There are no more double entries needed for uploading customer lists, allowing for automatic autoresponder series to take place right away after a sign-up or a purchase
Contact databases and CRMs
Many businesses utilize customer relationship management software (CRMs) or contact databases to store valuable data like user information, user purchase history, and the past history of customer service interactions.
These are powerful tools that can help your brand not only sell but deliver exceptional customer experiences. Integrations between CRMs and contact databases, for example, are likely the reason behind getting an email to follow up after you've called customer service to remedy a situation.
The Salesforce CRM and MailMunch integrations are two of the most valuable.
Salesforce CRM by SyncApps
SyncApps has some great integrations with Constant Contact, and their Salesforce CRM integration is no different. The Salesforce CRM is powerful, with far-reaching, extensive data; the ability to tap into that when creating segmented campaigns is a massive advantage.
The key features include the following:
- Sync data from campaigns, events, customer lists, leads, accounts, and custom fields between the two platforms
- Automatically sync opt-out data across both platforms, regardless of where the opt-out occurred originally
- Create unique audience segments based on data from Salesforce, including stage of the buyer's journey, recent interactions with a brand, product interest, and more
- Use Salesforce forecasting capabilities to improve your email marketing campaigns overall
MailMunch
MailMunch's central focus is collecting user information while they're on your site through opt-in and lead forms. These include pop-ups, sidebar, or embedded forms.
Here are the standout features that come with the MailMunch and Constant Contact integration:
- Grow your email list with different easy-to-create form types, the data from which are then sent straight to Constant Contact
- All forms are responsive and mobile-optimized, ensuring that you're not missing out on any potential new leads
- You can even have different opt-in forms appear on separate pages to increase overall responsiveness
- Get in-depth analytics to determine which pages, posts, and forms are most effective
Blogging & content management integrations
Content marketing is often a major source of lead generation for both B2C and B2B brands, drawing users in through blogs, lead magnets, and video content. Having integrations in place to streamline this process and sync the data with Constant Contact can be invaluable.
Viewbix
If you're using video marketing to attract new potential leads and customers, it's essential to optimize them to actually drive those conversions. With Viewbix, you can add calls to action (CTAs) and interactive links to your existing videos.
With the Viewbix and Constant Contact integration, you can:
- Add Content Contact sign-up forms to any video
- Have the data from these forms be sent directly to the Constant Contact database in real-time
Privy
When you're using blog posts and on-site content to attract site traffic with the hopes of generating leads, you'll want to make it as easy as possible for users to share their information with you. Privy has exit-intent-driven website pop-ups and banners that businesses can add to their site to capture users with appealing offers in exchange for their email addresses before they leave the site. This can reduce abandonment rates while actively building your email list.
The highlights of the Privy and Constant Contact integration include:
- Sending new contact information to Constant Contact
- Automatically using list-based targeting centered around what opt-in the user converted on or what campaign they saw
- Distributing customizable autoresponders and automated email campaigns when users join your email list
Social media integrations
Social media marketing is an important lead generation and relationship-building tool, regardless of which platform you choose. Having integrations to help monitor, respond to, and act on your customers' interactions at different stages of the funnel based on social activity can be widely beneficial.
There are two key social media integrations to look at here: the Constant Contact app for Hootsuite, and LIFT- FanCONNECT.
Constant Contact app for HootSuite
HootSuite is a social media marketing, monitoring, and publishing tool, and it's one of the most popular tools in its industry. They have detailed analytics and social media dashboards that allow you to schedule, publish, and engage with content on your Page.
- Monitor Constant Contact email marketing campaigns within Hootsuite's dashboard
- Share Constant Contact campaigns to social media sites like Facebook or Twitter
- See a big-picture view of your cross-platform campaigns in a single dashboard
LIFT- FanCONNECT
FanCONNECT is a tool that helps you build targeted customer lists from Facebook so you can send trackable offers to your customers. This can help you incentivize and track offline sales simultaneously, turning organic marketing from Facebook into a sales-building opportunity.
The core benefits of the LIFT- FanCONNECT and Constant Contact integration include the following:
- Integrate to build customer lists quickly
- Distribute personalized coupon offers to your customer lists
- Gather email addresses that can be pushed straight to your Constant Contact account
Mobile integrations
Over half of all internet traffic currently comes from mobile, which means that you as a business owner or advertiser, and your customers are both on mobile. It also means that everyone involves prefers more streamlined, advanced technology, even when they're shopping in-store.
Mobile integrations are the clear solution for this, and we're going to take a look at two important mobile integrations: Contact Contact's List Builder and Landing Pages by LeadPages.
Constant Contact's list builder for iOS and Android
This app allows you to collect email addresses and other lead information in person without asking users to put pen to paper to share it with you. They can enter their information through the app on an iPad or other tablet mobile device instead.
These are the core benefits of this integration:
- Collect customer information in-person in a secure, streamlined way
- Have all that user data go straight to your Constant Contact account
- If the tablet is offline, the app will store the data and sync next time the device is connected to the internet
- Easy-to-customize preset forms with adjustable fields of information, brand logos, greetings, and promotional messages
Landing pages by LeadPages
LeadPages is an outstanding lead generation tool that can help you create and test high-converting landing pages. They have plenty of customizable templates and advanced marketing features.
Their integration with Constant Contact includes the following features:
- Access to create unlimited pages and domains that can accommodate an unlimited amount of traffic
- Collect lead information from any site with embeddable lead forms
- All forms are entirely mobile-friendly and easy for your audience to complete on phones and tablets alike
- Easy split testing features to assess the efficacy of your lead forms
- LeadPage's "digital asset delivery system" will send lead magnets or opt-in bribes to new subscribers to incentivize further conversion.
5. Getting started with Constant Contact
Ready to use Constant Contact for your email marketing? The following sections will walk you through the basic tasks you'll want to learn how to do in order to use the tool.
Add your contacts
When you view the "Contacts" page in the dashboard, you'll see a blue "Add Contacts" prompt at the top of the page. Click on it.
You'll then see the option to upload your contacts in several different ways. These will include the following:
- Create a contact manually
- Enter (or paste) multiple contacts and their information into the system at a time
- Upload a list from a customer file, like an Excel or Google Sheets file
- Import contacts from integrated tools
After you've chosen a way to upload your contacts, you'll be asked if you want to add them to different lists. You could, for example, have an "all customers" list. You might also have a "VIP" list or a "new leads" list. These can be adjusted at any time, but they allow you to send out more relevant messaging to your subscribers.
If you ever need to update your contact list to remove unsubscribed users, you can upload an unsubscribed file to remove users from your active email lists.
Create and send your first email
To create an email, you'll head to the "Campaigns" tab in Constant Contact. This can be found along the top navigation bar.
Once on the Campaigns page, you'll see an orange "Create" button in the top right corner. Click that.
You can then choose to create an email, email automation, social media post, event, ad, or more. Go ahead and select email.
You'll see a list of templates that are available to choose from. Pick the one that most aligns with the layout that you're looking for.
You can then drop images and text into the available boxes in the template. The templates are all customizable using drag-and-drop technology. You can also do the following:
- Add action blocks, like the option to RSVP, make a donation, or take a poll
- Feature products with integrations like those from Shopify
- Add in clickable CTA buttons
Once your email is exactly how you want it, click "Continue." You'll then schedule your email, select which list you want the emails to go to, add in a subject line, and choose the name you want the email to be sent from.
Finally, preview the email, and then either schedule it or send it immediately.
View your reports
After sending out your first email campaigns, head to the "Reports" tab in the top navigation bar.
The reports page will give you insights into data like open rates, clicks, bounce rates, and unopen rates for desktop, tablet, and mobile. You can customize the time period of the data (you may prefer, for example, to view all data over the past twelve months), and look at graphs showing trends over time.
When you scroll down, you'll see a table breakdown showing the performance of each individual campaign that you've sent.
If you want to download this information, you can click on "Export All," or download information only from certain campaigns by clicking on the checkbox next to it before downloading.
Ways to grow your contact list
Want to grow your client list quickly?
First, go back to your Contacts page, and choose "Add Contacts." You'll see the following options along the bottom of the pop-up:
- Create sign-up forms to generate more contacts on your site; users who complete the forms will automatically be added to your site
- Sync up your account with Facebook to get access to your Facebook Lead form submissions
- You can use the Join My List app on Facebook to encourage users to share their email information so you can get in touch
These methods all work.
To create new sign-up forms, you can also go to the Sign-Up Forms page by clicking on the tab by the same name in the top navigation bar.
Here, you'll choose from pop-up forms, inline forms, or landing pages.
The creation process here is similar to the email creation process. You'll choose from a template and customize the text and fields of information requested.
Pop-up and inline forms can be embedded on your website. Landing pages can be added to your site or linked to from your site.
6. Constant Contact Pros and Cons
Constant Contact is clearly a strong tool that can help business owners and marketers in a number of ways, particularly when it comes to their email marketing campaigns.
If you're deciding whether or not it's the right tool for you, it's always good to weigh the pros and cons. Let's take a look at the biggest advantages and disadvantages of Constant Contact.
The pros of Constant Contact
Interested in investing in Constant Contact? These are the biggest pros of the platform:
- It has an intuitive interface. It has an exceptionally user-friendly interface, which is a big deal. There isn't a significant learning curve involved, and you can dive right in even if you don't have much email marketing knowledge.
- It has outstanding deliverability rates. It has an industry-leading rate of deliverability, meaning that those emails are more likely to be received by users and less likely to wind up in the dreaded spam folder. That's the goal.
- There are extensive integrations. As we've discussed above, there are a large number of integrations available (over hundreds) with Constant Contact. You can have the tool work with a large number of platforms that you're already working with, including Google Analytics, third-party tools, and more. The more streamlined your marketing efforts are, the better.
- It has a full suite of features. There are a ton of marketing features available here even outside of email marketing. You can create lead forms, landing pages, and more. And the email marketing features are incredible, with in-depth analytics, split testing, and excellent list segmentation options.
- It can integrate with social media marketing. Social media marketing and email marketing are two platforms where we're regularly engaging with our users for both selling purposes and relationship-building efforts. The ability to integrate the two is a massive advantage.
The cons of Constant Contact
While Constant Contact has a large number of advantages, there are some challenges that you may want to consider as well.
These are the significant cons of Constant Contact:
- It has a high price point. Compared to other tools that offer similar features, the price point of Constant Contact is on the high side, which increases with the number of contacts added. This may be restrictive to small business owners. One review online also cited a poor billing policy, where they paid for a 12-month contract but that they needed to renew earlier due to raised pricing by the company.
- Templates lack advanced customization. While we do want to acknowledge that Constant Contact has a large library of different templates that are customizable, they don't have truly advanced customization options like some competitors.
- Automation lacks advanced customization. Basic automation features are included and available through Constant Contact, all of which are useful. There is, however, a lack of customization available that would be needed to accommodate more advanced workflows. While this likely wouldn't impact small businesses who want more simple automation, businesses who want to dive deep into complex funnels may want to consider another tool.
Keep in mind that if you're on the fence after reading our pros and cons, Constant Contact does offer a free trial for sixty days. You can dive in and see how you like it before investing.
Conclusion
Constant Contact is a powerful marketing tool, with advanced email marketing methods that are particularly valuable to small and medium businesses. You can use this tool to not only create high-converting emails that look great on an automated basis, but you can also use the tool to build your email list in a number of different ways, too.
The analytics available through Constant Contact is also incredible, especially since you can integrate the tool with so many others that you're already using. This allows you to create data-driven campaigns that hit the mark every time, with relevant emails that your audience is sure to love.
