Here at TechKnowSys we manage email campaigns on behalf of a variety of clients. One of our clients has about 15 geo-targeted lists, each of which gets a slightly different weekly newsletter. Last week, I setup the entire campaign for immediate delivery. I saw it was all scheduled and starting to be delivered. This week I logged in to ConstantContact.com and saw the notice that I couldn't schedule this week's campaign until I called in and did a list review.  This is fairly routine, the interesting part is Constant Contact decided to suspend the account at the end of the campaign I had scheduled last week, so because of this Constant Contact List Review, the last two segments of the campaign didn't go out.

 I spoke to the Constant Contact Senior Analyst, who told me the review was scheduled because of growth of the list. The only problem with that reason is all of the lists have had only very slow organic growth. For example, since December 2008,  the time of the last List Review, the largest list (just over 50k) grew by about 50 names. The lists are all seasoned and target professionals with professional information. Constant Contacts reports show there are a very low level of spam complaints - usually zero, sometimes one or two.

The Constant Contact analyst did his scans and told me there were no problems. I asked him why it's necessary to involve me in a scan that reported no problems - why can't they do the scan first, then, if there are problems, susptend the account? He said because that's not how the system works - as if it's not their own system, but something that was forced on them.

Constant Contact's policies caused a client's campaign to be suspended in the middle of sending it, even though they have been a customer since 10/07, have had essentially no spam complaints and have had little organic growth over the past 7 months. Again I say this, Constant Contact is a good service, but it is not something to risk your business on. I have found their policies to be random and without recourse.

Despite the Constant Contact misgivings I laid out in my previous post, I use Constant Contact every day - sometimes two or three times a day for different customers. This morning, I logged in and everything worked fine. Just now I tried to login and I am completely unable to even reach their site, due to a DNS problem. Constant Contact has never been unreachable before, but I have to say, this is might inconvenient! According to a site that is the expert in this type of thing (DNSStuff.com), Constant Contact uses two nameservers. They appear to be two different computers (which is good) but both of them are unreachable (which is bad). Here is the verification that there is a problem:
Even if their website itself is doing fine, it's like they changed their phone number without telling anybody - and making it unlisted. So far, they have been down for at least a half hour. I'll note when they come back up again...

I have used Constant Contact for several years across several clients. I send out hundreds of thousands of messages every week to professionals in the insurance field (agents and brokers) and legal field (lawyers and expert witnesses). I find the service generally good, but I have a problem with their policies.

I never used the templates provided by Constant Contact. All of my clients use their own custom designs. I find it easy to upload and manage the different designs. Constant Contact treats the design, the list of contacts to receive the mail and scheduling information as a unit. I think it would be easier if the design were saved on its own and could be associated with a list at the time it's scheduled (the system used by Endai Worldwide), but Constant Contact's architecture is easy enough to get used to.

Even though the service is technically among the best, I cannot recommend Constant Contact, unless you can tolerate a sudden, non-appealable termination of your services. Constant Contact is very strict about spam complaints. Constant Contact allows only one spam report per 1000 addreses in your list. It doesn't take too many people having a bad day to get your list banned. At that point, you can never send email to that list again. There is no flexibility on this, even if you escalate to a supervisor (I've tried).

As an example, I have a client that sends out a large number of emails to expert witnesses on a weekly basis, and has been doing so for over a year at Constant Contact. The list is very mature (it was used for about two years with another provider, prior to Constant Contact) and gets very few complaints. We recently moved a small list of a couple thousand addresses from another service to Constant Contact. The first time we sent to this list, we got a few spam complaints (not unusual when switching services) and, as explained to me by Constant Contact tech support, a single person compained directly to their ISP. This single complaint caused that entire list to get banned. Because that list is banned, we are not able to consolidate on Constant Contact as a single provider, so we will have to look elsewhere.

While Constant Contact's user interface is better than most, their deliverability is not noticeably better than other providers.

Constant Contact does not offer an autoresponder, but their report does tell you, on a link-by-link basis, the email address of any recipient that clicked on a link.

We have quite a bit of experience in e-mail marketing. We send out hundreds of thousands of messages each week to seasoned opt-in lists on behalf of numerous clients. If you are a professional firm, sending e-mails to other professionals, we can probably help you. Give us a call: 973-796-2820.