An Affordable but Imperfect Email Solution for Small to Mid-Sized Businesses
Written: Apr 12 '08 (Updated Apr 12 '08)
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Email marketing can be a cost-effective way to retain and increase revenues for your organization and to streamline communication with your constituents, but it’s difficult to communicate regularly when you have to deal with unwieldy and ever-changing email lists and preferences. Constant Contact offers inexpensive email marketing solutions best suited for small to mid-size businesses. Staff will appreciate the time it saves in list management as well as the quantifiable results available in the report format, though you may experience some frustration with the less than user-friendly email creation tools.
Background and Organizational Use
I work for a small nonprofit organization which has had mixed success with email newsletters. I used to make them in Publisher and email them out to whoever I had in my address book without allowing people the option to opt out of my list or receive my email in text format. After learning a little bit about marketing, I stopped sending out emails entirely. We rebranded and became much more strategic about our marketing activities. I found Constant Contact after some internet searching and talking with my colleagues in the nonprofit world. Constant Contact was the email marketing service of choice mainly because of its low cost which was more than made up for by the time I saved managing lists and preferences.
Your price is based on the number of contacts or responses to surveys you have, with fewer than 500 contacts costing only about $22 a month. Like many internet services, you can also save money by purchasing the service for a longer period of time. I bought a yearly plan for $229 (15% off the monthly rate). Since signing up for this service, we have steadily increased our email communications and contact lists. I send out a monthly newsletter strictly to internal constituents as well as invitations to collaborative, community-wide events. Now that I’ve experienced some success in maintaining some kind of “constant contact” in these arenas, I’m contemplating going live with a newsletter for our donors. I would never attempt to do this without a service like Constant Contact, so it has definitely increased our communications capacity.
While we do some survey work, we don’t use Constant Contact for it. You pay a little more for the survey feature, and I’ve found that Survey Monkey works well for our survey needs.
Creating E-Mails
This is the most buggy and time-consuming part of using the Constant Contact service, but if you can develop a strong template from the start, the initial time investment will usually pay off. You can upload images or use an image link already hosted on the web, and the Constant Contact interface reminds you to do simple things – such as adding a title to your image for those who block images in their emails by default – that help you to create an email that won’t set off the spam alarms. I have never had to download anything from the site in order to successfully create or distribute emails, though I have yet to try copying and pasting HTML directly to Constant Contact’s code pages.
Editing HTML is a little rough, so if you are HTML savvy, you may find that you are creatively restricted by this service. There is some kind of weird bug that changes fonts in my templates with no rhyme or reason to it, and many of our emails have been distributed looking far less professional than they should because of this despite my attempts to edit the code. This is one of the more annoying features of the email creation mode, along with the poor image manipulation. Resizing images really compromises quality, so I recommend this service for people who can at least resize images for the web in Photoshop or the like.
While creating your email, you can send test copies to yourself or others with notes. I didn’t figure this out immediately, and thus created loads of copies of my emails unnecessarily. That is rather time-consuming, so I suggest you identify the test email feature prior to distribution. You can also set the email headers to reply to individuals other than the main account holder, but there is no built-in RSVP feature. I set up basic RSVP forms through www.formassembly.com and linked to that form from the invitation I created through Constant Contact.
Prior to distribution, you can access a basic spam check feature. All of the template emails have built-in forward and opt-out functions which automatically affect your contact lists. If you have the problem of already being blacklisted as a spammer on certain domains, Constant Contact gives you a kind of second chance. Our domain has been attacked and hijacked by a ridiculous number of spammers but Constant Contact distribution seems to get through without issue.
Contact Management and Reports
You can upload your contact lists directly from common software applications like Excel, Outlook and even Quickbooks. We manually entered ours and have about 7 different contact lists. I recommend adding peoples’ first names to the Constant Contact application, because just as with snail mail, personalized emails get more reads and attention than generic ones do. You can keep addresses and other detailed information about your contacts on the site, though we haven’t had the need to do that thus far.
The reporting feature on Constant Contact shows bounces, opt-outs, opens, and clicks in terms of numbers and percentages. This is nice when you’re launching an email campaign and need to demonstrate your success, though here I recommend looking up the figures that are most common in your type of email campaign. You may see surprisingly low open rates that end up looking fabulous in light of what is most common. I like the fact that I can see who clicked on what, which helps me to learn more about what my constituents want to know about.
Overall
We are clearly not using Constant Contact in the most sophisticated ways possible, but we have been able to implement some regular communication with our employees, board members, community members and others because of this service. I think that the price point is reasonable, and the usability is nearly (but not quite what I’d expect) from a service like this.
Four out of five stars overall.
Special thanks to Joubert for adding this online service to the database for me.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
meagandowney
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Member: Meagan Downey
Location: Chicago, IL
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