Constant Contact vs. dotMailer

Constant Contact is great when trying to target specific market segments. We typically like to segment our master list by region, but also have product segments, as well. They do provide pre-made segments to start you off too. We don't usually use their email builder, we find others to be more flexible, intuitive, and have more variety. We do prefer emailing from Constant Contact, however.

dotMailer is a great tool whether you are a standalone shop or a global company. I am not familiar with many other programs, but my favorite thing about dotMailer is the ability to have all of our constituents on the same account to share templates and ideas, as well as gauge our performance levels. To any colleague within our Group, I would 100% recommend dotMailer

• Constant Contact allows the users to send unlimited emails and just pay per list size.
• The software does welcome emails pretty well and allows you to set up all sorts of automation.
• The branded templates and starter templates are very useful and look good.

Incentivized

• Segmentation by distance.
• RFM segmentation.
• Product recommendations.

Incentivized

• Sometimes some software provides outdated and useless features and functions, but this email marketing tool gives advanced kinds of functionalities with modern features.
• I like the ease of use of this platform also appreciate its professional customer support team.
• I am no longer desperate after getting this tool at my work.

Incentivized

• Updating contact lists can be cumbersome. It would be much easier if we could just make mass update to contact lists without having to export and re-import them. For example, if you upload a list of Joe's contacts and then want them to all be individually tagged with Jane instead, you would have to export the list, change everyone's rep to Jane, and then import the list again.
• The time zone on our account is set to London which creates challenges for the other cities (New York, Chicago, Seattle, Sao Paulo) that we send emails for. We definitely have to be cautious when scheduling out emails so that we get the timing correct.
• I would love to be able to view previous months' activities and expand the comparison tool to view trends over time.

There is no doubt that we are going to renew Constant Contact. We have not just invested a lot of time in learning and creating a great looking product but we have developed a strong database of information that allows us to track how we are doing for each newsletter. This supports our goals of creating products that residents desire and are excited to receive.

Since this is used on a global scale and it is preferable to all of our brands, I cannot see us switching to a different provider. We have built years worth of contacts and templates within our current system, which saves our marketing team a lot of time when putting together future campaigns. All of them are mobile optimized which makes it even easier to work with

There is always room for improvement. I don't know how they test their systems, but they should invite not-so computer savvy people to test it. If I, as an expert have problems, they need to think like the technophobe. Since I've used Constant Contact in the past as part of my former employment, I have not viewed any of the tutorials and just jumped in to work on my client's newsletter. With that said, I found some areas easy and some a bit cumbersome

No major problems in sending out the email campaigns and accessing the analytics

Incentivized

The system seemed quite slow sometimes. Specifically, there was sometimes a delay in sends if it was during a high traffic period. There were time-outs when uploading new code for an email, and a lag in reporting analytics which was sometimes as long as 72 hours

I think the overall support for Constant Contact has always been incredible; I have nothing negative to say. Our customer support representative was attentive, easy to understand, and very knowledgeable. I never felt like I wasn't a priority of his and my issues, while very small, were fixed in a very short time frame.

Implementation is very easy for someone who wants to send out the “batch and blast” type newsletters. If you want to use their templates with no customizations, the product works fine. However, the more customizations you get into involving link color, etc, that’s where things can get tricky for someone who may not be familiar with coding

We selected Constant Contact due to pricing constraints. However, if the pricing were to increase, we may look at alternative products that offer more features. We are looking for a product that will allow us to stand out from other organizations like ours that are appealing to the same customers—a product that will set our company apart from the others.

Incentivized

DotMailer is built for eCommerce. Drip, ActiveCampaign, and Infusionsoft are not eCommerce platforms out of the box, though they can be tailored to that use case. DotMailer is especially geared toward retail businesses.

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Very reliable in sending email campaigns and controlling the recipients so that no contact is sent the same email more than once, even if they are on a resent list

Incentivized

• I can't report hard numbers, however, being able to execute sales and marketing campaigns led to a noticeable increase in brand awareness in our industry.
• We were able to offer white-labeled email communication services to clients, which is not something that other administrators typically offer. This helped us win and retain business.

• Gave us more granular segmentation than simply pages visited or products purchased.
• Helped us segment local customers vs long-distance customers, and send different messaging to each.
• It takes a product feed, so enabled us to launch personalized product recommendations in emails.

Incentivized