Constant Contact review 2025: Is it worth your money?

Starting from its step-by-step onboarding to its intuitive email editor to its massive set of integrations—Constant Contact shines for many reasons. 

But when you look deeper into its features, is it as comprehensive as other popular email marketing providers in the market? Does it let you scale your newsletter or business without making a serious dent in your budget? Let’s find out. 

"Love at first sight"—this is what you might feel when you first "meet" Constant Contact, especially if you're new to email marketing. From one of the smoothest and most helpful onboarding processes to the ease with which you can create multichannel campaigns, Constant Contact will make you fall in love.

But while the platform is super beginner-friendly, starting at $12 per month with basic email marketing, social media marketing, and a host of integrated apps, the cost quickly adds up if you want features like advanced automation or A/B testing.

You’ll also start noticing some limitations as you dig deeper. For example, automation and segmentation options are restricted, the templates look less modern compared to others, and the pricing plan grows faster than some alternatives. Plus, user discussions on communities like Reddit often mention concerns about pricing transparency. 

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's begin at the beginning.

"Smooth as butter" onboarding? That's Constant Contact. It immediately stands out by asking relevant questions to tailor your experience. Want to attract new customers, promote a product, run events, or collect donations? The tool customizes the rest of the onboarding based on your answers.

It even asks about your preferred features—email marketing, social media marketing, automations, ads—and whether you have a website, email list, social media presence, or CRM.

Once set, I landed on a dashboard that was extremely intuitive, guiding me to my next steps. 

A standout feature is how it pulled my brand colors from my website to automatically create marketing asset templates. For beginners or small business owners, this personalized touch is very thoughtful.

Domain authentication

Constant Contact automatically verified my email. Great! But if you want to send emails from your own domain, you’ll also need to authenticate it.

Unlike some email tools that handle this automatically, Constant Contact requires you to manually add the provided DNS records to your domain’s settings.

The process might sound technical, but it’s worth doing. Domain authentication significantly improves your email deliverability and reduces the chances of your emails landing in the spam folder.

Clear unsubscribe option

The unsubscribe option was clear on my test email, and it also offered an option for people to comment on why they unsubscribed.

User interface and email creation

Constant Contact's platform interface shines for its ease of use, making email campaign creation straightforward. The drag-and-drop email builder is a breeze to use, offering standard blocks to craft effective emails. 

You can easily upload images from your device, phone, social networks, use the ones Constant Contact imported from your brand assets, design images in Canva, or pull stock images from Shutterstock.

The design tab conveniently displays your imported brand colors, and standard customization options are available to refine your email's look. Sending a test email to preview it in an inbox is straightforward. 

While it's a solid tool for basic email creation, some users have reported the HTML editor can be clunky, which might be an issue if you need more advanced design control.

Here are some key features of the email editor:

• Classic drag-and-drop functionality

• Customizable templates

• Built-in image gallery

• Unique event and RSVP integration

• 200+ email templates (though some of the designs feel dated)

AI assistance

Need a jumpstart on your creativity? Use Constant Contact's AI to generate subject lines and email content. As with most AI, the generated content often requires significant editing, but it's a great starting point for inspiration.

Lead magnets

Constant Contact has a lead magnet generator that lets you quickly create lead magnets based on the questions you’d like to ask your customers. You enter the prompt, your web address, and click on Create.

Next Constant Contact creates a lead magnet with 6 questions. You have the option to edit the logo, background, questions, and style. 

Here’s the lead magnet it created for me with a pre-made background image, logo, and questions:

A step-by-step prompt generator is also available to spark ideas, letting you specify customer pain points, target audiences, and products to create tailored lead magnets.

Each lead magnet comes with a short link and a scannable QR code for easy sharing on your website. The share button further extends its reach to social media, email, Reddit, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

The lead magnet template library has 55 pre-built templates from which you can choose and then further edit.

Forms and pop-ups

Creating forms is straightforward and easy to implement. However, a notable limitation is the fixed order of information collection, which can restrict customization. Pop-up form options are also available.

Landing pages

The landing page feature lets you build a sign-up landing page or customize and make your own landing pages. You can choose from pre-built templates or build one from scratch. 

The landing page generator is easy to use with the intuitive drag and drop features.

However, it only comes with 9 templates. That's on the lower end compared to some other email marketing platforms. Plus, the template designs look a bit less modern when you stack them up against contemporary designs. 

Constant Contact’s landing page and form integration is sufficient for simple lead capture and basic segmentation, but it lacks the advanced customization, conditional logic, and design flexibility found in specialized landing page or form builders. For more sophisticated needs, you’ll need third-party integrations.

Organize events

Another cool feature is Constant Contact's event creation tool. All the familiar drag-and-drop functionalities are here, along with options to add tickets, add-ons, and a default form for collecting names and email addresses (with options to add more fields). 

For payments, it supports popular currencies like USD, GBP, and EUR, and accepts payments via Visa, Mastercard, Amex, PayPal, and Venmo, with Stripe and PayPal integrations available.

Social campaigns

Constant Contact’s social media integrations are impressive. All you have to do is connect your social media accounts and it’ll take care of the rest.

The social campaign lets you manage and post to multiple social media platforms from a single interface. It’s smooth, efficient, and perfect for social media marketing. You can post instantly or schedule for later if you’re on a Standard or Premium tier.

Surveys

Creating surveys on Constant Contact is easy even for beginners, and here's why: it uses a straightforward drag-and-drop interface, making it simple to add questions and customize the layout. However, the surveys look a bit basic compared to those created by other email marketing tools. 

Multichannel campaigns

I loved Constant Contact’s intelligent multichannel campaign planning feature. I asked it to create a weeklong campaign for a new bookstore, including author readings, a café opening, and a 10% discount. Constant Contact automatically generated a comprehensive schedule with specific posting dates and platform recommendations.

It can even help you create the assets for each step, like the AI-generated announcement email I crafted.

While these features appear robust at first glance, keep in mind that many are tied to pricier tiers. 

Segments and groups

Constant Contact lets you organize contacts by creating up to 1,000 lists and adding contacts to multiple lists as needed. For more granular control, the Segmentation Builder lets you filter contacts using various criteria including:

• Contact profiles

• Email activities

• Engagement

• List membership

• Shopping activity

• Sources and providers

• Tags

The tool automatically adds or removes contacts from segments as they meet or no longer meet your defined criteria.

The segmentation options are pretty basic, especially on the Lite plan and Standard plan, where you can create just 1 and 10 contact segments, respectively, and no e-commerce segments. 

This means that unless you’re spending money on the Premium plan, you might be restricted if you wanted to create highly targeted campaigns.

Automations

Compared to other email marketing tools, Constant Contact's marketing automation capabilities are limited. While it offers basic email and SMS templates for welcome sequences, anniversaries, and birthdays (plus e-commerce workflows for Shopify or WooCommerce users), you're mostly restricted to a single trigger per automation. 

The automations go a bit beyond sending emails and SMS and updating contact fields or tags. It supports basic drip campaigns, behavioral triggers, and list management, and can be extended via integrations. However, it doesn’t offer the advanced, multi-step, or deeply customizable automations found in more sophisticated email marketing platforms.

Plus, the Lite plan and Standard plan offer just 1 and 3 automation templates respectively. To unlock the full suite of automation features, you'll need to subscribe to its Premium plan.

And even if you create a custom marketing automation path with the priciest tier, you might be disappointed as it’s difficult to combine actions and conditions like you can with competitor tools.

Integrations

Being a long-established email provider, Constant Contact boasts of a massive number of integrations—over 7,800 to be precise. So, it’s easy to connect with all the software and apps you use in your business. 

Furthermore, there’s the option to filter the integrations by category like email, e-commerce, CRM, and so on. It also helpfully suggests tailored recommendations based on your needs. 

Deliverability

Email deliverability shows the percentage of emails that got delivered to your contacts against the total amount you sent. The higher the deliverability rate of an email marketing software, the more reliable it is, because what’s the point of sending emails if they don’t get delivered?

Email Tool Tester considers anything above 89% an excellent rate, and Constant Contact boasts an impressive 92% deliverability rate, placing it among the top performers. For comparison, ActiveCampaign and MailerLite, in the top 2 positions, have slightly higher rates at 93.4% and 92.7% respectively.

Constant Contact covers the basics, but if you want email marketing campaigns that drive results, then MailerLite gives you the advanced tools without the premium price tag.

MailerLite packs all the latest email marketing features, helping you craft professional emails, build stronger relationships, and truly grow your business. 

Let’s take a look at some of the features that make MailerLite stand out:

Advanced drag-and-drop editor that doesn't box you in

Unlike Constant Contact's often dated templates, MailerLite's editor gives you true creative freedom. You get multiple builder options: the intuitive drag-and-drop, rich-text, and even custom HTML for when you need to get technical. You can embed social media posts directly into emails and create modern, responsive designs that impress subscribers.

Dynamic content that speaks to each subscriber

MailerLite’s handy targeting options like email segmentation and groups let you send emails to specific audiences. Dynamic email content takes this a step further, allowing you to add blocks to your email that are only visible to a particular audience, dramatically increasing campaign relevancy for each subscriber group. 

This is where MailerLite truly shines for personalization. You can create one email that shows different content to different subscribers based on their preferences, behavior, or tags. This level of personalization would require setting up multiple, separate campaigns if you use Constant Contact, but MailerLite handles it seamlessly.

Landing pages that convert

MailerLite provides fully customizable landing page templates that integrate effortlessly with your forms and overall email marketing strategy. 

And the best part? You can create 10 landing pages in the free option and unlimited in the paid tiers. You can choose from 26 templates or build one from scratch to match your brand perfectly.

Powerful signup forms

With MailerLite, creating embedded forms for your website or web pages is really easy. These forms seamlessly collect new subscribers and can even automatically segment them based on their inputs.

You get tons of design flexibility, from background to content style to CTA, and can even customize with HTML and CSS if you're feeling fancy.

Behavior-based pop-ups are super easy to create, triggered by timing or scrolling. Start from scratch or pick from 23 pre-designed options, including email opt-ins, newsletter sign-ups, and even a "spin the wheel".

Here’s a pop-up form I created with MailerLite.

Surveys: Listen to your audience and learn

Want to know what your audience thinks? MailerLite's survey feature makes it simple to ask questions and get valuable feedback directly from your subscribers. You can create various types of surveys, from quick polls to more detailed questionnaires. 

This is a fantastic way to understand your audience's preferences, gather ideas for new products, or improve your content, all within your email marketing platform.

As you can see from the preview, the surveys created with MailerLite look contemporary and sleek. 

More powerful email sending options

Smart sending: AI-powered optimal delivery

MailerLite's smart sending is powered by AI and machine learning. This intelligent tool analyzes your past campaign data and individual subscriber behavior to pinpoint the exact moment each person is most likely to open your email. 

Smart Sending optimizes delivery times for each subscriber instead of mass-sending at a fixed time. This personalized approach dramatically boosts open rates and engagement, leading to more clicks, conversions, and ultimately, higher revenue. 

Send by timezone: Timely delivery, globally

For those critical emails where timing matters across different regions, MailerLite's send by timezone feature is invaluable. Set a single desired delivery time (say, 9 AM), and your email will automatically arrive in each subscriber's inbox at that exact local time, regardless of their location.

Auto resend

MailerLite's auto resend feature lets you retarget subscribers who didn't open your initial email. You can potentially reach 30% more subscribers by automatically resending an email. You have the option to resend with a different subject line or even slightly tweaked content. 

Sophisticated automation options

If you're looking for advanced email automations, MailerLite is where you should go. Constant Contact restricts you to primarily single-trigger automations and basic templates, often locking advanced workflows behind its most expensive plan. 

MailerLite has an intuitive visual workflow builder. The drag-and-drop interface lets you build complex, multi-step automation journeys with ease. Think multiple triggers, branching logic (the all-important if-then conditions), and time delays. This gives you granular control over the entire subscriber experience.

Advanced triggers and actions for deeper personalization

MailerLite goes beyond basic actions like sending emails or updating tags. Its sophisticated automation triggers are based on a wide array of subscriber behaviors, including form fills, ecommerce events (abandoned cart, hello!), email link clicks (which can segment or initiate new workflows), and form submissions. 

This versatility allows you to create:

• Comprehensive welcome series

• Lead nurturing funnels

• Customer onboarding sequences

• Event-based reminders and follow-ups (for webinars or events)

And the best part? MailerLite provides these powerful automation features, including its visual builder and wide range of triggers, across its paid plans.

A/B Testing within automations 

While Constant Contact's A/B testing limits you to subject lines, MailerLite lets you test subject lines, email content, automation workflows, pop-ups, and landing pages. Plus, its multivariate testing lets you test multiple factors at once.

This data-driven approach helps you continuously improve your automated campaigns, giving you invaluable insights into what your subscribers truly want.

Analysis that drives action

Forget drowning in overwhelming data. MailerLite provides clear, actionable insights with its intuitive reports. You can easily track opens, clicks, and engagement, helping you truly understand what's working and why.

Integration ecosystem that plays well with others

With MailerLite integrations, connect with over 130 popular tools and platforms, from Shopify to WordPress. Need something custom? The robust API lets you build exactly what you need.

Pricing

A free plan that actually delivers

While Constant Contact makes you pay from day one after your free trial, MailerLite offers a useful free plan that isn't just a teaser. It supports up to 1,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 monthly emails. 

The free tier includes the drag-and-drop editor, email automation builder, 1 website, 10 landing pages, unlimited signup forms and pop-ups, some automation templates, e-commerce integrations, A/B testing, surveys, quizzes, and deliver emails by timezone. 

Plus, you get premium reporting features like comparative reporting, list growth, and e-commerce sales tracking. These are features Constant Contact often locks behind higher tiers or doesn't offer at all for its starting $12/month Lite plan.

For just $10 a month (with a 10% annual discount) for up to 500 subscribers, MailerLite's lowest paid tier adds selling digital products, unlimited templates, dynamic emails, campaign auto-resend, multivariate testing, unlimited websites, blogs, landing pages, and more.

Here’s a website I created with MailerLite:

Let’s compare the prices for MailerLite and Constant Contact for up to 500, 10,000, and 50,000 subscribers. 

The table below shows MailerLite's pricing plans:

Now, let's check out Constant Contact's pricing:

As you can see, the more you scale your small business, the more expensive it gets to have an account with Constant Contact. Even the Lite plan at 10,000 and 50,000 subscribers is more expensive than the highest tiers of MailerLite.

Plus, Constant Contact imposes overage fees for exceeding sending limits. There are no such hidden costs with MailerLite. 

MailerLite gives you email marketing freedom. Whether you're just starting out as a small business or scaling up, with MailerLite, you get professional-grade email marketing tools without the enterprise-level price tag.

Here are some of the awards that MailerLite got from G2, GetApp, TrustRadius, and Email Tool Tester, recently.