Top 7 Alternatives to Constant Contact

This post was updated on 9/1/2011:

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Constant Contact, it is one of the leaders in e-mail marketing services. They allow small businesses to create and manage e-mail lists and professional looking newsletters. The site boasts to have serviced over 130,000 customers (Update: As of June 2009, they've almost doubled to 250,000 customers). The company went public earlier this month and nearly doubled its offering price on the first day.

We use the service ourselves at Team and a Dream and are extremely satisfied with it (Click on the banner above for a free 60-day trail). However, I wondered what other companies offered the same service after I heard about the IPO. After talking to some of our clients and browsing through the web, I’ve compiled a list of seven alternatives to Constant Contact (in no particular order).

1. iContact – In addition to creating, sending and tracking e-mail newsletters, you can also create and send surveys, auto-responders, blogs, and RSS feeds. iContact offers a free trial without requiring a credit card and the next level starts at $9.95 a month. This service charges you on the number of contacts you have - not the number of e-mails sent or a flat fee basis. The platform also works with Macs (not common with other platforms).They've also partnered with a third party to improve how many e-mails get through to recipients. Look for the 20% discount if you're a non-profit. The service recently won the Web 2.0 Award for "Best Marketing Application."
2. VerticalResponse – This company offers a pay as you go model or a monthly subscription. They seem to be one of the few services to integrate with Salesforce and Intuit. In addition to offering surveys, they also allow you to send postcards from your browser. You can customize your postcards online and VerticalReponse will send them for you - offering a unique and an additional way to get in touch with your prospects or customers. Their rates are comparable - with $10/month for up to 500 emails and $120/month for as many as 16k emails. 
3. Campaigner - Tailoring themselves for small businesses who are new to email marketing, this company charges a monthly subscription depending on many email addresses you have in your list. The lowest plan is $10/month for 500 contacts and the highest is only $55/month for up to 10,000 contacts. The features seem standard - email templates, easy to use email editor, signup forms, tracking and reporting, etc. 
4. SimplyCast – This service is offering an unlimited free-for life account for individuals/businesses that send less than one thousand emails a month that you can try without adding a credit card during the sign up process. Their monthly subscriptions start at $4.95 for 1k emails and go up to #38.95 for 30k emails. Their most popular is $28.95 for 20k. They also offer discounts if you prepary. One of their most noteworthy features is how they allow you to integrate with CRM solutions such as Salesforce, Drupal & WordPress. Finally, they seem to offer every service imaginable to help businesses such as Survey Marketing, Event Marketing, SMS marketing, Fax Marketing, even Twitter Marketing.
   
5. MailChimp - Offering a pay-per-email or a monthly plan option, MailChimp lets you customize how you want to be billed. The most notable difference is how they allow users to perform A/B testing of your subject lines. Their monthly plan starts at $15 for 1000 subscribers and goes up to $240 for 50k. Pay-per-you-go pricing starts at three cents per email and decreases accordingly as more credits are purchased. 
6. StreamSend – With clients like Monster.com, Barnes & Noble and UPS, StreamSend is an enteprise solution suited for medium to large businesses. Their pricing starts at $19.90 for 2k emails and goes up to $209.90 for 150k emails. One feature that stuck out at me is their Email Analyzer where they preview your email in 30 email clients as well as test it with 9 spam filters. They also offer professionally designed custom templates for a fee. 
7. Emma – This company is praised for their customer service as well as their intuitive features. Their service includes custom designs, which are available for a fee. It is the most expensive option out of the seven and is also the only site I’ve seen that charges a one-time setup fee of $250. Update: Emma is offering special startup pricing. Click here for more details.

Bonus: For those looking for an enterprise solution, Infusionsoft combines email marketing, CRM and ecommerce solutions. Their most impressive feature is what they call a "an automatic follow-up engine" which they guarantee will double your sales (has anyone tried these guys?). Offering a 15-day free trial, monthly pricing starts at $199/month for 10k contacts and 25k emails/month. 

If you’ve encountered or use a service we haven’t mentioned, please share your experiences with us by adding a comment below.

By: Yasmine

Comments

[Sue]

Thanks for posting this list. We've had our own issues with Constant Contact just recently when sending out a large list for a marketing client of ours. CC requires what they call an "industry standard" of only 1 email per 1,000 being reported as spam. We all know that's an unrealistic number - all it takes is someone changing jobs and a new person taking over their position - email gets forwarded from old person to new - and bang - you've got a spam report. What about those executives or others on our email list who have an assistant checking their email? Again - high spam report risk, because the assistant might decide not to forward the email to the person it was intended for. Out of nearly 9,000 emails, we had 25 spam reports - but an even higher number of opens and click-throughs, so our email was not being regarded as spam by most of the recipients. Nonetheless, we were told that we had to remove what appeared to be the "trouble list" and move them to "do not mail" - which reduced our list from 9,000 to about 6,000 - and we were informed by CC that any further spam reports that entered their realm of unacceptable numbers could risk termination of the account. We're seeking another option, since we can't control the reaction of recipients to our email. It's rather unrealistic of CC to expect a 1 in 1,000 spam report rate considering all the variables involved.

[Sol Kleinman]

Thanks so much for your information. Does anyone know a service that sends e-mails without the signature of the service company on the bottom? I want it to look more personal than having a signature as Constant Contact attached to the e-mails.

[Bandorah Mandy]

Have you considered www.simplycast.com they have a free for life plan. They also offer all in one marketing platform.

[pirates 4]

Another good thing to know about these programs is if it matters at all whether you're a PC or Mac user... All in all, however, this is a very helpful little write-up. Thank you.

[Barry]

I am forced to use constant contact at my company. I absolutely hate it with a passion! I have nothing good to say about it. It is not user friendly. The templates are terrible to work with. Trying to get a basic email done in a few hours is impossible. You cant copy and paste to it without it screwing up. I can't wait for a better alternative to come out. I despise it, and I do NOT recommend it to anyone. Stay away from constant contact. What should you use instead, I have no idea.

[Jennifer]

We had a similar experience from constant contact, lost 1/4 of our list because of a complaint (they forced us to put entire lists on do not mail). We went from 150K contacts to 90K Now looking for alternatives.

My other big complaint about them is they seems to require these list and account reviews at 4pm on Friday afternoon and sometimes the issue can't be resolved in a couple of hours and you are shut down for the whole weekend.

[psychic]

Great list here. Thanks for detailing each service.

[Skip @skipshoe Shuda]

@Jean - thanks for pointing out the alternative.

[Jean]

I'd recommend GoToCampaign as a nice hassle free alternative to Constant Contact. Their pay as you go plans range from about $0.005 to $0.0025

[ruaj]

I'm trying out Vertical Contact now, and the image doesn't show up in emails. That makes the email look cheap. I love Constant Contact and was planning to buy, when I noticed it does not allow for one off use. That's no good for me. I need to be billed on a pay per use basis.

[cheap laptop computers]

In my opinion this constant contact would be great tool for those businesses who are new in the market and want to increase their contacts and want to make to make others aware of their business functioning and other things. Great tool and thanks for sharing it.

[rapidshare]

I was looking for this kind of explanation for quite a while already, thanks for sharing.

[Skip @skipshoe Shuda]

@Cameron - thanks much for the clarification. I've been hearing more and more good things about Mailchimp, although I haven't used it myself.

[Cameron]

Mailchimp is actually free now if you send out under 3000 messages a month and have under 500 contacts. I just signed up and i have been very pleased with it so far

[spss help]

Best Marketing of Icontact and these are good provide offer. So you can use this website.

Thanks

[John M. Hoyt]

This is good information... I'm in the process of investigating lists myself to help our clients and eventually our own company with mail distribution, or re-distribution rather.

Thank you,

John M. Hoyt - Homeland Secure IT, LLC

[Skip @skipshoe Shuda]

@Cordes - thanks for sharing your experience. I've seen clients with large lists have similar troubles. Anyone from Constant Contact care to comment?

I'm glad you were able to find some alternatives on this post.

- Skip

[Cordes Owen]

I am predicting the demise of Constant Contact. Because their service is practily un-usable on a commercial scale.

We have a double opt-in list of customers but because < .3% of the people reported our mailing as spam Constant contact made us call their compliance department over and over and eventually told us we could not mail to our list.

This was regardless of an open rate and click through rate tripple the industry standard for this list. The customer service team even commented on how well the recipients interacted with the mail. They only look at spam reports though.

Once upon a time their spam threasholds made since. You used to have to take a little effort to report a mail as spam. Now most online mail cients have a "report as spam" button right next to the junk and delete button. It is too easy to report something that isn't spam as spam.

I am looking for a good alternative to them. I am happy to host my own email marketing software or use someone elses. I am going to try some mentioned here. Thanks.

[Josie]

Thanks so much for this. Constant Contact was the only email service I had come across before, but you gave me a great base to start some research.

Thanks again!

[psychology dissertations]

This blog is very nice and informative. It is pretty hard task but your post and experience serve and teach me how to handle and make it more simple and manageable.

[Adam]

ShiftMail provides UK based email marketing that works on a pay as you go basis.

http://mail.shiftcreate.com/

[Skip Shuda]

@Rick - thanks for the suggestion! We'll take a look at that topic.

[Rick]

Now that constant contact has event management tools, how about a list of alternative services like www.eventbrite.com and www.ettend.com?

[Dale Dreher]

Constant Contact is charging me $150.per month for my 11,000 contacts, fine. But, now they Stage and hold my emails when I send out. According to CC 6 Spam reports in 3000 is enough to shut me down. That is unacceptable to me, I know my clients or prospective clients, I want a service that I control, not them controlling me. Anyone know of a service like Constant Contact that doesn't tell dictate to me the quality of my email list?

[crazyguy]

nice read! thanks for this note !