It is our experience that most emails send through Constant Contact are blocked by the largest email providers (Yahoo, MSN, GMail, AOL).

Chris,

Are you saying that you have proof that over 50% of Constant Contact emails are blocked by those 4 providers? That's interesting; I'd like to see your numbers for that.

However, I also noticed that you left three similar comments throughout my blog, and you sell a competing service.

Don't you think that kind of disclosure is important?

I manage both print and Email lists for a number of clients and have found Constant Contact to be among the best vendors. I have been active in Direct Marketing of all types since 1964 and am a firm believer in accurate records.

NO properly mananged Email list and properly designed Email piece should experience large scale interdiction. My records indicate Constant Contact is rarely blocked (less than 3% on average) and that follow up contact with blocked Email addresses eliminates most of those.

The key is to follow up and maintain your Email list. Most people with deliverability problems fail to perform regular and consistent list maintenance.

Hope this helps…

Carl Street
carl_street@cjstreet.com

HI, i found your blog while researching the differences between Aweber and Constant Contact. i LOVE the interface at CC, but i can't seem to find a definite answer to one simple question (perhaps because everyone just KNOWS already and i am a bit dumb at all this!) but in case you can help, here is my question….

I already use Aweber, and i am so annoyed by their lack of support (and the fact that thei sign up form code messes up W3C compliance was the last straw, when they said they basically didn't care!) so i looked into CC and loved it, HOWEVER i need to know if i can do everything in CC that i was doing in Aweber? Mainly the SCHEDULED AUTORESPONDERS, so that after people sign up they get email 1, email 2, email 3 at the timing and intervals preset by me. IS THIS POSSIBLE IN CC?

Grateful for an answer to this if you can help.
Many thanks
Martin

Another of the Constant Contact customers here….I Have used their service and agree with the ease of use and nice design tools. I fear they have lost touch with their customers through marginal customer service response. A series of long waits on hold, curt automated e mail responses, and inflexable policies have me on the look for a new provider. I think the only time you are going to get a call from a "Kevin" is if you are a reseller or in some way going to enhance business growth. Trust me, no one has been calling me. In fact I can't get a live person to talk to. Before adding new features and new costs (survey product now out), they should work on making their core customers feel good about using their existing product. I saw some other options in one of the comments above…so I will check em out. Thanks.

I have been a Topica customer for several months now, and my service has been extremely prompt. Their Customer Service Team helps me when I call – I seem to keep on being forwarded to the same Customer Service guy – Walter or Will. But the service is prompt. I haven't found anything wrong at this point, and the block rate is at 2-3%, but we all know that really depends on the list. Mine is about 3-8 months for a range. Hope this helps.

I am currently looking for a newsletter provider for our not-for-profit organisation and I really love the templates offered with Constant Contact. I need something very easy to use and I think that CC offer this. AWeber has rave reviews and I have to say that I haven't tried it out, but from what I have heard, they only have limited templates and it is difficult to set up unless you are proficient with html. I don't want to have our 5000 subscribers have to re-opt-in either (although for new subscribers, I have no problem with opt-in) so I am guessing that CC fulfils my needs. I just hope that their help service is good cos I'll probably need it.

Incidentally, does anyone here know of any product from which you can email, send bulk html newsletters and have a spreadsheet? Maybe I'm asking for a miracle, but I'm tired of have all my contacts separated into three different places.

Hello,

I recently began using Constant Contact and am impressed with the product. I was wondering if someone could shed some light on one problem I am having. When I send a test email it gets to my Yahoo and Verizon accounts fine, but it never shows up in Gmail. I spoke with tech support and they had no definite answer. Any ideas?

Thank you,
Larry

Larry,

Sometimes there is no real answer. I've had similar oddness w/all email service providers.

Check your junk filter, or it may have been blocked at the ISP level.

Rich

I have been using Constant Contact for about 3 years now and find them the easiest program to use by far, after an extensive testing out of softwares by about 6 other companies. I recently e mailed them a question and they got back to me right away. I do the test e-mails and they show up in my Google mail no problem. I am also looking for an auto responder program though, to try out some free materials, and I don't see that they do this, does the Aweber?

Thanks for the review and the comments. I am evaluating whether to go with AWeber or Constant Contact, and I find Constant Contact WAY easier to use and more beautiful. And last night I discovered they now have Autoresponders as a brand new feature (it's in beta, though)! Great! I think that seals the deal for me!

After starting in 2005, I'm finally getting around to building my newsletter list. Glad I did read the post here, comparing Aweber to Constant Contact was getting overwhelming.

I've used Aweber in the past and most recently canceled the account, the tutorials and trying to schedule time to get on a webinar wasn't going to work for me.

Thank you for sharing this. Impressive you think enough of the service to become a reseller…that's a strong endorsement:)

I have been using Aweber for four years, Vertical Response for three years and Constant Contact for two years.

Aweber's big advantage was autoresponders. Constant Contact now offers this.

In my opinion, Aweber is designed assuming you know HTML. If you don't know HTML, I would only consider it if you plan to send plain text emails. The HTML templates are ancient looking and buggy – I "load in" some of the templates with white background and they show up with black background – I cannot even begin to edit them. Aweber has no way to upload an image — so you need to know how to do that on your website each time as a separate step and copy and paste the URL back in your Aweber message where you want the image to go — not a problem if you only have a logo that you reuse, but a big pain if you want a newsletter with 3-4 pictures in it each time or a video window. The code gets messed up easily — so apostrophe's and dashes end up garbed. Make an edit to the text in HTML and you'll need to repeat the edit in the plain text version. Most of the positive reviews you see online are from people who are affiliates trying to get their affiliate commission.

Constant Contact has better templates, but can still be challenging to use, as you need to update one section of an email at a time (at least on the template my client has). Their autoresponder functionality is new, I have not tried it. They also had no RSS functionality, so you could not have your newsletter archive automatically updated each time you send out a new newsletter.

Vertical Response's templates seem to be oriented to retailers and selling products. I believe they now have a free-form template you can use. They are one of the easier tools to use and the pricing is well-suited to companies with short lists, but pay-per-email model can get expensive with long lists (over a few thousand). Also no RSS.

There is still lots of room for improvement for all these services — getting into landing page, CRM integration, RSS feeds, Twitter and blog integration — be sure to look before you leap.

Rich,
According to the woman at Constant Contact, they only allow 5 messages with their autoresponder system.
If you send out an ezine through CC, how do you handle the list if you use Aweber to send out autoresponder messages? Is there a problem with opt-in confirmation at Aweber if the list signed up through CC?
I agree about the templates. CC is much better which is why I was hoping to use them for my ezine and to build my list. However, I also need more than 5 message to send out ecourses, etc.
Advice?

I have recently started to use Constant Contact (CC) to communicate with our clients and found that gmail is stripping the internal links. When I contacted CC for some help I was told that I had to contact gmail. Does anyone else have this issue?