Anyone use Constant Contact?

[Owen]

Does anyone have any experience with Constant Contact? We need to set up a simple mailing list to send out a short email once a week to subscribers. Nothing fancy. We looked into Amazon SES, which is free, but it takes too much backend work.

Constant Contact was recommended to us, but they cost $20/mo minimum (0 - 500 contacts), and 2501 - 5000 contact is $55/mo. That seems a bit pricey. (There is a 60-day free trial.) If anyone knows how they are to deal with, I’d appreciate hearing. Or if there is a better and/or cheaper solution, that info would be much appreciated.

Reliability and ease of set up are as important as price. (I hear a lot of complaints about emails not getting through do to spam-blocking and blacklisting.)

Thanks!

[Sam]

Yes, I use it for work.
Constant Contact is very good but not cheapt at all. The price is actually slightly better than MailChimp at 8000+, but MailChimp is free under 2000.

Constant Contact has beautiful templates and if you have even a modicum of "for dummies" talent and design, you can create nice templates. They are a reputable company, and their emails rarely get dumped in Spam. But, MailCHimp also has low spam problems.

I find CC to be easier to use than Mail Chimp in terms of setting up e-mail campaigns and collecting user data, but to be fair, I have three year's experience using CC and little using Mail Chimp.

My experience has been good overall, but they are not cheap. They offer lots of seminars in your area, and while some of them are worthwhile, others less so.

[Owen]

Samuel wrote: "Yes, I use it for work.
Constant Contact is very good but not cheap at all. The price is actually slightly better than MailChimp at 8000+, but MailChimp is free under 2000."

Thanks! That is good info. I looked at the MailChimp, and it struck me as being more opaque than Constant Contact. (And the name!) Since what we want is so simple, a lot of what they talked about did not seem to apply. On Constant Contact, I found a clearer description that applied directly to what we want to do.

Do you know if the contact list can be pulled from Constant Contact in some form that could then be entered into Mail Chimp?

I'd like to try Constant Contact for free for 2 months, but if we end up with a only few hundred people, I certainly don't want to pay $20/mo. There's almost no way a list that small would cover the 240/yr the service would cost, and it would make much more sense to go with mail chimp for free. But I wouldn’t like to ask people to sign up with a new service, either.

[Angela J.]

Yes! You can export your contact list from Constant Contact and import it into Mailchimp, that way your subscribers won't even know you switched! I still use the free version of Mailchimp and use it to automatically send out new blog posts as well as announcements.

[Owen]

Angela wrote: "Yes! You can export your contact list from Constant Contact and import it into Mailchimp, that way your subscribers won't even know you switched! I still use the free version of Mailchimp and use i..."

Thanks! That is a great help.

[Micah]

I use Constant Comment.

[joke, sorry, couldn't help myself!]

[Owen]

Micah wrote: "I use Constant Comment.

[joke, sorry, couldn't help myself!]"

We'll let it slide this time ... ;-)

[William]

I use 'instant comment'