Constant Contact acts as a list manager for 3 major purposes:
- Sending email to recipients
- Conducting surveys
- Marketing events managed via email
They charge based on the number of unique email addresses they store for you, and you can send unlimited emails to those users. They handle unsubscribes and provide code to enable you to encourage website visitors to signup through your website.
For list management, you can add recipients manually or by uploading organized lists of email address with or without other contact info using a spreadsheet (CSV).
They’re support is pretty strong, if occasionally heavy handed. To maintain their high degree of successfully inboxing your emails, they will suspend accounts that have high numbers of spam reports (if a recipient marks your message as spam) as this affects the reputation of their email servers.
For email marketing, they provide a number of email and newsletter templates that can be managed pretty easily. Usually when we send a new email, we’ll copy the previous one, modify the text or HTML and then send. Sometimes it is to a new list, i.e. followup for new customers only, or it might be sent to all lists and all recipients. Some customers highly segment their lists, others just have a few major groupings.
We generally administer the accounts but clients can certainly use it themselves. The dashboard is entirely web based and their phone support is available during business hours.
They offer a free trial for 60 days, after which their pricing is as follows (as of 9/17/11)
Constant Contact Pricing Matrix
Email addresses Monthly
0-500 $15
501-2,500 $30
2,501-5,000 $50
5,001-10,000 $75
10,001-25,000 $150
25,000+ Call for pricing