Constant Contact Email Marketing Review: Pros & Cons, Features, Ratings, Pricing and more

Constant Contact was founded in 1995 by Randy Parker, initially known as Roving Software before switching to its current name in 2004. It's one of the oldest email marketing software tools in existence. Since its inception, it has since expanded from a simple email marketing tool into a full-fledged online marketing platform for different types of campaigns, including social media, web, and SMS. 

Constant Contact has acquired a lot of other companies to expand, such as CardStar, a loyalty rewards app, and Bantam Live, a social CRM startup. In 2015, Constant Contact itself was sold to IT company Endurance International for $1.1 billion. In 2021, private equity firm Clearlake Capital acquired Endurance International and spun off Constant Contact as a standalone business.

Constant Contact: Plans and pricing

Note: Annual pricing reflects 15% discount for 12-month prepayment. Nonprofit organizations receive 30% discount. SMS add-on available for US customers starting at $10/month for up to 500 messages. Premium plan includes 500 SMS messages monthly.

Constant Contact restructured its pricing in 2025, moving away from Core and Plus plans to three main tiers: Lite, Standard, and Premium. The platform no longer offers a free plan, but provides a generous 60-day free trial that's 2x the industry standard.

The Lite plan starts at $12/month for 500 contacts and includes basic email marketing features, one welcome automation template, drag-and-drop email editor, social posting, AI writing assistance, and 300+ integrations. However, it's limited to one user and allows only 10x your contact count in monthly sends. This plan suits solopreneurs or small businesses with minimal automation needs.

The Standard plan begins at $35/month for 500 contacts and adds subject line A/B testing, three automation templates, email scheduling, resend to non-openers, advanced segmentation, social advertising capabilities, and allows up to three users. Monthly email sends increase to 12x your contact count, making this the most popular choice for growing businesses.

The Premium plan starts at $80/month for 500 contacts and includes everything in Standard plus unlimited automation templates, unlimited custom segments, unlimited users, 500 SMS messages monthly, advanced reporting with heatmaps, SEO recommendations, lookalike ad targeting for social media, and 24x your contact count in monthly sends.

For businesses requiring comprehensive CRM capabilities, Constant Contact offers a separate Lead Gen & CRM plan starting at $449/month, developed in partnership with SharpSpring. This includes advanced marketing automation, lead scoring, sales pipeline management, and centralized analytics.

Pricing scales with contact list size across all tiers. For example, at 2,500 contacts, Lite costs approximately $45/month, Standard costs $80/month, and Premium costs $130/month. Lists exceeding 50,000 contacts require custom pricing quotes. The platform offers a 15% discount for 12-month prepayment and 30% discount for nonprofit organizations. A 30-day money-back guarantee applies to all new subscriptions.

How does Constant Contact use AI?

Constant Contact introduced its AI Content Generator in 2023 and has continued expanding AI capabilities across the platform. AI features are accessible on all paid plans with no additional credit-based pricing requirements, which is a big relief for budget conscious startups. According to Constant Contact, nearly half of surveyed small businesses now use the AI tools to write emails, subject lines, or social posts.

Their core AI offering is the AI Content Generator, which helps create email copy, subject lines, SMS messages, and social media posts directly within the interface. You simply provide a few keywords, select the desired tone (friendly, professional, informative, urgent, etc.), and the AI generates customized content.

Then, Campaign Builder uses AI to set up multi-channel marketing campaigns with just a few clicks. You select your campaign goals while AI handles the heavy lifting of campaign structure and coordinates messaging across email, social media, and SMS channels.

BrandKit represents another practical AI addition on their part. By simply entering your website URL, you can automatically extract your logo, brand colors, and imagery, creating a library of customizable branded assets that can be reused across emails, social posts, and other marketing materials.

While these AI features provide valuable time-saving benefits, Constant Contact emphasizes that AI-generated content still requires human review and editing. It highlights businesses like like Sky Candle Co. and the Spanish restaurant Lunya, which have successfully integrated these AI tools into their workflows.

Constant Contact: Features

For business owners that are novices at design, Constant Contact has over a hundred customizable templates- already optimized for mobile. Another neat feature will scan your website and auto-generate a template themed for your website’s colors and images.

Editing of these templates is a snap with drag-and-drop layouts or image and text boxes. Users with coding skills will appreciate the feature to create an email template based on a custom code.

To build your contact list, Constant Contact offers the option to enter your contacts one by one, import them from a spreadsheet or file, or import them from Gmail or Microsoft Outlook. 

With your contact list complete, you then create segments, which enables you to target, for example, customers who haven’t opened an email in a while via a special promo or update. 

Constant Contact also integrates with Shopify and WooCommerce, enabling you to create contact list segments based on what customers have purchased. With Constant Contact’s integration with ecommerce, customers can also shop your store directly from their inbox.

We also appreciate the email automation tools. Automation can reduce the workload, with such features as the ability to send an automatic resend of the email to a non-opener.

Constant Contact: Interface and in use

An ease to set up and get started with, Constant Contact takes just a few minutes to register a new account. With your account created, you’ll be queried with a few questions about your business and any existing contact lists. 

Intuitively simple to set up, the web interface makes it pretty easy to find what you’re looking for, be it campaigns, contacts, or reports.

Constant Contact also has apps available for both iOS and Android. While the app is sleek and the ability to draft emails and organize contacts on the go has its appeal, the usefulness is extremely hindered by the inability to edit draft email campaigns created on desktop. By way of example, users that want to draft a campaign on their work computer, and then edit it from their iPad later will be disappointed.

Constant Contact: Support

Constant Contact offers direct support through email, live chat, and telephone. You can chat with a live support agent from Monday through Friday or contact them via phone from Monday to Saturday (hours and department phone numbers vary depending on your region). There's also an online community where you can interact with other users and exchange solutions to each other's problems. 

This platform also offers many other support resources for users. There's the Knowledge Base, which contains a lot of articles and user guides for all features concerning the platform. You can also find video tutorials to learn about the platform in an interactive way. Likewise, Constant Contact hosts regular webinars for users to interact with marketing experts and ask questions. If you're finding it difficult to run email campaigns, you can hire a marketing professional from Constant Contact's directory.

Constant Contact offers excellent customer support, which is one of its main selling points. 

Constant Contact: The competition

For the budget conscious, Mailchimp is a worthy competitor to Constant Contact. It offers most of the same email marketing basics, such as templates and list segmentation- at a lower price. Even further, Mailchimp offers a free plan if you have under 2,000 contacts, making it ideal for users who are just starting out.

For businesses that have webinars as a core component, it might be worth looking into GetResponse, to allow for easy integration of webinars with your email contact list.

Constant Contact: Final verdict

Constant Contact easily makes the shortlist of names people think of when it comes to email marketing, and there’s plenty of reasons why. Constant Contact is easy to set up and use, offering high levels of support and security.

However, the shortcoming is that there’s nothing really setting Constant Contact apart from its competitors among email marketing services. At least Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial, so it’s worth checking out. However, temper your enthusiasm as you can’t expect game-changing innovation at these levels.

Constant Contact can stand out with the separately featured and more comprehensive CRM plan, but as with the Constant Contact Website Builder, we'll consider that in its own review.

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