Constant Contact vs. Yesmail360i

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.

If you are a smaller business I would not recommend YesMail. You really need someone who is analytical and can understand hard to use products to get the most out of this email service provider

Incentivized

• 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

• The biggest strength of YesMail is that it's good for churning out large amounts of emails. So if you constantly send out a lot of emails, newsletters, or promotions on a daily or weekly basis then YesMail is a good fit.
• The reporting for YesMail is also above average. You're able to look at all the main metrics such as open rates, click rates, bounces, unsubscribes, etc. They also have a click map so you can optimize your emails based on where people are clicking within the email and what content they're clicking on.
• YesMail also has a fairly good scrubbing process in place so if you have a lot of dead weight on your lists (email addresses that aren't active don't open, click or bounce out a lot) then YesMail will automatically remove these emails. For example if an email address has bounced 10 times in a row then YesMail will remove that email from its system.

• Sometimes some software provides outdated and useless features and functions, but this email marketing tool gives advanced kinds of functionalities with modern features.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

• The Market Intelligence tool, while useful, and while it has a Deliverability Intelligence plug-in as well, is still a little rough. It's hard to sort through reports, and the location of different points of information between the "feed" and the list of marketers, is a little cumbersome to sort through.
• The metrics available could use some updating and some clarification. There are quite a few caveats to reporting that aren't clearly stated. Ex. the clicks reported on a "click thru" report are TOTAL clicks, while the clicks reported on a Delivery and Response report are FIRST CLICK ONLY, while also the dashboard reports might show unique clicks and "clicks" (total clicks) but those numbers might also not match with the other two reports because dashboard reports are behind by 2 hours whereas the specific reports are pulling straight from the CRM within the system, and the dashboards are summaries generated every couple of hours from the CRM. All of those details took me a while to figure out, and I had to ask a lot of questions. But my account manager was always easy to get a hold of, and if he didn't know the answers to my questions he was quick about tracking down someone who did.

Incentivized

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.

I do not have the buying decision to renew/change providers, but do have the ability to provide my feedback to those who do. Yesmail has a lot of kinks that need to be worked out. But, for those that just need to deploy emails, and house subscriptions, this is a decent platform to do so. Companies with more advanced campaign targeting/analysis needs should explore other service providers.

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

Overall it is easy to use but there's several different portals you must log into instead of having everything at your disposal in one place (reporting, emails, extracting data, etc).

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.

Very easy to get a hold of an actual person and quick responses.

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

YesMail offers almost all of the "bells and whistles" that the other major ESPs offer, but at a much more reasonable price. IBM and SalesForce, for example, offer great platforms...but they outsource the setup and implementation, and they have a lot of add-ons that drive up the price of their tool. YesMail does the implementation and maintenance themselves, and while they do have their own add-ons, their "out of the box" platform is much more inclusive than the competition's.

Incentivized

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.

• Increased our send rate from 20K/hour to 200K/hour. Previously with our in-house tool it would take days to send a campaign. Now it takes hours.
• Increased efficiency of our email marketing team. Having to work less with the data team now for list pulls.

Incentivized